John Miller, player/coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is back chronicling his team’s 2009 season in his weekly column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com.
This year, I’ve gotten a half-dozen calls from adults who want to start a baseball career.
“Well, it’s an almost impossible sport to learn from scratch when you’re an adult, but let me tell you about softball,” I always say.
“Softball!? Mais je veux jouer au baseball,” is the invariable response.
The solution, I have suggested only half-kiddingly to the committee, is to change the sport’s name.
“How would you like to play super-baseball!?”
Sounds much better.
I, for one, am a fan of super-baseball.
For the last eight years, I’ve organized a slow-pitch softball tournament on a Sunday in late June. We get four teams and play round-robin on two fields at the International School of Brussels. The best two go at it for the championship, and that’s that.
The first year, I titled it the “Brussels Softball Challenge” and ordered T-shirt and trophies. We had a homerun derby at the end. All that was like ordering china for a barbeque. Folks just want the softball.
Usually, there’s a team from Fat-Boy’s, a downtown American sports bar, one from the military, one from the Kangaroos and one from the school.
There is something marvelous about casual slow-pitch: the absence of batting helmets, catcher’s gear or warm-up tosses; the easy substitutions; the justice in all those long fly balls that die.
For us hardball duffers, it’s a chance to unwind with some strong hacks at a slow-moving pumpkin and easy plays. The ISB has two turf fields. I like big, clean hops.
I did the tournament again this Sunday. I put together a team from my office. My office isn’t that big anymore, so my Belgian carpenter brother-in-law had to play right field. We lost all three games.
We played our best against a team of muscle-bound U.S. soldiers in matching uniforms with “Sentinels” striped across the front. They had nicknames across their backs like “Herc” and “P Train”. Afterwards, we challenged them to a game of Scrabble.
The best team was made up of parents from the local Little League, the Brussels Sports Association. They pinged bullet loads of line drives into the outfield, and caught most of the balls.
I am quite sure that I will end my baseball days playing first base in a casual slow-pitch league, working up a mild sweat then slurping down a couple cold ones. If only Roger Clemens’s exit had been so full of grace.
What else could we call softball to entice skeptical Europeans? Suggest to oldworldpastime@gmail.com
