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.
In the early 2000s, I spent some years on the Kangaroos board, aka “the committee”. Board seem to run all European clubs – usually six people you love dearly but who, for a few hours a week, morph into a fearsome politburo to set fee policy, discuss lineups and impart arbitrary decisions on all parts of their baseball fiefdom.
I’d show up, listen to some debates about the accounts, rant and rave about the importance of playing catch, and drive home in a baseball high. At least, that’s how I remember it.
I’ve stayed away from administration since then. Much more fun to get out there and coach, play or umpire.
That is, until now. This month, I accepted the job of Little League commissioner for Belgium, in charge of drawing up guidelines so that all kids playing federation baseball in Belgium are eligible for Little League’s international tournaments.
All European baseball federation now have an agreement to eventually follow Little League rules and participate in LL’s tournaments. It’s hasn’t happened yet in Belgium.
I, for one, am a big believer. I know it’s a hierarchal top-down corporation, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. Only Little League offers an incentive so magical — a free trip to the World Series — that parents, coaches and kids go the extra mile to grow ace ballplayers.
As a kid growing up in Belgium, I played in four European championships on U.S. bases in Germany. We never won. As an adult, I coached my brother’s team four times at championships in Kutno and Miejska Gorka, Poland. (Poland houses the headquarters of Little League in Europe.)
We won in 2004 and 2006, and took dreamy trips to the under-15 World Series in Taylor, Michigan and the under-17 event in Bangor, Maine. We played Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, Oklahoma, and so on.
Behind those triumphs were a dozen kids and their families who, for the sake of their World Series dreams, put momentous time and effort into upgrading their baseball. You can see the players from those teams gracing the fields of Namur and Brussels, and wearing the Belgian national team uniform.
The Brussels Sports Association, the Little League-chartered organization that sponsored the teams I coached a few years ago, has run out of steam and no longer has the volunteer muscle to organize all-star teams for the European championships.
The Belgian federation is not yet set up to pick all-star teams and send them to Poland. My job, over the next few months, is to come up with a league schedule, and educate all the clubs about how it works, so that soon every young Belgian baseball player can dream of going to the World Series.
Please please please email me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com with observations about how your own federation has adapted to Little League rules. When do you stop playing the federation schedule? What happens to the kids who don’t make the all-star team? Who pays to go to Poland? How do you pick the coaches? Thanks.