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.
The European baseball field is its own species. (Last year, we compiled a collage of them (http://www.mister-baseball.com/myfieldofdreams-photo-project-ostende-belgium/) for you to look at.)
It’s often hemmed in by road and rail. Even more often, it’s scratched into a rectangular cut-out designed long ago for soccer.
In Belgium, three fields (Mortsel, Deurne, Borgerhout, Brussels) are near airports. One (Antwerp) is next to a highway. Mortsel’s field is also next to a train line, and Borgerhout’s right by a busy street.
The latter is so close to the field that, a dozen times a game, foul balls bounce onto the road. I’ve been playing there for ten years now, and, miraculously, I’ve never seen person, animal or vehicle take one in the nose. Our rectangular field has a 280-foot fence in left-center.
Back when the Kangaroos played in third division, we visited an opponent’s diamond that had a) a hole instead of a mound b) a canal 20 feet behind home plate c) waist-high grass in the outfield. Our center fielder dove to catch a fly on a bounce, then emerged with a smile, and the ball. Out! Balls plopped into the canal. It was the only game I’ve ever pitched uphill.
The truth is that underpinning those fields, even the ugly ones, is a lot of love for the game. And behind the nice fields is hard work.
Little League’s European headquarters in Kutno, Poland has a half-dozen or so dudes tending with care to every square inch of the complex’s four ballfields. The golden groundball hops and soft, yet firm, dirt and grass are a big part of the charm of playing there.
Saturday was an off-day for the Kangaroos, so Jimmy, Eric, Garrett and I met at noon to work on our field. Usually, we don’t take special care of our grounds. The second and third base fielding areas were polluted with weed grass. The small clumps looked like an onset of back hair on a 31-year-old male. (Or so I imagine!)
We found a couple of hoes, and got to work. Every time we removed a piece, it seemed like another two popped up. We kept at it. After two hours, we had filled three buckets. And there were still green splotches on the infield. I had a blister on my hand, and the sun was giving me a headache.
We weren’t getting paid. Our teammates were unlikely to appreciate the effort. But we had made a piece of planet earth look a bit more like the ideal form of the ballfield. That is its own reward.
The day before, we had driven up to Bonn to watch Belgium play Italy in the European Junior Championships. The sky was blue. Former Yankee and Dutch baseball legend Robert Eenhoorn chatted with scouts behind home plate. The fields were pool-table smooth, with the grass and dirt lining up just so. A lot of work went into that, I thought as I unearthed a final piece of tundra.
Any stories about European foul balls injuring, maiming or breaking? Tell, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com