John Miller, head coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is chronicling his team’s 2008 season in a column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com. It is the first of several Mister-Baseball Blogs this year.
On my lunch break last Monday, I hopped in the car and drove over to Stade Fallon, the Kangaroos’s home field. It’s only a ten minute run, up and over a few hills in eastern Brussels, near the headquarters of the European Union. The grass glowed in the lambent sunlight. The crowd was tiny – only a few parents.
The teenage teams were young and excited. In shiny blue and white battled the Blue Devils, the best of French-speaking (southern) Belgium. The Diables Bleus are fragile but exceedingly well coached. Someday, they will be good.
Opposite was red-yellow-black Team Belgium, the country’s overall best. They are also well coached, but inexperienced and volatile. The contest was uneven. Belgium is talented and vigorous and swung metal bats. The Devils fielded precious little top level experience, and swung wood. They were, however, plucky. They scratched hard, and lost 8-3. The next day, they tied 8-8. In the three-team, three-day tournament at our field, they would beat eventual winners France, 5-3.
The quality of the baseball was average, I thought. These kids need two months of playing baseball every night on 11-man teams, of dozens of 4-for-4s and oh-fers, of sore arms and dirt and grit and lemonade, all the blocks that forge Japanese, American and Caribbean ballplayers, with nothing in between – no trips to the beach, no scout camps, no family vacations to time-shares in Spain. They don’t have that yet, so they forget to tag up or follow the throw on a rundown, or they don’t dive or run hard out of the box. Most European baseball leagues don’t have enough players or haven’t figured out a way of simulating that everyday high-intensity assembly line.
What I loved, though, was the fluid beauty of the ballgames rolling along all day in this expansive park of soccer fields and tennis courts. A man riding bicycles with two children stopped atop the hill behind third base.
“Papa, what is that?” said the little boy.
“Why, it’s a baseball game,” the father answered. “Let’s get going.”
It was a fleeting moment of recognition, but the tall shortstop firing to first at that moment could not be ignored.
Over by the shipping container that doubles as our concession stand, Catherine “Cathy” Gerard served up homemade chili con carne. It was tasty and filling.
The mother of two teenage players, “Cathy” has poured heart and soul into the Kangaroos over the past eight years. She’s hosted dozens of committee meetings, driven hundreds of parentless players to games and graciously hosted eight baseball players (Frank, Jon, Sean, Brandon, Adam, Cameron, Joe and Sam) who arrived on her doorstep as neither family nor friend. It is not the same sort of valor as Josh Beckett, but Cathy is a baseball hero, firmly pushing the game into empty cracks, like an afternoon in the park.
I’m revising my coaching library. What are your favorite baseball coaching books? I’m particularly interested in the psychological aspects of baseball coaching. Write to oldworldpastime@gmail.com