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.
The Ardennes hills are brown and gold. Like New England. My wife and I visited in-laws there Sunday. I bounced a two-year-old on my knee, and the only baseball I saw was the digitally-captured end of the rollicking Rays-Red Sox Saturday night homerun rollerthon. It was late morning, and I set the laptop on the kitchen counter as I scrambled eggs.
Everywhere, the games are ending. The Port of Antwerp Royal Greys chased down the Hoboken Pioneers 6-1 today to secure another Belgian national championship.
A shout-out to the Greys. They are good, not world-class, but numerous and talented, organized and efficient. A car drags a trimmed, flat diamond before every game. They have scoreboards and a clubhouse a stiff gust of wind can’t knock over. And a couple dozen catch-players, coaches for teams of teens of tykes.
While our frites-n-beer league wrapped up by the coast, in the capital center of the country, we said goodbye this weekend to Michael Joannides, a stocky, shrewd Minnesotan who flew in this June when we were down and out, and happily rode along for our 10-5 playoff run, and 2009 first division berth.
Mike graduated from Pomona-Pitzer College this May, and is another example of why European clubs risk wasting time and money if they don’t recruit the best ballplayers of top academic schools. He’s off this week to start studies that will eventually make him a brain surgeon, or something like that.
This smart, funny Midwestern gentleman can also play ball. Here’s how our pre-game bullpen sessions went:
- Wanna throw?
- Sure
- OK, here’s a few fastballs
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. All from the set.
- OK, curveball
Swish. Swish. Swish.
- Changeup
Plock. Plock. Plock.
- OK, that’s good, I’m done
In 20 years of catching, I’d never seen anything like it. Pitching is so hard that most of its practitioners straddle the border between brash overconfidence and fragile neurosis. It was another Pomona grad turned Kangaroos, Sean Gilbert, who in 2003 told my team of 14-year-olds “that when you’re pitching, you gotta be thinking about that hitter, ‘You are my b—, you motherf—–.” This nervousness is why bullpen sessions usually required so much sweet talk and fine-tuning.
Not Mike. And once the game started, like a clock, he’d rock out of that set all day, and fire strikes till dusk. He threw a one-hitter in his first game, and eventually finished 8-3 on the season. He also hit well, and coached several youth teams, including our representative at the European Championships in Kutno, Poland.
The Kangaroos are not yet the Royal Greys. We don’t have enough ace players, and we struggle to find dedicated coaches. But every year, we try, and this time around, the future brain doctor battled brave for us.
I’m going to the World Series, then checking out, so write to oldworldpastime@gmail.com while you still can. I will dedicate a column to mail.