By Riccardo Schiroli
The thing that hurts me the most after this week of European baseball is that a relevant part of the news reported here in Italy are not about baseball.
Bologna complained about the field in Paris and San Marino did not agree with the way the tie break rule (Team Quality Balance or TQB) was implemented by CEB Technical Commission.
Let’s be clear: breaking a tie off the field is as bad as it gets in baseball. Until Saturday, I would have said that at least TQB made it clear. I would have never suspected that we could still have a tie after calculating TQBs and reaching the 4th decimal.
What happened is: we had a protest, fans left the ballpark without knowing who was going to play against Bologna in the final. This is bad for baseball in Europe.
What is even worse is that the new format of the European Cups will see in 2016 only 4 countries performing in the Champions Cup: Italy, The Netherlands and Germany with 2 teams, Czech Republic and San Marino with 1. If we consider that San Marino is actually a team of the Italian Baseball League, it makes it 4 countries. So, the reform is going exactly the opposite direction of the intended (this format featured France, Ukraine and Belarus) and top European baseball loses another one of its founders, since France falls to the CEB Cup level.
When in 1953 CEB (then called European Baseball Federation) was founded, there were 5 members: Belgium, Italy, France, Germany and Spain. Only Italy and Germany will play in the 2016 Champions Cup, together with The Netherlands (not a founding member, but still the cradle of the game in Europe, will join soon after) and Czech Republic (in 1953 not even a country, will join some decades later). Belgium, France and Spain are gone.
If what I suspect (i.e. that all CEB does is calling Executive Meetings that call a Congress that calls the next Executive Meeting) is not true, I believe that my friend Jan Esselman and his Executive are ready to share my concern.
I was not in Paris or Rotterdam, so I won’t comment the games. Still, what I felt through play by play (the video streaming was actually not enough to understand more) for most of the week was that Italians and Dutch were playing a different tournament. I had heavily underestimated Draci Brno, as I suppose did the Rimini team.