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.
A journalistic partner in crime, Josh Chetwynd, has reported and written a very cool, and ground-breaking, little book, Baseball in Europe: A Country by Country History (McFarland, 334 p.)
Mr. Chetwynd narrates the story of the game in 11 different European countries, including Belgium. This space will spend a few weeks perusing and discussing — blogging, if you will — the book. (It’s available at Amazon)
The first chapter focuses on the mighty Dutch, who open their Olympic campaign this Wednesday against Taiwan. They are 157-31 at the European Championships. Against countries not called Italy, they are an astounding 113-1.
Why the honkbal dominance?
Baseball grew up in the lowlands as soccer’s summer sister, Mr. Chetwynd explains. “After the war, baseball became firmly established on the sporting scene. The key reason baseball was so accepted: two of the most famous soccer clubs in the country, Amsterdam’s Ajax and Blauw-Wit, decided to take the game on as a summer sport.”
(I’m starting to think partnering with soccer clubs might be the Only Way Forward in Belgium.)
Footie greats Johan Cruijff, Johan Neeskens and Cor Wilders all played. Mr. Cruijff, Europe’s “Footballer of the Century”, caught for the Ajax youth team until he was 16. Mr. Wilders was the Deion Sanders of his day, becoming the only Dutchman ever to represent his country in baseball and soccer.
With soccer clubs and players leading the way, baseball spread quickly. In 1934, the Dutch national team played its first international game in a suburb of Amsterdam.
The winning team: Belgium, 21-12.
A great trading nation, the Netherlands used international connections. Han Urbanus, who in Holland went over 150 starts without being relieved, attended spring training twice with the New York Giants in the 1950s.
In 1956, the Netherlands represented Europe in a “Global World Series” in Milwaukee, staged by a local businessman. They lost 14-2 to Puerto Rico and 7-1 to Colombia. Around the same time, Dutch baseball officials forged ties with Sullivans, a Michigan traveling team whose alumni include Kirk Gibson, Al Kaline and Jim Kaat. Players from the Netherlands’s Caribbean colonies also gave the domestic league a big boost.
Bill Arce, a college baseball hall of fame coach, showed up in 1962. By the time I met Mr. Arce in the summer of 1999 at the World Port Tournament, he was a legend, credited with pushing the country to within striking distance of Olympic medals and major league prospects. (Cool fact: Robert Eenhoorn, the Dutch game’s current standard-bearer, started at second base in Dwight Gooden’s 1996 Yankees no-hitter. See Box score)
In 1999, I freelanced a story about the World Port. At the same time, I was looking for a player-coach for the Kangaroos. Mr. Arce handed me a business card (still on my desk, tattered and torn) with the name of a friend in California.
The friend gave me a number for Frank Pericolosi, who arrived here in May of 1999, our first ever guest coach.
Any other serious studies of Euroball out there? I will mention them if you write to oldworldpastime@gmail.com