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.
Sometimes, a ballgame calls you.
So it was with the USA-Venezuela World Cup contest in Regensburg last Thursday night. I had a reporting trip to Bavaria scheduled anyway – and once I heard the call, I had to go.
Away it was in a rental for 1,000 miles of streaming autobahn. The weather was cold and sunny — ideal for driving. The only snag was the roadwork in Germany which cut strips of the trip down to two lanes. You can’t beat the thrill of steering your small box of metal 18 inches from a thundering 18-wheeled dinosaur.
The stadium in Regensburg is comfortably laid between a ridge and a river. You could be in Bluefield, West Virginia, Billings, Montana, Omaha, Nebraska, or a hundred other minor league baseball towns. I had been wanting to see this pearl of European baseball ever since one of you sent in a picture last year. I was not disappointed.
Team U.S.A. hit three long homeruns early and took a 7-1 lead. It looked like a rout. A few rows in behind the third-base on-deck circle, I settled into a well-honed routine of cheeseburgers and chat, first with a young Baltimore Orioles scout on his first European baseball trip, then with a grizzled softball coach.
The coach was lecturing artfully on the softball swing (one seeks a level path through the hitting zone, same as in hardball) when a sweet-stroke lefty named Rene Reyes (177 at-bats in the bigs) punched a grand-slam over the right-center field fence. Suddenly in the seventh, it was 7-7.
The rest was pure baseball delight. There were great plays and missed chances aplenty into the 10th. In extra innings, the teams got to start with runners on first and second, and the hitter of their choice at bat. The orthodoxy seemed to be send up the two hitter to bunt, aiming for runners second and third with one out and the three hitter up.
This made no sense to me because a) Your power hitters deliver doubles and homers that don’t require runners to be in scoring position b) With other team getting the same edge, you have to play for the big inning, so why waste an out? c) The other team will walk your three hitter. d) You give yourself two chances to knock in a run, instead of three. Anyway, it was fun to see the rule in action.
Venezuela scored two in the top of the tenth, including one on a one-out groundball to the USA first baseman with the bases loaded. He had been playing (as with the bunt, inexplicably to me) behind the runner and could only trot to the bag instead of coming home to cut off the run. USA equalized with a two-out double.
In the top of the 11th, Venezuela hit another grand slam to put the game away. After USA went down scoreless, the contest had lasted four and a half hours, and was one of the best I had ever witnessed.
At the press conference, I finally got to meet the genial Germans who put up this impeccable website. There’s no “About Us” tag on Mister Baseball saying how great they are – but they, and their work putting together this little local European baseball newspaper, are great.
Just like Regensburg, and its expert job handling the World Cup, they’re all about the baseball.
Tales from the European World Cup? Please tell at oldworlpastime@gmail.com