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.
Tensions flared some at Kangaroo field Sunday, as the Brasschaat Braves took down the Kangaroos 10-4. They nailed our 16-year-old second baseman with a fastball to the back of the neck.
We tagged a runner in the face, clearing the benches. I can’t say I endorsed the move, but I stepped in front of the tagger. Being a real man, I kept the catcher’s mask on, of course.
Anyway, the Braves won, wasting a fine performance from Harold, our 6ft5 Dominican ace. Seeking further wisdom in the arts of confrontational baseball, I checked in with baseball immortal Ty Cobb, the meanest, toughest human ever to strap on spikes:
轩 Thanks for taking the call, Ty, how’s life?
轩 Hate it. No baseball here.
轩 Really?
轩 Well, not real baseball. They play games on a perfect field with perfect umpires on a perfect field. Everybody plays clean, flawless baseball. When they’re not making clean plays, they have positive attitudes and come back and make the play. Everybody throws quality strikes, hits the ball hard and makes dazzling defensive stops. I hate it.
轩 Sounds great.
轩 Well, it’s not. Nobody fights, nobody argues, nobody gets down.
轩 But Ty, isn’t that the point? In baseball, you beat the other guy’s performance. Belligerence doesn’t get you anywhere.
轩 I can’t stand guys who don’t battle their guts out.
轩 What do you mean?
轩 It’s a man’s game. Sometimes, you have to throw at a guy’s head, slide spikes high, fight. There was one time, I waited for a guy after the game. Knocked him upside the head. Hard.
轩 Ty, I have a hard time hitting the ball, never mind other players.
轩 Yeah, well, you have a life, it seems, all I had was the game. Ripping a single, stealing second, taking out the catcher on a single to left. I hit .367, you know.
轩 And I wish I could play like you. I’m in my 16th season of catching for the Kangaroos, and I still can’t hit.
轩 Play harder. Step on somebody.
轩 But that’s not me. My parents are Europeanized musicians from Maryland. They raised me on opera.
轩 But don’t you love the game?
轩 More than anything. Last night, as if I hadn’t had enough baseball on the weekend, I watched the O’s and Rangers in bed while following season 1 of Friends with my wife.
轩 Lame.
Let’s hear about European baseball fights. Email me good stories from your league at oldworldpastime@gmail.com
To be completely honest Ty has a point, you play to win and you play as hard as you can. It’s not a full-time contact sport but there are moments that contact is needed. One thing you need to keep in mind is that most of the players in Europe pay to play instead of getting payed to play and our bosses would like to see us show up to work on the monday without to many injuries.
In all my career in the field I have seen a couple of bench clearings and managers going balistic (as a player and as an umpire) but everytime when the game was called we would gather in the canteen and have a drink together and shake hands. Some of what you see happening is part of the theatre to get your team pumped up and trying to drag them out of a slump.
In my opinion there is a difference between mean and hard. Mean is unacceptable, hard is.
Well, you need to have a little fire otherwise why are you out there playing. I can’t say that I was ever in a full brawl on a ballfield. One time in legion ball our third baseman started jawing with the home team in their dugout and a couple of guys came out of the dugout and actually got into it on the field with him. I’ve had a couple flare-ups on the basepaths with hard tags and high spikes. My best/worst incident was an off-the-field affair while I was playing in Italy. The other guy got the short end of that incident, and it hurt his team since he had to sit out a game.