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.
Under warm skies, there was baseball in Brussels this weekend. We fell to the Cats, 10-6, in a hard-fought duel where we struggled at the plate. We play one more weekend, and then hang’em up until August 2. The season, it is a slog.
But after a dozen campaigns, I’m finally learning to balance my approach. This is a minority sport in this country, played by a mere 3,000 souls, and attempts to apply professional atmospherics end in frustration. So I try to be as serious as possible — while fitting baseball into my life and not vice versa. The true, productive labor will be getting more eight-year-olds to play, not yelling at 17-year-olds to “work harder, harder, harder.”
Meanwhile, with team members absent, I’ve taken to playing again, which is wholly fun, but reminds me all the time how hard this sport is. I tried very hard to get better at baseball when I went to college, between the ages of 18 and 22.
Before that, I was stuck in the Belgian third division, pitching out of holes and banging balls over soccer goals. I’m an entirely average athlete, so I never would have made it that far anyway, but by the time I started to get serious, it was too late. After 18, I improved only marginally despite thousands of hours lifting weights, taking groundballs, summer leagues, contact lenses and individual coaching.
I hit my ceiling a few years ago – decent, occasionally good, defensive catching and a spaghetti bat. Try as I might – and I’ve tried very very hard – I’ve never hit over .200 with wood bats in the Belgian first division. My bat goes instinctively to the ball, like a finger scratching an itch. I don’t often strike out.
The problem is that it never applies real force. Like a machine, it delivers gentle collisions that result in barrels of groundballs to shortstop and the odd medium-deep fly ball.
It is a maddening affliction, especially as I watch guys who have worked less hard at baseball than I have flick their wrists and crack the pop of thunder. As a coach, the task has become to figure out how to motivate the thunder-crackers to lift weight and dedicate themselves to hitting .300 for the Brussels Kangaroos.
As our loss on Saturday showed, we have some trekking to do before we get there. But as I’ve rediscovered these last few weeks, baseball is endlessly fun. Nobody in their right mind who’s been taught properly and treated fairly will simply walk away. In this, I place my faith.
How do you teach hitting? Send your 5-point hitting plans to oldworldpastime@gmail.com. I will publish the best.
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