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.
On a crisp Saturday with the leaves falling, I drove out to Kangaroo Field to run a birthday ballgame for an 11-year-old Belgian named Clement.
I had never met the boy, but he wanted baseball for his special day, and I’m inclined to spread the game around, however clumsy the final form.
Clement and his twelve friends were the best audience: enthusiastic, disciplined and athletic. Most could play catch without coaching. They couldn’t throw any strikes, but within an hour, they were playing a coach-pitch game with a net behind home plate.
Clement’s team scored two runs in the last inning to tie the game at 4. The kids ran off rosy-cheeked and happy. They continued to play pick-up baseball as I chatted with Alain, one of their dads.
These kids are socially-adjusted happy jocks – smart and snappy — so they play soccer from September to April. And they are right to do so. That’s a rich tradition here, carrying many a soul through long tough, rainy nights.
Was there a league, asked Alain, where the boys could play some baseball a couple times a week in April, May and June?
In ten years of coaching here, I’ve often mused to myself that our season – at most clubs, ten months of baseball – is too long. If you sign up for one of the Kangaroos’ youth teams, you get three months of winter baseball and seven months of practice and regular season games — roughly 70 practices and 30 games.
That’s 260 hours of baseball — equivalent to a competitive American high school program that practices religiously every day. No parent in their right mind would sign up their soccer-loving son to such an overwhelming commitment. Off to war, buddy. Good luck. Don’t hurt your arm.
And yet, we need those kids to reverse the trend that’s taken us in this country from 2,211 players in 1992 to 1,722 in 2006. As Josh Chetwynd’s excellent book Baseball in Europe shows, partnering with soccer clubs is how baseball thrived in the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. When the FCs quit baseball, it almost died out. Why? Because a sport’s level and popularity is only as good as its athletes and in almost every European country, the best play soccer.
We don’t need to get them to quit the round ball. We need to get them to play two sports: soccer and baseball.
I looked over at Clement and his buddies, hitting and catching on their own, and my head ached: What are we doing?
At a Belgian federation meeting a couple weeks ago, a couple of us pleaded, along these lines, for a more rational schedule. Quality, not quantity, is what matters, we said. Look at people’s lives, and find a place for baseball to be played by all.
We were ignored or shouted down. “Back in the day, we played baseball all day, and we never complained,” bellowed an old hand.
It reminded me of that Monty Python skit with the Yorkshire men complaining that young people don’t understand hard work.
At the end, one boasts that he “had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulfuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.”
Says his friend: “And you try and tell the young people of today that, and they won’t believe you.”
I don’t believe the old bellowers.
On Saturday, I shook hands with this eager dad, Alain, and told him that if his sons wanted in, they’d have to sign at the dotted line for ten months and give up soccer. There’d be no middle ground. The dad said that was too bad and drove away.
The 2008 season is settling into my brain, and I haven’t yet decided what to do next year. My gut tells me I should quit coaching adults, and figure out a way for Clement and thousands of other athletics kids to play some baseball without having to give up soccer.
Only two columns to go and I’m outta here. So write while you still can, to oldworldpastime@gmail.com. I yearn for long screeds about why I’m wrong, and why kids need to blood, sweat and toil baseball from February to November.