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.
The Belgian baseball world was all abuzz last week about the New York Mets’ signing of Hoboken (before being a place in New Jersey, it was a county in Antwerp) Pioneers lefty slugger Thomas de Wolf. The 18-year-old picked up a $20,000 signing bonus to go play winter ball in the Dominican Republic. If all goes well, he’ll ship out to the Gulf Coast League next spring.
The folks here are right to be excited. Pro ball is the dream, and you need only glance at what former New York Yankee Robert Eenhoorn has done to grow the sport in the Netherlands — the new members, the players drafted, the excitement around tournaments like Honkbal Week (www.honkbalweek.nl) — to see the benefits of landing a fish of your own in the Farm System. “Everything I’ve accomplished, I owe to the opportunities I got in America,” Eenhoorn told me when I interviewed him two years ago.
The Belgians are all proud to be part of a league coughing up its first bit of professional talent. Messages of congratulations flowed to Hoboken and league officials last week.
There is something counterintuitive, however, about signing hitters out of Europe. Homer sapiens is slighter and smaller on this side of the Atlantic, which doesn’t impress scouts, who tend to look at ballplayers as farmers inspect cattle. “Good ankles, bad shoulders, no meat on his back…”
The skill is also so mechanical and requires so much habit-forming practice and fine-tuning; it’s hard to believe a professional hitter could emerge without the millions of at-bats teens get in the Dominican Republic, the U.S. or Japan. Spotting your fastball, on the other hand, never depends on who’s 60 feet away with a bat. If you can hit your spot at 90+, you’ll get me out. You’ll also get A-Rod out, at least sometimes. And as the drafted Frenchman Joris Bert illustrates, speed is another baseball commodity Europe could export.
One factor that does favor European hitters: Teens here hit against college-quality pitching with wood bats, which is harder than facing fellow teens with tin.
It was below the radar that the (Minnesota) Twins drafted catcher Greg Najac off the SHAPE, Belgium military base high school in 2003. He was a squarely-built muscular force of nature. He never played in the Belgian first division, but teed off instead off international English-speaking high schools.
From base to baseball, Najac hit .258 at age 19 in the Gulf Coast League. He then quit. What happened? “He was having problems as a catcher handling pro pitching, and the Twins wanted him to change positions,” says somebody familiar with the matter. “He refused.”
I know one place that will have somebody drafted within 20 years: Namur, the charming castle town 40 minutes south of Brussels. I have rarely heard as much baseball sense talked as I did last Friday night at a 4th of July shindig the Namur Angels put together. As the stereo blared rock and the grill served up shredded pork and ribs, Angels coaches and players described to me their dreams for the future.
Almost always, they involved teaching baseball to as many kids as possible. And they have lots of teachers. Seven past and present members of the Angels first division team are now coaches. One is obsessed with how to get 6-year-olds (and their parents) to like baseball. “What baseball in Europe needs is prodigies, and you don’t get those unless you attract good athletes before they get into soccer,” he said. Over Kriek cherry beers, club president Eddy Heymans said: “We’re looking at how we can make baseball attractive and fun for people who do have other things to do with their lives.”
In a world of obsessive compulsive crazy sports dreams and prospects who refuse to change positions, the words don’t come much more level-headed than that.
Outside The Netherlands, which we all know about, where else are players getting signed these days? Tell me, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com
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