John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.
This weekend, I spent a rainy/sunny Saturday at the field offering half-hour initiations to passers-by as part of a nationwide sports festival. A handful of Kangaroo teammates joined me to help for an hour or two at different parts of the day.
I always start off by introducing the field and her four bases. Belgian playground baseball often features between five to ten bases. It’s a non-trivial point to correct. Then I make the kids run around those four bases “in a circle, not a square.”
We taught the newcomers to play catch, “which is to baseball what swimming is to water-polo and what skating is to ice hockey”, as I explain it. “Is it like a serve?” asked a 17-year-old boy who professed himself a tennis ace. I guess so, I said. His was the best arm of the day.
There are two kinds of balls to defend, I told those assembled: “groundballs and… undergroundballs.” Yes, some people laughed.
We finished up each session by letting the kids hit off a tee, one at a time. It worked fine until a plump 10-year-old connected firmly and lined a ball off a classmate’s jaw. A TV cameraman had just showed up, our luck. There was blood everywhere. “Don’t worry, if something was broken, it’d be a different kind of bleeding,” said Toshi, a new member of the Kangaroos who had come to help out. Toshi is a boxer. The kid survived. I gave him a ball.
The crowd was made up of a wide socio-demographic. There were scout troupes, families and city youth clubs. A Venezuelan man came with his seven-year-old son. There was a mom who stood right next to her darling as he took groundballs.
And you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to teach baseball to 31 hyper-active wild-eyed kids from the worst part of Brussels. They have a hard time not picking up bats lying around.
My favorite group was a dozen or so soccer players from a small-town club. We played soft-toss baseball on a youth/softball field. They were above-average athletes and picked up the game fast. It wasn’t long before, without prompting, the outfielders were throwing the ball to the shortstop on a double in the gap.
One of the soccer players had an interesting assumption regarding the rules. He kept on calling for the ball to be thrown precisely to second base after a single. “We have to seal the base, right?” he said. It was his belief that by stepping on second base with the ball, you stopped the batter from advancing after you threw the ball back into the pitcher, or, in our case, the soft-tosser.
Very few kids were from Brussels, and I don’t expect the 31 inner-city kids to make their way out to our field any time soon, but baseball was played on Saturday. We please the gods as we can.
Besides sealing the base, what other rule changes could baseball us? Tell me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com