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 skies cleared on Saturday. We raked the field, took BP, and played our first proper ball game of the year. (OK, we played six, but we’ll take it.) We beat an undermanned Namur Angels team, 8-3. (The night before, in a freezing-rain battle, World War One-style, the Angels spanked us by a similar score.)
Each of our three starting pitchers got a couple innings under his belt. Besides Clay Osborne, our Iraq veteran lefty, the two other starters were teenage Belgians who learned the game growing up in Brussels.
What makes the Kangaroos special is that the club was started by guys who were not taught baseball as kids. They weren’t born into baseball.
They converted.
This game lends itself to early baptism. I’m not talking about that dads and sons at sunset TV movie garbage. It’s the repetition, repetition, repetition, catch, throw, catch, throw, swing, swing, swing quality of baseball that makes it so hard to teach (and learn) from scratch – and thus to get going in Europe.
It is not a matter of finding big hunks and teaching them to tackle the quarterback, or showing sprinters how to kick. (Here, I anticipate some bar room banter about the mysticism of football and soccer. I take the point about those sports at their highest levels. But what’s harder to organize for uninitiated adults: A pick-up soccer game or a pick-up baseball game? If you said soccer, I have a coaching job for you.) In baseball, we have to find sprinters, and then spend five years teaching them to catch, throw, catch, throw.
When the Kangaroos entered the first division in 2000, we pushed a fledgling youth program into gear. We grabbed sons and nephews, neighbors and friends, and led them to the ball field.
The work has paid off. Saturday’s starting pitcher, Cedric De Smedt, is a 16-year-old right-hander with hands the size of Frisbees. He has tons to learn, but he’s played enough baseball to have good mechanics and to understand the importance of changing speeds and spotting his fastball. How did we find him? He lives in a house next to our field.
After Clay, we went to Harold Gerard. He’s the nephew of Pierrot, one of the guys who founded the club. Harold is a 17-year-old lefty who attended the MLB academy in Italy last summer. (The same one attended by Dodgers farmhand Joris Bert, a 20-year-old Frenchman.) Harold has potential but still has to prove he can get grown men out consistently.
But no matter how far they go in baseball, Cedric and Harold are ballplayers. They love baseball, I hope, for life.
What’s galling is how fragile this whole set-up is. After getting married last year, I quit coaching a minimes (11-12-year-old) team. Only one person volunteered to replace me.
This game isn’t a weed that grows between cracks in the ground. It’s an intricate, complicated, expensive pastime. Its survival demands that you grab the nearest kid and play catch.
This year, we’ll offer a free one-hour initiation before every game to any boy or girl who shows up. Players from our men’s team will take turns coaching the sessions. (Catch, throw, catch, throw…)
Last week, we dug up newspaper clippings about a baseball team in Brussels in 1957. That team died, I don’t know when.
What happened between 1957 and the founding of the Kangaroos in 1988? My guess: They stopped playing catch with kids.
Do you know what happened to the original Brussels baseball team? What’s your best idea for developing baseball in Europe? I’m in the dugout, listening at oldworldpastime@gmail.com
Previous Columns:
Playing and Coaching in Europe
My Country, Delayed by Rain
Wanted: Pitcher-Shortstop-Catcher With Homerun Power
John,
first of all, many compliments for some excellent reading. Believe me, you are not alone. This winter I started coaching the 2nd youth team for my club and unfortunately I can’t continue it cause I’m moving from Holland to England. Even in a baseball enthusiastic country like Holland it’s difficult to find people wanting to coach youth and teach kids the fundamentals.
Good luck to the Kangaroos this season.