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.
I like to think European baseball has much in common with the game played in America around 1890: small parks, run-down equipment, shoestring budgets, family-run clubs, players hopping from team to team, and a unpredictable rawness.
This winter, I read, for the first time, “The Glory of Their Times”, the classic Lawrence S. Ritter oral history of 22 ballplayers from the turn of the 20th century to the 1920s.
Here, for example is hall-of-fame lefty Rube Marquard on escaping his home town to find a baseball team: “From Cleveland, Ohio, I bummed my way to Waterloo, Iowa. I was sixteen years old and I’d never been away from home before. It took me five days and five nights, riding freight trains, sleeping in open fields, hitching rides any way I could. My money ran out on the third day, and after that I ate when and how I could.”
Nobody in European baseball today has ridden the rails inside a Maersk container from Rotterdam and Regensburg. But there is that rawness in a couple guys playing catch in a cow field, a team stuffing shopping bags with straw to make bases, a small boy taking the bus in his cleats, and a nation’s best players crowding inside a Volkswagen Polo for road games.
There are other gems in that book. The great outfielder Sam Crawford tells of “living in a little cabin at the edge of the Mojave Desert, near a little town called Pearblossom. Nobody around there even knew I’d been a ballplayer. I never talked about it. So there I was, sitting there in that cabin, with snow all around – it was February – and all of a sudden the place is surrounded with photographers and newspapermen and radio-TV reporters and all. I didn’t know what in the world was going on. ‘You’ve just been elected to the Hall of Fame,’ one of them said to me.” That was 1957. Crawford also told Ritter: “I read a lot. My favorite writer is Balzac. A wonderful writer.”
I read a lot of baseball stuff during the winter. On a recent trip to Maryland, I picked up, in a secondhand bookstore, an anthology of baseball pieces by the inimitable Roger Angell of the New Yorker. Coincidentally, it’s signed “For John, Yours in baseball. Roger Angell.”
Angell writes of a famous 1962 spring training game where the Mets, who would lose 120 games that year, beat the Yankees, 1962 world champions. He marvels at the “marvelous complexity and balance of baseball. Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world’s champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.”
The 2010 season – “hundreds and hundreds of separate games” – is here. This year, the incarnation of baseball in my life will take the form of a (thank God) second-division campaign with the Brussels Kangaroos, running Belgium’s first Little League all-star tournaments, following European baseball, cheering on my Orioles and, of course, writing this column every Sunday, after the games are over and the sky is dark.
To my baseball readers and friends around the world – Happy seasons!
How did your club get its start? I’m still here, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com