Old World Pastime – Ballgames in the Bedroom

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 have never been crazy about fantasy baseball. There’s always been plenty of fantasy baseball going on in my own head not to need to bet how many bases Derek Jeter will steal this year.

As a kid growing up in baseball-starved Brussels, I played endless games that were happening only in my imagination. First came a 1980 Topps baseball card set. I traced a diamond on the floor with white masking tape. The corner of a bookshelf was the left-field foul poll. The baseball was a purple paper party ball, the kind you blow out of a hollow stick. The bat was the wooden stick of a lollipop — or my finger.

I’d use the cards to divide up the teams, and pitch with one hand and hit with the other, doing the play-by-play in my pre-teen squeak. “There’s a long fly ball, Doug Decinces has hit a homerun!”

I had plenty of friends — including the son of an American Mennonite missionary, a Vietnamese immigrant child who tried to sell me calculators and an Armenian boy who now works in insurance – but with whom among them could I share this burgeoning religious passion for our game?

On went the fantasy. I graduated to a board game with cards called Statis Pro Baseball. My friend John, the Mennonite son, and his brother Reuben were gracious participants. We played fervently for many months.

There were late-night series with ice cream and sodas, trades over the phone and studious record-keeping. In lined school notebooks, I tabulated the games, at-bats, homeruns and ribbies compiled by my cardboard heroes.

They grew out of Statis Pro. I continued for many years – by myself. OK, so you might call me a loser for flipping card after card on a board as a pretend ballgame grew on a piece of paper, but does that really make you more of a loser than playing Grand Theft Auto all night? You couldn’t find a happier kid in Belgium on the night that Roger Clemens threw a no-hitter on my bedroom floor.

In my late teens, I was a fan of another game, APBA baseball, which is played with dice. Even though I had a girlfriend, I happily played entire seasons by myself. I memorized the codes so that I could play a nine-inning game in 20 minutes. I scored games in notebooks and kept overall stats in a thick blue binder. It sounds a bit nuts. In my defense, we never had TV at home.

Thus, caught up in my own madness, I have mostly refrained from Fantasy Baseball. Until this year. The web has made it possible to play without putting hours into maintaining a team. And so I have joined a league this year that includes Namur Angels coach Chris Dassy, Neptunus Rotterdam manager Steve Janssen and a bunch of other Lowlands baseball guys.

So it was that I let out a cheer this morning after flipping on the computer to news of Ubaldo Jimenez’s no-hitter.

That’s right, Jimenez is on MY team.

What are your fantasy baseball games? Dream on at oldworldpastime@gmail.com