John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.
In 1995, a gaggle of baseball crazy college students lobbied the eastern Brussels municipality of Woluwe-St-Lambert for a diamond.
Their club, the Kangaroos, had been playing on a soccer rectangle. Right field was 220 feet deep. Anything to the right of a phone poll in right-center was a double. They wanted better.
The students got their wish, and a proper baseball field was built. It isn’t perfect, but it is cool, and distinctive. There’s a short porch in left-center, 275 feet from homeplate. Right-center is 365 feet deep. It drains amazingly well. On many weekends, all other ballgames in Belgium, except for ours, are rained out.
The homeplate area is surrounded by a grassy hill, protecting the field from the wind and affording picnicking spectators a luxury-box view. The grass is tall and lush. It always smells nice.
On and around this field, those students, and I was one of them, would grow up, find work and women and the wisdom of age — but they would keep playing and organizing baseball, together.
And as the field blossomed, warmed, turned to mud and froze with the seasons, the baseball got better. Some very cool things happened.
The ‘Roos won three division-two titles. They beat the best teams in Belgium’s first division. Among the 300+ games was a 30-0 defeat, a 52-0 victory, a three-homer game, a 17-strikeout game and a perfect game. A dozen walk-off wins. Some brawls. Former professionals and college stars from the U.S. and Australia, some very fine baseballers indeed, played at Kangaroo Field.
We started a youth program that’s allowed thousands to play baseball in leagues and camps. Generations of Brussels kids learned the game and made new friends. A cadet squad won a national title. Two teams that trained on the field won European championships and advanced to Little League World Series events in the U.S.
We won, lost, practiced, fought, tried hard and sometimes not hard enough. It was sometimes exhilarating and sometimes frustrating as hell. Sometimes we partied all night next to the three 20-foot shipping containers that housed equipment, groundskeeping gear and concessions. Once I climbed on top of a container and sang a rap song.
All that was Kangaroo Field.
Saturday was its last chapter. Woluwe-St-Lambert has elected to put in a multipurpose artificial turf field, able to carry soccer and hockey as well as baseball. It will be a canyonesque baseball yard, 500 feet to center with youth/softball fields in right and left. No grass, no hill. There will be a proper canteen.
Construction begins May and should last two months. A Dutch private firm is doing the digging, so it should finish on time. Until the new field is ready, we’ll play chez our rivals to the south, the Louvain-la-Neuve Phoenix.
So there will still be baseball in Brussels, but I don’t think it will be the same. At least not for me. Things happen for a reason.
We lost our last game at K Field, 8-2, to the Beveren Lions. There was one hero. Toshinori Ogikubo, a New Yorker of Mexican and Japanese descent who moved to Brussels last year, pitched valiantly into the 7th, and, two innings later, hit the last homerun at Kangaroo Field.
A lot of guys like Toshi, young Americans living abroad, have played for us. They are invariably surprised, confused and delighted to find hardball in Europe’s capital. And, as they get to know the Kangaroos, they get excited about it.
After Saturday’s game, we were having beers when Toshi, with a wide grin, handed me a white plastic bag full of infield dirt.
Yes, I’m keeping it in a jar.
Meanwhile, we’re holding a contest to name the new facility. Kangaroo Grounds? Stade du Baseball Bruxellois? Camden Yards? Make the call at oldworldpastime@gmail.com
Photo: © Leander Schaerlaeckens