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.
Matt Brown, a 32-year-old baseball-crazy architect from New York, now a Brussels resident, texted me a week ago. “Happy Opening Day,” he wrote, referring to the Orioles playing the Rays (my interest) and the Marlins taking on the Mets.
Of course, I had to correct him. Opening Day was on Saturday, when Matt, me and 10 other men aged 17 to 35 piled into a squadron of Volkswagens and Peugeots and other such machines and sped up the E19 to take on the Antwerp Eagles.
It was the first game of the 2010 Brussels Kangaroos season and much has changed since last I wrote here of the club I have loved, played and worked for, and sometimes hated since I was 16 years old.
We are now in the Saturday-only recreational second division, a step down from the Saturday-and-Sunday semi-professional first division. Our most talented kids are playing for the first-division Namur Angels. Our posse of good-hit no-field Dominicans has scattered among a few other Belgians teams.
In their place have come a sane and solid corp of regular guys – mostly Belgians and Americans — who love baseball and are happy to play once a week at a semi-decent level. We are using the extra time to put our youth program back together: It is a kid’s game.
I’m sure the debate of what adult level to aim for plays out in the minds of coaches, players and administrators all over Europe, and here’s my argument: If you don’t have the Sherpas, don’t climb Mount Everest.
Whatever your sport or discipline, you should only field an elite team if you have that talented core group of a dozen folks who really, badly want to be the best and are willing to work at it. If you have such a competent, passionate crew, set your goals high, baby, and go for it. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for an awful lot of misery. We tried so hard in Brussels these past couple years to put together competitive teams, but without that core of committed good players, we floundered in frustration.
It was different on Saturday. Under a bright sun on the Eagles’s gorgeously-renovated diamond, Matt gave us gutsy five innings in his first mound appearance in forever. “Called my dad, he couldn’t believe I pitched,” he said after the game.
An American high school kid, Ben Hausdorff, picked up the ball and led us into extra innings with the score tied at 5. We won it 6-5 in the 12th on a double by Travis Reine, a 30ish Exxon engineer. As we headed for beers and ice-packs, we were grinning like a bunch of Little Leaguers. This kind of baseball, conscientious and somewhat decently-played, yet spirited, unpretentious and purely fun, is a sweet reminder of why we love the game.
On Sunday, to see what I was missing, I headed an hour south of Brussels to watch the Namur Angels pound the Merchtem Cats, 13-2 in windy Arctic conditions.
“Sorry about your team going down,” a Namur player told me through the fence, his face strained by the cold.
“Are you crazy?” I said, before heading to the canteen for a coffee.
For 10 years, I bought into a season that asks grown men, only a few of whom are getting paid, to suspend their lives from noon to eight p.m. every Saturday and Sunday from April to October. You’d have a hard time finding other countries with that kind of nutty schedule. There are no six-month amateur men’s league seasons in the U.S. Even the minors don’t play that long.
Goodbye to all that.
Have you had to debate the merits of shooting for your country’s highest level? Tell all at oldworldpastime@gmail.com