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.
You can play a lot of baseball before you’re ever a part of what I was on Saturday. I estimate I’ve caught an average of 20 games a year since I was nine years old. That adds up to roughly 500 baseball games.
On Saturday, behind the dish for the Kangaroos against the Leuven Twins, the balls being fired toward my mitt produced a pleasant pattern. It went something like this: 1-2-3. Again and again. Our defensive innings went by so fast that the umpire asked us to take more time between pitches.
Of course, we directly didn’t talk about what was going on. That rule is in the baseball gods’s 10 Commandments. I had planned to take out the starting pitcher after six or seven and give innings to somebody else. But that wasn’t going to happen if the outs kept falling like they were, in tight little bunches. “Yeah, if I keep doin what I’m doin, I’d like to stay in the game,” the pitcher told me after the fifth, venturing out on a rhetorical tightrope. “Cuz, uh, what I’m doing, well, I’ve never done it before.” I couldn’t have agreed more.
The end was anti-climactic. We won 10-0, finishing off the game in the bottom of the seventh on a mercy rule. It may have been the Belgian second division and only seven innings of baseball, but 21 up and 21 down counts in my book. Even at age 33, I’m plenty enough a baseball nut to get excited about such things. “Lucas Fogarty, you got yourself a perfect game,” I yelled.
The Kangaroos have been bringing over American and Australian players for a decade now. We’ve seen a couple dozen college and pro guys roll through Brussels. It’s been a cast of characters. Among others: a vintner, a cell phone salesman, a Toronto thug, a Harvard Law School student, a 50ish pot smoker, and plenty of coaches.
Lucas, a 22-year-old psychology graduate of Pomona-Pitzer in California, is unique, and worth a mention here. As he announces before every game, “Mister umpire, je suis un diabetique.” He then points at the insulin pump attached to his belt that he has to play with. It looks like an old-fashioned blue tape recorder.
Like all those who suffer from Type-1 diabetes, including some Major Leaguers like Brandon Morrow, Lucas lives his life with one eye on his blood sugar scoreboard. If low, candy or soft drinks. If high, water and an injection of insulin to help the body break down the extra sugar. “When I was a kid, they told me, you can deal with this and have the life you want, or you can choose not to, and have a bad life,” he explained. Living with the disease has given him an awareness of his own body and an appreciation for the fragility of life that most people can’t fathom.
And on the baseball field, Lucas says, “it gives me a bit of a chip on my shoulder.” He is an animated figure on the mound, pounding his fist in his glove, cheering on teammates, and yelling at the umpire one minute then, the next, apologizing in his sweetest French.
On Saturday, the Californian’s fastball-change-curve arsenal was dynamite: It was like the hitters were swinging wiffle ball bats. There was no need to apologize for anything.
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