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.
On a spiffy Sunday, a quartet of dudes from Brussels hopped in the rod and whizzed down to Namur to watch its Angels play the Braves of a Brasschaat, a tony suburb of Antwerp whose team has won numerous Belgian national championships.
This year’s Angels, coached by my friend, baseball uberobessive Chris Dassy, feature a half-dozen former Kangaroos, who left for brighter pastures when our club fell into an ill-fortuned cycle of decline and frustration, sliding down to second division.
They are still our guys, though, and the Angels are admirably serious about their first-division baseball, so we made a date to see what was cooking. It was worth the trip.
The field in Namur sits atop a wind-swept plateau up the hill from 19th century villas and mansions along the lovely Meuse river. This elevated diamond surrounded by corn fields always seems to be too hot, too cold or too windy. At this game, it was mostly the later two. We gladly sipped minutes of warmth when the sun served them up.
The damndest people show up at ballgames. We met Doug, a groundskeeper for a youth baseball league in Indiana who was lonely on a month-long assignment in Luxembourg for an American auto parts company. He found the game online. He kept score on the back of his Google Maps printout. The Angels are his team, he said, at least while he’s here. He bought a hat.
And, in Belgium, the damndest things happen next to baseball fields. An encampment of Roma people is set up beyond the left-field fence. They’ve been there forever.
But what was happening beyond the right-field fence took the, ahem, cake. A local sex shop, and I am not making this up, had sponsored an Easter sex toys hunt. The store buried 150 sex toys in a grass field, brought out some beers and fired up the grill, and invited women to bring their shovels. We saw ladies in pink T-shirts walking toward their garden, shovels perched on shoulders like soldiers marching to war.
We, of course, paid attention only to the ballgame. And it was a fine one. Cedric De Smedt, a hulking righty who grew up next to our ballfield in Brussels, threw seven innings of one-hit no-run baseball. Both infields made sparkling plays. The Angels drew some walks and knocked some gappers to build a lead.
Brasschaat came back, bringing the tying run to the plate in the last inning. Vincent King, another Brussels boy, made a stylish catch, chasing down a pop-up in right field from his position at second base to help preserve the lead. The final score was for Namur, 7-4.
A good ballgame makes for a good day.
What’s the best game you’ve seen in person this year? I always like to hear baseball stories at oldworldpastime@gmail.com