'Pitching in - ten years on the Irish baseball team'

A history of baseball in Ireland 1996-2006

Introduction

Yes, there is a baseball team in Ireland. If I had a euro for every time I have had to answer that question, I would be a very rich man. It all started in 1995 on the grassy, sloped fields of Corcaigh Park in Newlands Cross, Dublin. Mike Kindle, Mick Manning and a few other friends decided to throw a baseball around. They normally played softball but decided to give ‘hardball’ a go. Simple as that. Over the course of a few weeks other guys joined in, myself included. We ran basic ground ball drills, played short scrimmage games, took simple batting practice, sometimes with a light rain falling, against almost always grey skies.

The Irish Baseball Team @ Rhode Island in 2001

The early days were messy to say the least. Sessions were a little, well, confused. Every now and then we would all learn something new. While pitching one session the batter, Brian Nolan, squared to bunt on strike two, fouled it off and then settled himself back into the batters box to wait for the next pitch. Someone said, ‘Hang on a minute, isn’t he out now?!’ It took a while for all of us to understand that if you attempt a bunt on strike two and foul it off, well, you are out buddy. Next batter. The little things sometimes took a while to sink in.

The rest, as they say, is history. Now we do indeed have an Irish National Baseball team, we have been all around the world and played so much baseball and worked hard at it. We are now at the stage where other European teams see the draw for the European Championships and see Ireland in their group and say ‘Oh crap!’ (Or, ‘Nein! Schlecht!’)

It has been a long and winding road, leading from the guys throwing the ball around in the mist in Corcaigh Park to the Irish team collecting the Silver medal in the 2006 European Pool B Championships. In eight years Irish baseball has grown from a bunch of guys tossing a ball around to an established Adult league with a buzzing, thriving youth league all supporting a successful national team which is thriving in European Competition, and not too far off Olympic or indeed World Cup qualification. Naturally, quite a bit has happened in that time.

There have been problems, there have been victories, many of incredible people have helped us along the way. We have been trained by established baseball coaches, former major league all stars and guys preaching religion with a little baseball on the side.

The help not only came in the form of training, it also came in friendships built up over the world, opening doors for Irish Baseball that we could never previously have imagined. We have been helped graciously by Peter O’Malley, former owner of the LA Dodgers. Read more about Baseball Ireland's link with Peter O'Malley here. We have been allowed play on the hallowed grounds of Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox. We have been all over the world and made many of great friends, none more so than the wonderful people associated with Slocum Baseball Club in Rhode Island.

This book concentrates on the beginning of baseball in Ireland, club baseball in the form of the Dublin Hurricanes, my club side, and the Irish National team itself and how it has progressed through the tournaments it has entered.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have been on the team since day one. I had always jotted down diaries and notes while on tour and decided to put those notes into a coherent form, thus this book was born.

It’s all pretty amazing really. Thinking back, going outside and looking in, seeing myself at a desk in my dorm room in the college residences accommodation we had on the trip to Hull in 1996, watching myself jotting down notes about our inaugural trip. If I knew then that we would come so far as a team and as a group of friends I would be absolutely blown away.

Baseball is surprisingly big in Europe, and the talent level is improving all the time. The Netherlands and Italy qualify for and compete regularly in the Olympics. They both represented Europe in the inaugural and massively successful World Cup in March 2006. They both won games in the 2004 Summer Olympics and the World Cup. As a measure, the United States didn’t even qualify for the ’04 Olympics.

France has a good team, and apparently has an amazing teenager who several major league teams have watching as a shortstop prospect. Europe has some ways to go before it is a baseball powerhouse but it is catching up fast, and the game is spreading and growing, from Russia to Ireland and back.

European baseball caters for club tournaments, youth and adult, and every two years they run the European Championships. Ireland is currently in the ‘B’ Pool, which is played on even number years whilst Pool ‘A’ plays on uneven years. If you win your side of the Pool ‘B’ tournament you qualify for the next years Pool ‘A’ tournament. Pool ‘A’ is where the big boys play. Italy, The Netherlands, France, Great Britain and Russia amongst others. Ireland finished fourth in the Pool ‘B’ tournament in 2002, third in Germany in 2004 and second in Belgium 2006, so right on the periphery of playing for a place in the Olympics (The European Olympic representative comes from the winner and runner up of the Pool ‘A’ tournament closest to that Olympics). We have been to just six tournaments in our entire history and we are already knocking on the door to Pool ‘A’. Some European teams have been playing for decades and have never progressed to Pool ‘A’.

The tournaments have become something of defining chapters in my life, and the lives of the team-mates I have played alongside the last decade. Jobs, relationships and friendships have come and gone, the one constant in the last ten years of my life has been the Irish Baseball team. The tournaments are hard work but always enjoyable, and the teams Ireland sends always play hard and learn so much. We have a reputation for hustling on and off the field, instilled in us by our first couple of coaches and carried on through the various teams to today.

The teams Ireland has sent abroad over the course of the last decade have been a wonderful, colourful, disparate bunch of young men, amazing characters and most of all fantastic friends. Baseball in Europe is almost totally amateur, you play for the love of the game and the love of your country, and very few leagues pay their players. So the players on the Irish team mostly have to hold down regular jobs while playing and training. They are talented players, they are accountants, photographers, software experts, teachers and students.

The dream for Irish baseball is European recognition and success, Olympic or World Baseball Cup qualification and long term to send a player or two to professional baseball in the States. With young players starting to come through to the Adult team that prospect is slowly becoming a reality as opposed to a wild pipe dream. Maybe in seven to ten years time a young Irish slugger will start the long road through the minor leagues towards playing in the majors, The Irish league will probably be pretty competitive and the national team will be bullying teams around in Pool ‘A’. As long as Irish baseball is in the hands of dedicated, intelligent people like Sean Mitchell, Mick Manning, Mike Kindle and Ann Murphy it will continue to grow and reach out towards it goals.

Mike Kindle (left) - the undisputed World heavy weight champion of 'Meet and greet' - seen here with the former US ambassador to Ireland (middle) and author.

Just imagine the incredible interest there would be in, for example, Boston or New York, if an Irish born player made his way into the minors in the Red Sox, Yankees or Mets organisations. They would need to build a new Fenway park to accommodate the number of fans brought to the park by an Irish born star.

When that kid breaks into AAA baseball he will have all the skills. He will have years of training behind him and the backing of a big infrastructure.

The future of Irish baseball?

This book is about where that came from, where that was born, before it actually happens. This book is about the guys who learnt baseball often from scratch and went to Europe with people laughing at us, or worse, ignoring us. Getting the Irish media involved in baseball is difficult even still, however in the mid to late nineties we were viewed as nothing more than a bad joke. Now Irish baseball has been the subject of several large spreads in the national newspapers, we have appeared in slots on major US sports shows and a young independent New York film maker, John Fitzgerald is touring the States with his documentary, the Emerald Diamond. More on that later.

This is about the guys like Gordon Ireland, who had zero baseball experience, came out to the training sessions and turned himself into a slugging first baseman with soft hands and a fierce will to win.

Gordon (left) flexes the guns while Darran (right) holds on for dear life

It’s about Chris Foy, born in the States but working in Ireland he ‘fell’ into Irish baseball and finally got a chance to use his high school skills on a higher level. It is about Brendan Bergerson, in college in the States but with an Irish family background, Brendan is a hard throwing, young lefty who the major league teams are keeping tabs on. The new breed of Irish baseball player.

The future is bright, the right people are running the show and some hard-nosed, talented people are playing for the team. The infusion of youth gives great hopes for the future. The following is how we got there as a team. How we went from Hull, in the UK, to Karlovac in Croatia. How we toured New England and played in Fenway Park and how we went to Germany and Belgium and had scouts from every team watching our every move.

Most of all it’s about the team. The lads.

Enjoy

To read the chapters just use the contents links up to the right of this page. For further information on Irish baseball check these links out.

Links:

• Everything you needed to know about Baseball Ireland
• The 2007 Irish League preview
• The opening weekend review
• Click here for details on how to get to the O'Malley fields at Corcaigh Park.

If you would like to get involved with Baseball Ireland at any level, Adult or Youth, or would like to support the game in Ireland, please refer to this link.

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