The Great Game is More Than America's Pastime - Baseball In Germany Update

First post for a couple of weeks. We have been busy back to to school and our routine. Although the routine has changed in the evenings. We are happily spending our time trying to get a feel for home playing baseball, at least something resembling it. David's team practices outdoors on Tuesdays Thursdays and Fridays with games mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. I was talked into joining the adult softball team by some other parents. My practices are Mondays and Thursdays with games on Mondays too. Little Miss Katherine has decided she wants in on the action. She proactively asked if she could join the tossball team and has started practices on Tuesdays and Fridays at the same time as David. In other words, you can find us at the ballpark each evening if you are looking for us.

First I wanted to try and describe some of the detail of the baseball happenings. It is really interesting in some ways, sad in others, and even a little inspiring. The organization that we are a part of is the Garching Atomics. Trying to figure out the town itself is confusing. The city is known as "Garching bei Munchen" and is located just north of Munich near the famous Allianz Arena where Bayern Munchen plays soccer. All of the street signs for this town say "Garching Hochbruck", including the large park and ride area for the public transportation system. Hochbruck is a district within Garching that is mostly the commercial and industrial area of the city. It is very close by to our home in southern Unterschleissheim. It only takes ten to fifteen minutes to get to the field.

The organization is run by some great people from what I have seen. It is made up if an adult men's "professional" league, men 2 team, youth team (over 12), Schuler LP (school age live pitch, David's team), Schuler TB (tossball, Katherine's team), and the Isotopes BBQ softball team. I really don't yet understand how they are funded to get equipment and other stuff to run the organization. The membership fees to play are minimal. All three of us are registered for a year for less than what one season of soccer or baseball costs for one of the kids back home in Texas. When you register they give you a cap, a jersey, and you have additional insurance coverage if you are injured. They have a web site and recently added a mobile app.

There is only one field to support all of these teams. This is the practice field and the game field. When it is game time they roll out an orange construction fence and hammer rebar stakes into the ground to support it. At the end of each game the fence is rolled up and put away. Most of the practice times overlap with other teams and they take turns with the actual field and use the outfield area or batting cage otherwise. At the end of each day the players shed the gloves and grab the rake to fix up the dirt around the bases. They ensure all of the equipment is neatly tucked away before leaving. David is still getting used to having to pick up and help with the field after practice. I love that part of it, seeing the effort these people put in just to have a place to play. They make it work and in some ways it is good that there is only one field. You can always find someone to play with, the equipment is stored on site, and they can share a lot of it between teams. It is pretty clear that baseball is still the odd step child once you get outside of the organization. The field is located in the corner of a large soccer complex. See below, look at the transition from the weed infested field to the pristine grass turf.

I wish I had taken this picture a week earlier. The baseball area was covered in dandelions and sunflower weeds while the soccer fields are perfect. At this point it had been mowed down. Can you believe they just ignore this section of the same open field? I know that soccer is king in Europe, and especially in the shadow of the arena for the mighty Bayern Munchen team, but come on. They not only ignore it for weed treatment, they also will not mow it. It is up to the organization to maintain the field, even though the city owns the land. When they first got the piece of land they hand dug all of the dirt areas around home plate and the other bases. This is not good ground either. There are layers upon layers of rocks just under the surface. The infield and outfield are uneven and the ball never takes a true bounce. (I am not complaining, just trying to paint a picture) This baseball field is used every single day with multiple teams while the fifteen soccer fields go mostly unused. Well, all of this was going to change soon........was.

The men's team has won the Bavaria Championship two years in a row. We have not made it to a game this season, but we plan to catch a few of them. Bavaria covers a very large area and there are quite a few teams, so the championship is kind of a big deal. I have met many of the players and thrown with some of them. They are a bunch of mostly young guys and some of them look like they can really play. After winning it all last year the team was being rewarded by city funding for a new field. All that I heard about during the indoor season and up until a few days ago was the new field. It was going to have a permanent wall, actual stands for fans, warning track, etc. It sounds like a 1000% improvement over the current field. The plans were drawn up and they actually broke ground. Than, earlier this year a new mayor was elected. The new mayor has shut everything down and said there is no funding available for the project. Another parent that I have talked to quite a bit is very involved in this process. He had all of the plans and happens to live next door to the new mayor. He has been scheduling appointments and trying to get answers as to why previous funding, that has already been appropriated, is now no longer available. I guess updates will come later. The soccer folks want to take over the baseball part of the existing area, and for now they have no place to go.

Part of the inspiration I get from being out there every day with the kids is seeing these guys that really love the game. There are a few that I see at the ball park every single time I am there. Even if it is not an official practice with their team they are there. A lot of times they will just join into practice of another team that is there, the young kids, the softball team, whoever. They just want to participate and get better. One guy in particular I think lives there. He is in his early twenties and just looks like a baseball player. I was amazed when he told me he only just started a few months ago and has only played three games with the men's 2 team. He was trying to talk me into playing on that team. First of all, with my vision I don't think I could see a fastball, much less hit it, or even more important get out of the way in time if it is coming at me. I told him I was right in my sweet spot with softball and teammates that are either my age or have little to no talent or experience. He shared with me that his team has close to twenty players on game days. That means half of the team is sitting out waiting to be substituted. I asked him why they don't form a men's 3 team, he was not sure. I would guess it has to do with resources, lack of fields, etc. Kind of sad that they are in this situation when so many people want to play.

Schuler LP is David's team. They played their first game a couple of weeks ago. As I said in an earlier post, the coach is great. I have met all of the coaches for the various teams, and David is lucky to be on this team. He is by far the best coach I have seen. He knows the game and knows how to teach it. David will do good to be coached by him for the next few seasons. The first game was a travel game. One fun aspect here is not playing at the same complex all of the time. We have home games on our practice/game field, they set up tables, cook out, and serve beer. For away games we meet at our field, and if a parent cannot make the trip their kid rides in another car. On this morning it was cold and damp. A couple of the moms were talking about a shopping center near the baseball field. They asked Cindy and Katherine to go, Cindy said she did not want to miss the game. We all understood that the shopping was before the game and they would be there for it. We split up into different cars, I took David to the game. It was a forty five minute drive to get to Eisendorf Scorpion field, um soccer field that is.

This is the outfield wall. I guess they do not have enough orange construction fence to make it around. The white line is the out of bounds line for the soccer field and also the foul line for the first base line. If you hit a foul ball over the temporary backstop it probably rolled passed the electric fence in the cow pasture behind.

Even after the drive we still had over an hour before first pitch. I am not sure why we go so early, but I got a good picture at least. Around game time Cindy figured out that we had both misunderstood the plan of the other mom. She was there to shop and was not coming to the game anytime soon. In the end this turned out okay I think. It was cold and windy and this was not a good team, it was a newly formed team. This is pretty much how the day went.

Four balls in a row to each batter, above hitting the ground before the plate, below two feet over David's head.

Get to first base and wait for the next pitch.

Steal second and most of the time third base too, in one pitch.

Make it home of the next pitch that was either a pass ball or wild pitch. 

This happened batter after batter on our team. They did have a ten batter per inning rule, which was the only way we ever stopped batting. Two kids from the other team left during the game. I was told that the reason for leaving was that they were too cold. The other team only put the ball in play one time, otherwise 12 strike outs in four innings, final score 25-0. That was after taking it easy and not stealing for the last two innings. Cindy and Katherine did not intend on missing the game, but if it was going to happen, this one was the one. They did not have to endure the cold or extreme boredom.

A cleverly disguised action shot of David, is actually him tossing the warm up ball back to the bench for the inning to start.

We had a double header planned last Sunday, but we got rained out. We are going to give it another try this Saturday with another two games scheduled. David is doing really well. He is going to be first base and pitcher and yesterday after his batting practice the coach was talking about using him as the lead-off hitter.

So the tossball team is a little bit weird. Toss ball just means the coach tosses the ball up next to the batter and they hit it, instead of tee ball. The kids in this group range from 5 to 11. I think you are allowed to play tossball as long as you want to up until 11 if you don't want to play live pitch. The tossball team uses some of the younger live pitch players on game days since they do not have enough players. This is a little concerning to have Katherine out there as a beginner playing with kids that have much more ability to throw and catch. The better players are placed in the outfield and bat last to allow the younger kids to play more.

Katherine had a rough first practice not paying attention and messing around.

She did better this week and is starting to learn a few things. This coach does not speak English very well, but does a good job helping Katherine. Not quite proficient at throwing and catching; she can at least hit the ball for now. She is having fun so far and enjoying it.

My team has a sixteen year old girl that is one of the better players. She used to play on the Schuler LP team before quitting a couple of seasons ago. There is a twenty something guy that thinks he is a hot shot. David's coach used to coach him. He told me he is lazy and needs attention. Another guy has a big old beer belly and does not seem to own a shirt that is long enough to cover it when he raises his glove or throws a ball. There are a couple of other younger girls and a mom from one of David's teammates. In fact there are four or five parents from David's team that play. On Thursdays the boys finish practice and play together while we are having our practice. A couple of men that are older than me just show up for the games. It is a very casual for fun only team. They are not very good and they don't really care either. Some of them are drinking a beer while warming up for practice, it is called the BBQ league after all. It is as funny as it sounds. I am enjoying getting back into it a little, even though my body is sore all of the time now.  

Some of you probably saw that we did some family pictures and posted to Facebook. These fields of Rapseed flowers are beautiful in the rolling hills around here. 

No trips for a few more weeks. I will try to get another post up in a week or so.