Tentative Conclusions

My blog description promises culture AND curveballs and I realize that I have been slacking on the latter in favor of descriptions of over-abundant aviary populations and apologetic bicyclists. So, for those of you curious about the state of baseball in Holland, these are some of the tentative conclusions I’ve discovered in my interviews and observation this month.

Firstly, I must address, the most difficult of my project - since August – has been truly defining what “amateur” refers to.  In the US it is easy to point to a professional baseball player and say “he is a professional,” noting a semi-pro ballplayer is a bit more difficult and non-descript, but for the most part any team in independent ball is probably a good barometer of that, but as for amateur, the boundaries are not as clearly defined.  You have the Cape Cod League with collegiate athletes who are amateurs in the sense that they have not yet turned pro, and you have the Cranberry League where you have amateurs in the sense that they have given up on ambitions of becoming pro, but are good enough to still compete.  Furthermore there is beer league softball which can be even more informal and unstructured than any other level (hoping to find one of those in Boston this summer, for my own amusement)

In Holland, however –

Sidebar:  My project is now between Holland and New England, not the US and Netherlands.  There is a difference.  Holland is in the Netherlands and made up of Noord (North) and Zuid (South) Holland which are only two provinces out of the twelve that make up the Netherlands.  Because the most famous towns and cities (The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, etc) are in Holland, most people refer to The Netherlands as synonymous with Holland, such as today’s article about a 7 foot Dutch pitcher from Oss, The Netherlands.  Oss is not “South Holland,” it’s in North Brabant, which is in the southern part of The Netherlands.  Sure, ask someone from Holland and they will have no problem agreeing that The Netherlands and Holland are the same, but ask someone from one of the other ten provinces and it can get pretty animated and impassioned.  Because I have interviews from Holland natives and will only get interviews from teams in New England, I will be narrowing my focus in this way.

-- teams are a bit more difficult to categorize.  EVERY team is amateur and every level is within the same club.  Take for example, the Amsterdam Pirates.  They have teams set up by age group with teams that are the equivalent of little league, babe ruth, pony, legion, and Cape-Cod-League-amateur.  It’s like a perpetual AAU team and when you get to a level that isn’t quite good enough to be head-class, they have satellite programs which are much like the regular amateur leagues in the US.

 Because this is so difficult to differentiate, and really it seemed as though I should be comparing the latter group – the satellite program – with teams in the US exclusively, I have made the executive decision to focus on all players encompassed within my Project Plan.  I went back into the work I’ve done the past nine months and looked at what I had planned to do and how I defined that.  My definition of amateur is any player, paid or unpaid, who plays baseball while simultaneously maintaining another job.  Here that is everyone, even at the national level (which is awesome because they practice in Amsterdam and so I don’t have to track them down haha) while in Boston, players in the CCL most likely have host families for the summer so the only after-work game would be in the Cranberry and Park Leagues, etc. 

So far while being here, I’ve noticed that baseball seems to benefit from being a minority sport. Almost all of the players I have interviewed point to soccer as being too competitive and too intense, to the point that it is un-enjoyable.  This is not to say that none of them LIKE soccer (though some have admitted that they hate it), more so that there is too much pressure to perform because everyone is trying to go pro with it and so if they do play, they prefer a pickup game with friends.  Others, say that they hate soccer because it is too simple, there isn’t the strategy and thought that baseball provides (see, I knew it wasn’t just me).  Most plan on playing until work or family knocks them out of the game.  There isn’t the “this IS my relaxation time” mentality that I have found with baseball in the states.  Rather, people often say that baseball is time-consuming; taking up weekends and time after work.  The sport here is an afterthought, they enjoy playing it and it's social, but they would rather socialize with their teammates by going out for a beer the night before (or sometimes right before) the game.

When it comes to drinking, even the practice facility has a bar.  It’s like a VFW of sorts where people come to watch practices or socialize after them.  I’ve even conducted an interview in this manner more than once.  It makes the interviews themselves more social and informal and has led to conversations rather than interviews.  This is often where parents spend their time during practices, grabbing a beer or tea and walking into the warm room to socialize and watch.  As far as why people play baseball, my main finding is that it IS a much more relaxed outlet for friendly competition.  Friendly, here, is the most important word.  If someone messes up, it’s not a problem, nor is it held against them, it just happened and the game continues.  People are inherently competitive, but not necessarily intensely competitive.  It wouldn’t be a game without competition, but the adage rings true here: it’s just a game.