EVERY TOURNEY IS A JOURNEY
The 2025 Euros
They say every baseball season is a marathon. And it is. 162 games. Then playoffs, if you’re lucky. Back and forth across a continent, everyone eventually hypnotized. But if every season is a marathon, every tournament is a spiritual journey. A season packed into a week. A sprint. A flood dose. I have been on many of these trips. Too many to count. This year, to Rotterdam, Holland for the 2025 European Championships. The top sixteen teams in Europe duking it out for supremacy of the Kingdom of European Baseball in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
There were security concerns for the tournament. Holland was the location of the Maccabi Tel Aviv protests turned attacks last year and there had already been petitions circulated by local groups trying to disqualify us and there were protests planned. We moved training-camp to another location and packed gear that did not say “Israel” for practices.
Training camp, an entire spring training squeezed into three days. Signs and systems. 1st and 3rd defense. Bunt defense. Pick plays. All the stuff teams spend too much time on. Stuff that will not dictate the outcome of games as much as pitching, hitting, and defense. It’s like CPR. Most likely you won’t need it, but it’s damn useful when you do. Maybe we should have added CPR to practice plans, considering. More complications. Weather. Three days of rain. Practices moved indoors, or delayed. But we got through camp unidentified in the drizzle. Off to Rotterdam for the tournament, seven games in eight days.
In Rotterdam, we were told we would not be able to leave the hotel. I quickly asked Mitch if he had any books. He did, and handed me a book by a famous real-estate mogul in Chicago that I did not read. Being locked inside wasn’t so bad. A month ago, I took a boat tour of the Hudson River, a 90 minute serpentine loop from a creek in Kingston out onto the big river and back. As we passed a dilapidated light tower, our guide told us the story of the man who used to live and work there. “He spent his whole life in that tower.” Despite traveling too much and doing too much and wanting too much, I secretly am the man in the light tower, or want to be. A single mission, prevent boats from crashing, and maybe a can of beans every once in a while. Simple. And so, for a week, I got to be the man in the light tower, a single mission, win the European Championships, or at least win a game and then see what happens. The baseball life, preparing for the game, playing the game, talking about the game. The only thing that mattered was the immediate future, then, only the present, and then, for a short time after, only the immediate past, a small mountain of paperwork from the day turned to scrap as soon as the last pitch was thrown, the self-contained universe of baseball in the self-contained universe of a hotel.
Nighttime, chill, eat, send out the schedule for tomorrow, meet with the staff, watch video. Morning, wake up before everyone else, get breakfast in the same restaurant where you will eat three meals a day for the next week. Say hi to the staff. Eat the same thing each morning. You may never have a better chance to satisfy your wildest compulsions, and maybe a can of beans every once in a while. Go back to the room to fill out the lineup cards and change. Pre game shower. Make sure charts, pens, stopwatch are in their rightful pockets in the backpack. Put on your “Bring Them Home” necklace over your undershirt but under your sweatshirt. Put on your jacket so no one sees “Israel Baseball” on the way to the stadium. Go to the conference room for scouting reports from Jacobs. Hitters’ meeting. Pitchers’ meeting. Leave for the field. Which exit are we using today? Vans or no vans? Security says it’s okay to go. Get into the dugout. Take off the jacket. Post the lineup. 15 minutes ‘til stretch. Barry makes his daily speech that he printed at the front desk. 15 minutes ‘til cage. Throw group 1. Mitch flips to group 2. Holtzy throws group 3. Change. Eat something. Have a few sips of a Monster. What is in those things? They’re gross, but they get you going. Ceremonies. Home plate meeting. First pitch.
Every pitch is a dagger. A jab. Every pitch matters. The games on the other field look like pickup games and ours feel like wars. We suck. We’re not ready for this. I did not prepare the team or myself well enough for this. I am getting fired. Get the lead. Hang on. We are the best. I am a master of this. I can control the game if I just find the right place to stand in the dugout and stay still and don’t say anything. Is there a sniper on the roof over there? We win. Or we lose. Talk to the guys that need talking to. Get back to the hotel. Stare at something. Sit with the staff. How did we lose? Was that guy on the bench in the park just a guy on the bench in the park? Were they staring because they hate us or because they felt bad for us, locked in the hotel? The obvious analogy, considering where we were, was Anne Frank. But it’s a bad one. She would have loved our circumstances, surrounded by security, ordering whatever she wanted off a mediocre menu each night.
There were protests. We heard them faintly outside the stadium and saw some red smoke. One guy broke through and ran on the field and poured fake blood on the mound. Once he got on the field, confronted with the moment he had no doubt anticipated, he didn’t really know what to do. The imaginary Jews he had in his head were worse than the real ones staring at him from the dugout, and he slowly lost his energy running around the infield unsure of where to go or what to do. He stopped and sat at short stop alone before an awkward half-hearted tug of war with a Palestinian flag between him and an equally fatigued groundskeeper who had been chasing him. He exited, exhausted, breathless saying, “Hamas will get you. Hamas will get you.” But that was the worst of it.
More baseball. More protests. More meals at the hotel. Life in the light tower. Beat France. Lose to Great Britain. Lose to Holland. In that order. The political backdrop of the matchups are so obvious and the details so absurd that they mostly go unmentioned — Israel vs Great Britain, a country that granted the other statehood 75 years earlier playing a foreign game in a foreign country while people outside protest a foreign war not realizing both rosters are made up mostly of Americans from California, Georgia, New York, Ohio, shipped to Holland for the week, a country with its own complicated history whose roster is made up of guys from Curacao and Aruba. Beat Swiss. Lose to Czech by one. Lose to Germany also by one, damnit. Beat Croatia (a roster of guys from Venezuela, somehow). Done. Three and four. 7th place of 16. Should have won the Czech game and made it to the semis, but also, they deserved it, a roster of guys from… the Czech Republic. Good for them.
And so it’s out of the light tower and back into the light, real life, try not to crash the boat. No dinner tonight in the dining room. No scouting reports. No game tomorrow. And no security. No security! Was that guy on the bench in the park just a guy on the bench in the park?
Thank you to our security detail, staff, and players. I would gladly be locked in a hotel with you anytime
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