By John W. Miller
Every time I’ve lost at anything, blundered, been dumped or subject to some slight or misfortune, I’ve thought about a baseball game.
Not just any baseball game, but one that altered my outlook on life and remains, all these years later, my own secret superpower.
History may little note that on July 20, 2004, at Stan Musial Field in Kutno, Poland, Belgium beat the Netherlands, 1-0, in Little League’s under-15 European championships.
That’s the short version of events. The full story is so much richer.
I was the head coach for that Belgium team. My brother Moe, a pitcher and centerfielder. Few baseball games end by a score of 1-0—just one of 50 at the Major League level. That outlandish outcome earned our team of a dozen boys and three coaches free airfare, courtesy of Little League International, to Taylor, Michigan, to play in that year’s under-15 World Series.
Two things made this game mystical and of such enduring potency for me.
One is that I had dreamed of winning a game just like it—pined for it, strived for it—from when I was 12 until the day it finally happened, at 26. What is something you’ve wanted badly for 14 years? A job? A child? A big prize? Imagine not thinking you’ll ever get your wish, and then having it suddenly happen through grit and a whole lot of good fortune.
The second is how the game itself transpired, the sheer utter insanity of it. I will get to that in a second.
The journey started when my parents emigrated from Maryland to Brussels in 1976. About a decade later, on a trip to see uncles in and around Baltimore, I fell in love with baseball, a challenging vocation when you live along a cobblestoned sidewalk, attend school in French, and your family owns no car.
So, I took trams and buses, 90 minutes each way, out to where American expatriates ran baseball leagues on suburban fields in Waterloo, famous for Napoleon’s comeuppance in 1815. Back then, youth baseball was the king of expat extracurriculars, and Brussels had a top-flight Little League program.
I made an All-Star team when I was 12 that traveled to an Air Force base in Germany to compete in the Little League European championship for the right to play in the Little League World Series. We got knocked out by Saudi Arabia, a team fielding sons of oil executives who practiced and perfected their game on their compounds all year-round.
The same thing happened, more or less, when I was 13, 14, and 15. Every summer, the same dream, and a trip to a U.S. military base. Every summer, a second- or third-place finish.
In 1999, I moved back to Brussels after college to begin my career in journalism and—yes—to resurrect the dream of winning a Little League championship, this time as a coach. I have two brothers: Jacob, 10 years younger than me, and Moe, 11 years younger. I helped launch a youth program at a baseball club, the Brussels Kangaroos, and set up summer all-star teams to get another crack at Williamsport and beyond.
Thus began another round of heartache.
When Moe was 12, we reached the championship game of the under-13 division, one game from Williamsport and lost to, of course, Saudi Arabia. When Moe was 13 and Jacob, 14, playing on the same team in the under-15 division, Poland knocked us out.
Then came 2004, when our team of 12 boys, picked from only 13 who tried out, entered the under-15 division. As every summer, we practiced religiously to hone my vision of the game.
Baseball is not a game of trick plays or fancy strategy, or even thundering motivational speeches, but a contest of good habits, persistent effort, competitive focus. You excel by mastering fundamentals like playing catch and throwing strikes. You practice and play games under enough pressure to force improvement, and with enough enjoyment and success to want to do it again the next night, win or lose.
With my two co-coaches Mike and Patrick, both dads, we ran a month of strong practices and prepared for another journey to Poland. This would be my seventh trip to a European Little League championship, my third as a head coach, after four as a player, all of which ended in defeat.
In the round-robin portion of the tournament, we won six and lost only to the Netherlands, the kings of European baseball. We rolled over Italy in the semi-finals, 10-2, to move on to the championship game against, gulp, those very kings, the Dutch.
Directed then by Robert Eenhorn, a former infielder for the New York Yankees who once lost his job to a guy named Derek Jeter, Dutch baseball was, and remains, a juggernaut. In Europe, they are a cut above everybody else, followed by Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic and France. The Netherlands has even beaten Cuba and the Dominican Republic in international play.
The team that year was an all-star group from the brawny port city of Rotterdam. Their boys, the cream of over 50 players who tried out, were larger, faster and stronger than ours. They belonged to a training academy that formed future national teams and players who went on to the pros.
All week, we scouted the Dutch team. We gave our outfielders spray charts to position themselves, a common tactic in pro ball, but not in youth baseball. We forbade our players to touch soda all week, and, on the night before the championship game, did not let them go to the disco party packed with local teenage girls.
I was so nervous I awoke at 5.30 a.m. and walked over to a nearby church to attend mass in Polish. Whatever happens, please give me calm. Deep down, I did not think we could triumph in a winner-take-all-game against a clearly better team with 15 plane tickets and a trip to the World Series on the line.
Now, let me tell you about the game.
I’ve been around a lot of baseball. Starting from age eight until now, I estimate I’ve played in roughly a thousand games, coached around a thousand more, and watched or listened to many times that if you count TV and radio broadcasts. I’ve caught a perfect game. I’ve been in attendance for a Major League no-hitter, and MLB playoff games. This summer, I saw a former player of mine in Brussels, Ryan Burr, pitch for the Chicago White Sox at PNC Park in Pittsburgh.
I’ve never seen a game like Belgium vs. the Netherlands that pristine July afternoon, 2004.
The Dutch starter, a husky righthander, mowed down our hitters. We were simply overmatched. In every inning, we went down 1-2-3. Except in the 4th, when our offense went: bloop single, stolen base on a curveball I correctly predicted, error by the rightfielder on another bloop. Because there were two outs, the runner was off on contact and scored. That was it. In the 5th and 6th, we went down 1-2-3.
In every inning except the 5th and 7th, our opponents put runners on base against Harold, our strike-throwing lefty. Four times, the Dutch had runners in scoring position. And in every one of those innings of risk, the rally somehow died, often miraculously.
In the first: a strikeout of the cleanup hitter with a runner on second.
In the second: a pickoff at second, eliminating another runner from scoring position.
In the third: with runners on second and third and two outs, a spectacular backhand and throw from the hole by our shortstop, nailing the batter at first by inches.
In the fourth: our only runner caught stealing of the tournament, and a diving catch by our backup rightfielder, after he had shifted 15 paces to the right based on our spray chart.
In the sixth: with runners on second and third and one out, our third baseman backhanded a ball down the line and threw out the tying run at the plate,
Overall, the Netherlands put seven runners on compared to our two.
And yet, inning by inning, as the intensity grew more unbearable, the dam did not break, until it exploded when the game ended on a called third strike.
Final score: 1-0.
We all went completely nuts.
I was crying. My brother was crying. The parents were crying. The boys dumped Gatorade on me. I collapsed on the ground and let my body feel the rush of 14 years of yearning fulfilled. As I got up, the tournament organizer handed me an envelope with 15 plane tickets and a World Series schedule. “Your next game is against Canada,” she said.
As if it weren’t ridiculous enough, 45 minutes after the final pitch, a perfect summer day and flawless azure sky erupted into an epic thunderstorm of hail and lightning.
In Michigan, a few weeks later, we won one game, against Canada, and hung in there against some great teams, including a Venezuela squad captained by future big leaguer Freddy Galvis. It was very high-level baseball, and very rewarding. Yes, a-once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But the World Series memories do not fill me with nutty hope and joy or make me think of Advent and Christmas at any time of year, or bring the tears that are once again now building up as I write this, like that game. I look at its scorecard and all the pictures of our ecstatic faces, shake my head in wonder, and thank the baseball gods again for a gift of magic that feels always at my fingertips.
That one game has provided me a well of optimism and enthusiasm I take wherever I go. To this day, it rekindles my trust in perseverance as easily as opening my eyes. Because of it, I know that with persistence, faith and patience, anything can happen, and that from desire can come miracles.
— John W. Miller is a journalist and filmmaker from Brussels, now based in Pittsburgh, who has played, coached and dreamed baseball for four decades.