A world sport plants local roots in Switzerland

“Base-ball” hits Geneva

David Winch, UN

Spring means baseball in much of the world and, these days, even in Geneva. In an era of mass travel and global culture- mixing, amateur sports are also being thrown into the blender. This produces oddities like cricket tournaments played in Santiago and ice hockey in Bangkok.

But baseball remains an outsider sport in Switzerland. The squads of soccer players trotting out on to Geneva sports fields look on curiously but blankly at the baseball players and their odd gear – hats and bats, gloves and pants.

Baseball may have graduated from demonstration sport at the Olympics to a real competitive event – one so competitive that even the U.S. amateur team could not qualify for the tournament in Athens this summer – but its image remains parochial. It is still vulnerable to the taunts of established global sports like soccer, and quickly emerging ones such as basketball, that it is just an American sport, and this despite its cohorts of followers in East Asia and Latin America. — Next stop, Europe?

Local leagues

Well organized and rooted “little leagues” sprout every spring in Geneva at the Bout du Monde fields in Vessy or at Nyon and elsewhere in Switzerland, particularly Zurich. The biggest of these leagues, the Geneva Baseball league (www.genevabase-ball.ch) brings together almost 300 players each spring in over 20 teams and age groups ranging from 6 to 16.

For UN kids playing in a Little League in New York’s Central Park, moving to a league in the shadow of the Alps it is no longer a big step backwards. Geneva certainly has its unique problems, with spring weather often dumping rain down throughout May, leading even to ducks swimming between first and second bases on uneven, lumpy, converted soccer fields In 2003, baseball was suspended for a week owing to competition from the G-8 summit. Only in Geneva, you say!

American corporate nomads predominate in baseball here, as the children of families transferred to Geneva by Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar and HP try to maintain the summer game in an indifferent Europe. But their numbers also include Japanese teenagers and the children of South American ambassadors, not to mention European kids who picked up a taste for the game during Dad’s transfer years in, say, Boston.

Over the decades, a small contingent of Swiss/French locals has picked up the flame. The Geneva Dragons, for example, take teams of young (12-15) and older teenage francophone players travelling to out-of-the-way fields around Switzerland where diehards and recent converts play.

Unlike basketball and ice hockey, both of which have developed serious, second-tier pro sports networks in French-speaking Europe, baseball is still relegated to the third tier, and is nearly invisible. Even the English vocabulary of baseball is simply borrowed wholesale. The only French- speaking city in the world where baseball has a real commercial presence, Montreal, resolved this problem after 1969, when the city gained a professional baseball team, the Expos. Montrealers soon saw posters in buses and Metro cars upgrading their baseball French (ex.: “Ne dites pas le shortstop. Dites l’arrêt-court. Ne dites pas un walk. Dites un but sur balles.” etc.) The complex rules of le base-ball are all translated into French, as are several histories and training programmes.

What’s the attraction?

So, what is the attraction of a game that seems, to non-fans, to advance at a snail’s pace? For new spectators, it seems involve occasional bursts of action disrupted by long stretches of lethargy.

Baseball looks like a combination of cricket (a batsman and ball, hard pitching, grass fields, and no time clock) with elements of chess and checkers, requiring both strategy and a few simple moves. This combination makes baseball both easy for a 5-year-old, and full of enough challenges to fascinate a Harvard evolutionary biologist and baseball obsessive like Stephen Jay Gould.

Its sports roots are romanticized in American fables around its founding, but it surely grew out of several games using balls and bats; the Renaissance English called a similar sport “rounders”, while Russians point to lapka. In any case, today is both American and determinedly global.

Who’s more global?

Today, baseball fans can point to packed stadiums of 50,000-plus screaming fans at the Tokyo Dome for a recent series versus the New York Yankees. Or the fact that several world leaders boast a baseball background.

One urban legend suggests that, ironically, Fidel Castro began his career trying out to be a Washington Senator. In fact, rather than trying out for the baseball Senators, the farthest Fidel got was pitching for the University of Havana law school team (although he also played for an improvised team of “Barbudos” after
1959). Lester Pearson, Canada’s UN rep in the mid-1950s and Nobel Peace Prize winner for the Suez peacekeeping operation, was also a baseball obsessive, in whose name a Pearson Cup is awarded each summer for the winners of a Montreal-Toronto series.

And of course, one failed Texas businessman leveraged his partial ownership of Dallas’s team, the Texas Rangers, into a run at being Governor of that state. And the rest, as they say, is history …

So, don’t laugh when you consider the future of baseball in Switzerland. Everything started somewhere, and global sports may be the wave of the future. — Play ball!

David Winch (dwinch@unog.ch) is an editor at UN Geneva.