Changes in store for the GB Senior Team?

This should be another exciting year for the Great Britain Senior Men’s baseball team.  They are scheduled to participate in the European Baseball Championships in September, hoping to defend their remarkable second-placed finish in 2007.  However, the management structure of Team GB could be about to undergo a considerable change.  Mister Baseball.com is reporting that General Manager Alan Smith and Head Coach Stephan Rapaglia are set to resign from their posts prior to the upcoming British Baseball Federation Annual General Meeting. 

A lack of funding is once again the driving force behind change within British baseball. 

Smith and Rapaglia are proposing that the Head Coach salary should be eliminated and that part of the money is then redirected more broadly to the European Championship budget.  The British Baseball Federation’s draft Financial Statements show that expenditure on the National Team Coach position accounted for £7,500 in the 2009 calendar year, amounting to 28 per cent of the total BBF expenditure.  Taking away the salary in 2010 would reportedly save £5,000.

MisterBaseball also states that Smith and Rapaglia’s proposal includes an undertaking that 25 per cent of the roster should be British based and that “National team players would have to be required to contribute to the costs for their participation in the EC”.   

The BBF AGM will take place on 28 February at Birmingham City University and an information pack was made available for general download yesterday.  There is plenty on the agenda, not least the consideration of proposed constitutional amendments and 20 ‘Motions to the AGM’, but the National Teams Report under Item 4 seems the likely place where Smith and Rapaglia’s proposal will be raised.  More details about the AGM will be published in the near future at BaseballSoftballUK.com. 

The BBF Board recently invited feedback from interested parties on how it should spend its money and the matter of funding the National Team was one of the main areas mentioned.  A sizeable proportion of the budget has been directed towards the GB set-up in recent years.  In real terms that budget is still much less than is required to compete in the main international tournaments and that has made the team’s success all the more remarkable.  A second-placed European Championship finish in 2007 and a creditable performance in last year’s World Cup amount to achievements that are unparalleled in the history of the Great Britain National Team. 

In terms of National team’s performance, the BBF have received a rich return on their investment, which is of great credit to Smith and Rapaglia.  Still, some within the BBF community are unhappy that funds are directed to the National team when relatively few members of the Team GB roster play in the BBF Leagues.  The two questions that then need to be asked are: what are the overall benefits gained from these international successes and could more be achieved for British baseball by spending the money in another way? 

Successful domestic and international set-ups should go hand-in-hand, but that’s a difficult balancing act to manage in a developing baseball nation, albeit one with a long history, when the overall level of funding is so limited. Following the World Cup campaign, Rapaglia wrote a thoughtful piece about the future of the Great Britain National Team and how this fits in with the domestic set-up.  It’s essential reading, although it doesn’t provide any clear-cut answers because they do not exist. 

Ideally the National team should be largely pooled from the British leagues and it’s clear that Rapaglia and Smith would love to take this route; however the level of competition and number of participants in the domestic scene simply doesn’t allow for this unless you’re prepared to accept fielding a considerably weakened team.  For example, the ‘BBF league’ members of the World Cup roster, including Richard Klijn and Alex Malihoudis, headed off to other European leagues last year prior to the World Cup so that they could prepare for the event by competing at a higher standard of play. 

Allowing the undoubted progress of the National team in recent years to go to waste would be a real shame. The current investment has raised Team GB’s performance immeasurably: a worthy cause in itself and also something that has provided several BBF league players with opportunities (e.g. being part of a World Cup roster) that they would have not received otherwise.

Improving the domestic league is absolutely a key objective for the BBF, but little could be achieved in this regard on the relatively small amount of funding that currently goes to the National Team set-up.  Raising the standard of play in Britain will involve greatly increasing the number of participants and facilities available to use.  Needless to say, an annual sum in the region of £5,000 isn’t going to go far in fulfilling those objectives.  

On a ‘return on investment’ basis, spending the money on the National Team therefore appears more effective.  The reported proposal by Smith and Rapaglia also serves as a decent compromise from the previous position.  Expenditure on the National team from BBF funds would decrease slightly, putting a bit more back into the domestic pot.  Reducing the roster quality through a quota system is never ideal, but setting it at 25 per cent is a workable solution. That should allow us to put together a good team while giving a few more British based players the opportunity to be involved.  The gradual process of improving the standard of British domestic baseball can then go on alongside a National team set-up of decent standing rather than badly compromising one or the other, which is surely in the best interests of all involved.  That said, BBF members obviously have every right to make up their own minds on how the money should best be spent.

We will now have to wait and see whether these proposals are tabled and what reaction they receive from within the BBF.