{"id":421,"date":"2008-05-14T21:20:05","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T20:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=421"},"modified":"2008-06-04T08:40:07","modified_gmt":"2008-06-04T07:40:07","slug":"baseball-in-orange-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=421","title":{"rendered":"Baseball in Orange Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u00c2\u00a0returned yesterday from a long weekend\u00c2\u00a0in\u00c2\u00a0The Netherlands with the Croydon Pirates, and, as promised in my previous post<\/a>, I’m going to share a few more thoughts on baseball in “Orange Country”.<\/p>\n

First up is the Hoofdklasse, the top tier of baseball in The Netherlands. The Dutch Whitsuntide holiday weekend sees the greatest concentration of\u00c2\u00a0games in the season, with 12 taking place across three days.\u00c2\u00a0We took in game one of the three-game series between DOOR Neptunus and Mr. Cocker HCAW, hosted by the latter in Bussum. It wasn’t much of a contest, with Neptunus running out 14-1 winners helped by four home runs (Neptunus went on to get the sweep). But on a warm afternoon with beer and frikandellen (minced-meat hot dogs) on sale, the lopsided score\u00c2\u00a0was not going to stop\u00c2\u00a0us having a good time.<\/p>\n

The strength of\u00c2\u00a0the\u00c2\u00a0Dutch baseball league and national\u00c2\u00a0side is aided by two of the\u00c2\u00a0country’s Latin American outposts, Aruba and Cura\u00c3\u00a7ao -\u00c2\u00a0islands sitting just off the coast of Venzuela, one of the world’s truly great baseball-playing nations. The three players with Major League\u00c2\u00a0Baseball experience who were playing in\u00c2\u00a0Bussum on Saturday – Ivanon Coffie, Eugene Kingsale, and Ralph Milliard – came from one of the two islands.\u00c2\u00a0Kingsale is probably the most famous of these, having been knighted by Queen Beatrix alongside fellow Arubans\u00c2\u00a0Sidney Ponson and Calvin Maduro in 2004.<\/p>\n

The Whitsuntide long weekend is used by some amateur baseball and softball clubs in The Netherlands to host tournaments, and the Pirates were invited to take part in the event hosted by the Zuidvogels club in Huizen. Such is the quality of the Zuidvogels ground, facilities,\u00c2\u00a0and organization,\u00c2\u00a0an American on the Pirates team commented that the set-up for social baseball\u00c2\u00a0in The Netherlands\u00c2\u00a0is probably\u00c2\u00a0superior to that seen in all but a few pockets of his homeland.<\/p>\n

Next year, The Netherlands will host second-round games of the baseball World Cup<\/a> and, based on my experience of watching baseball in the country, I am already thinking about heading back across to take in a\u00c2\u00a0match-up or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u00c2\u00a0returned yesterday from a long weekend\u00c2\u00a0in\u00c2\u00a0The Netherlands with the Croydon Pirates, and, as promised in my previous post, I’m going to share a few more thoughts on baseball in “Orange Country”. First up is the Hoofdklasse, the top tier of baseball in The Netherlands. The Dutch Whitsuntide holiday weekend sees the greatest concentration of\u00c2\u00a0games in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-baseball-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}