Reading between the lines
Baseball European Championship - Day 4: a break in the action to contemplate on the trip and baseball action, so far, in the Czech Republic
Turns out my addiction to books and reading translates well to Eastern countries, after all.
For the past four days, if I wasn’t at the park to watch a ball game, I was reading a book between long stretches of walking the streets of Prague, Brno and now Ostrava.
Correct that: I’ve finished two books and needed to find physical copies of two titles I wanted to explore. “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius a classic and master-piece, but I’ve never read it front-to-back. “The Art of Thinking Clearly”, by Rolf Dobelli, intrigued me, but so far I’m lukewarm on the quality of his insights, although for someone who likes short chapters and doesn’t indulge in social and cognitive psychology as much as I do, it’s an easy, rewarding investment of your time.
A lot more word-porn and walking are in store for me today as the tournament takes a break and returns Thursday for the quarterfinals and I finally settle at the 10-Z Bunker hostel in Brno for the rest of my trip.
The title of this article also offers a nice metaphor to what we’ve learned so far in the 2023 Baseball European Championship and what we can expect, now that the round-robin part of the tournament has ended and the picture becomes clearer.
As always, two sections await you below: baseball and my latest travel journal.
Baseball
After three days of competition, here are the standings:
Spain, Great Britain, Netherlands and Germany are undefeated and while no big surprises, Germany’s goal was to return to the Top 8 and make a run for the medals. They certainly have delivered.
Sweden delivered a blow to Italy on Monday and the Italians lost again last night, 11-10, in a great baseball game against Great Britain. It was a thriller until the end and Chris Knoblock, the GB PR guy and broadcaster, mentioned that it was “just an incredible game. Never had four hours of baseball be so much fun”.
Sweden’s right-handed pitcher, Oskar Syrén, deserves a lot of credit for taking the ball in all three games. He pitched in relief for the first two games and then started last night, going strong for six innings and ten punch outs, allowing no walks and only five hits. A gamer through and through!
I asked him though direct messages on Instagram:
“How does the arm feel? Do you think you’ll be available on Thursday?”
“Arms good. I’ll be ready if coach wants me in the game tomorrow. I’ll take every chance I get to keep competing.”
He’s a man. I’m a boy.
Here are the matchups on Thursday:
Another night in Ostrava, short walk and training session very early Thursday and then I take the road back West to settle in Brno and take on two games: Austria vs Switzerland at 10 am and the anticipated Czechia vs Great Britain matchup.
Those two last teams come into this game on very different momentum, with the Czechs handed a very difficult 9-0 defeat from Spain at home. The Spaniards are stroooong, man. They are relentless with the bats and can execute on the mound.
As far as the pitching goes in the tournament, many teams can claim strong arms and performances, but when you look at the leaderboards for hitting, the Netherlands, Spain and Great Britain are just assaulting their opponents.
Travel journal
Seems like an eternity since I last updated the journal. A lot of little things I experienced and noticed, so I propose to do a laundry list of all those instead of trying to wrap it all around a long and endless text. Go!
My first content for Baseball Jobs Overseas has been filmed and already it’s being published, little by little, on their platforms. Truly an honor to contribute to this amazing platform of international baseball craftsmen!
Traveling on the highways of Czech Republic? The limit is 110, but most vehicles are going way faster. One car, while I was going 120, passed me on the left at over 200 km/h, no doubt. My small rental car shook!
I stopped for a trip at a restroom in a sideroad stop on the highway and an interesting feature at that one (and likely most of then others) is that you have to pay 15 Czech Koruna to enter. That’s about 0.75 CAD, which makes sense if you make your restrooms available to any traveler.
I quite enjoyed my short time in Brno, a much smaller version of Prague and offering the same awesome (!!!) architecture. I’ll be reading a bit more about its history and that’s something that’s missing during my travel: my usual visits of museums. Baseball, writing, research and press duties are consuming a lot of time I normally reserve for more culturally diverse endeavors. That being said, I’ve been able to soak up day-to-day lives of the Czechs through various and numerous discussions and I’m a better human being for this.
There was no expectation about their friendliness coming here, although I had an image of them being a bit cold or reserved and that’s understandable when you consider their struggles through history. I will say, however, and those are only MY experiences on a small scale: the customer service in restaurants has been nothing less than atrocious. I quit four places before ordering because I seemed to make them vomit at first sight (well, maybe they have a point…), but other then the SUBLIME courtesy of Christian at Cafe Placzek (their breakfasts are… just… wow), I’ m still baffled why those people I met work with other human beings in the public sphere.
The weather has been nothing short of perfect everywhere I’ve gone, a nice development coming from Quebec City, Canada, where the weather in the last two weeks has been cloudy and grey, which is no good for our health and mood.
Hostels on the road are like playing Russian roulette: you usually find what you’re looking for for the price you pay, which is very cheap. Other times you wonder why they bothered opening at all, with facilities that are completely non-functional or filthy beyond logic. That said, my life has been taking a very interesting turn for the past 12-18 months and I find the simplicity of having a bed, shower and desk to be an eye-opener. When you think about it, that’s really all you need and more than a lot of people get to have in many regions of the world. It brings you back to the essential and I’ll be writing about it in a future edition of the Baseball Beacon Project.
I lost my passport for about 12 hours during the night of Monday to Tuesday. While it was a sad development, I pride myself on keeping my cool throughout this ordeal. Only a few months ago, it would have consumed me to the bone, not helping the situation and ruining a perfectly good trip.
This is a very cool experience to be surrounded by a language and customs you don’t understand, but very much want to know more about. People are attracted by this curiosity and I cherish every interaction I’ve had so far.
The Baseball Beacon Project allows me a place to put a spotlight on my past shortcomings and the incredible progress I’ve made and continue to build on. If you had told me, one year ago, that my daily mindset would be what it is today, I’d have told you that’s impossible.
Well, I did it, but the journey has just begun and that’s the most exciting part.
