City to be home for world baseball hub
Published on July 22, 2009 - 1:19 pm
by Ben Smith
Journal Gazette: Published: January 6, 2008 6:00 a.m.
The game is its numbers, and so Darin Van Tassell brings you an armful, chucks them like lazy batting-practice lobs across the table here in the ASH Centre.
"A little over 40 percent of all players in Major League Baseball are from outside the United States," he'll say, in a Georgia drawl soft as a spring breeze.
And a little later: "Seventy-two percent of Japanese were in front of their television sets watching (the championship game of the 2007 World Baseball Classic)."
And, because it's apropos to all this, too: "Seventy percent of the IOC voting board is European."
Which is why baseball will be gone from the Olympics after Beijing, at least for one cycle, because Europe is the one place in the world where baseball hasn't truly caught on yet. Which is also why all those Japanese wild for baseball (and Cubans and Costa Ricans and Australians and Israelis, too) will need some place to train and get better and feed a game everyone swears is about to go as crazy internationally as basketball did a decade or so ago.
"It's bursting at the seams," Van Tassell says.
Enter the World Baseball Academy. And, odd as it might seem,
enter Fort Wayne. The World Baseball Academy is the brainchild of
Van Tassell, Larry Bryant, Steve Sotir and Caleb Kimmel, and the idea behind it is to unify international player development into a multiweek training session on one site ("One-stop shopping," Sotir calls it). The one site is the ASH Centre in Fort Wayne.
What this means is, very soon, Fort Wayne could be the place to train for every national baseball federation in the world.
So why Fort Wayne, of all places?
The easy answer is that Sotir lives here. He is, after all, the former director of player development for the International Baseball Federation. Oh, and he's the former director of the Olympic Education Training Center. Oh, and he's been the IBAF camp director in no less than 14 nations, from Guam to Germany.
He's also been putting on clinics for international players for 20 years at Georgia Southern University. That's where he met Van Tassell, who was just named director of the Olympic baseball tournament in Beijing. And it's where he met Bryant, who's been the IBAF head coach for five different countries, including the U.S.
Those ties do bind. And so, welcome to Fort Wayne.
"We have the tournament venues established so they can grow," says Kimmel, who owns Between The Lines, the principal local liaison for the World Baseball Academy.
"We have the facilities secured. The last thing we need is a community effort to bring it up to world-class standard."
For that, Kimmel, Van Tassell, Bryant and Sotir spent Friday and Saturday pitching local business and political leaders. Kimmel didn't talk dollars Saturday, but he figured it will take one more quality playing field - the AHS Centre has three - to fill the needs of the WBA.
I don't know how this can be a bad thing, frankly. The more baseball diamonds, the better, that's my basic philosophy. Build enough of them, I figure, and there won't be room enough (or time enough, or inclination enough) to fight the wars mankind always seems to find it necessary to fight.
Fort Wayne as international baseball mecca?
Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But you listen to Van Tassell long enough, and you look at the credentials he and Bryant and Sotir and Kimmel bring to the table, and you combine that with the robust growth of international baseball - the Japanese actually declared a national holiday the day it played for the World Baseball Classic title - and the fact that all that passion needs some way to sustain itself ...
"It's that perfect storm of things coming together," Van Tassell says.
Break out the rain gear, then.