Baseball alum continues career overseas

Former Columbia second baseman Henry Perkins knew the following things about Namur, Belgium, before he decided to move there.

Namur is a small, quiet European town. Not at all like Paris or London or even Brussels, the capital that sits 30 miles to the north.

Namur is a typical European town: “Old city on a river, fort at the top of the hill, that sort of thing,” Perkins said.

Namur is the capital of Wallonia, the French-speaking zone of Belgium.

And that was it.

But the small Belgian town, sitting at the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse rivers and boasting a population just north of 100,000, did have one thing that Perkins knew very well: baseball. So Perkins, only a few months removed from his first and only Ivy League championship at Columbia, traded in his blue-and-gray Lions uniform for the yellow-and-black attire of the Namur Angels. The reigning Ivy League Player of the Year took his game across the ocean to one of the most baseball-poor countries in the world.

It all started with an out-of-the-blue e-mail from the small Belgian town that Henry Perkins knew nothing about.

The first record of baseball in Belgium, according to Josh Chetwynd’s book Baseball in Europe: A Country by Country History, dates from 1889, about 20 years after the first professional baseball team came together in the U.S. The sport attracted the national interest after World War I brought American soldiers to the continent, so much so that the New York Times wondered in 1919 if baseball could become the new pastime of Belgium, France, and Holland. But despite baseball’s sustained popularity in Belgium through the interwar period, World War II proved a decisive blow to building a top-notch professional league there.

Today, as Major League Baseball looks to expand its presence in Europe, Belgian baseball lags considerably behind the relative powerhouse of the continent: the Netherlands. The Dutch already scored the biggest coup of any European country in the history of baseball, upsetting the Dominican Republic in the first round of the World Baseball Classic last March. But Belgium is far from replicating its northern neighbor’s success.

Nonetheless, an eight-team professional baseball league does exist in Belgium, organized under the Royal Belgian Federation of Baseball and Softball (FRBBS). Like the National and American Leagues in the U.S., Belgium has two regional associations in Wallonia and Flanders. But of the eight teams in the top division, only the Namur Angels come from the Wallonian Francophone Belgian Baseball and Softball League (LFBBS). The other seven are based in and around Antwerp and Brussels, both part of the Flemish Baseball and Softball League (VBSL).

The Belgian professional season lasts from April until September with a preseason in March, although the poor weather in northern Europe makes it almost impossible to play in the early spring. Teams practice twice a week and play only twice a week, with both games set during the weekend. The rest of a player’s time is spent lounging about, doing odd jobs for the club, or traveling through Europe.

Club names are a motley mix of American inspirations, such as the Angels and Braves, and other, more esoteric creations. Teams such as the Brussels Kangaroos and the Koninklijke Borgerhout Squirrels square off every weekend, rosters comprised mostly of local players and the occasional Dutch transplant.

But the odd Americans do crop up on rosters. Each team usually has a couple, either fresh out of college or washed out of independent or semi-pro leagues back home. Brought over on work visas, most leave for better opportunities elsewhere after a season.

Without fail, these wayward Americans dominate their Belgian competition. Joel McKeon, a former Chicago White Sox prospect who came to Belgium after a deal with an Italian team fell apart, was one of those players. In three years as a starter with the Brasschaat Braves, he never lost a game. Tom Magrann, a career minor leaguer with 10 big-league at bats to his name, won the Belgian triple crown in his only year with Brasschaat, hitting .605 with 18 home runs in 15 games.

Far fewer players make the trip in the opposite direction. The closest a Belgian has come to MLB was last season, when an 18-year-old catcher named Thomas De Wolf signed a minor-league contract with the New York Mets. De Wolf was the first Belgian ever to receive a professional contract in the U.S. He has apparently not played a single game for any team in the Mets organization.

Namur is something of a success story in Belgium. Only 20 years old as a franchise, the Angels jumped from Division 3 to Division 1 in just six years. For a region of the country that has had organized baseball for only 21 years, reaching the level of the more-established Flemish teams was considered a tremendous accomplishment.

Christophe Dassy, current manager of the Angels, joined Namur in 1991 as a 17-year-old. He started out with their youth team after he returned from a school trip to the U.S. with a wooden bat and a baseball. Eventually funneled up to the senior squad, he was a member of the first Namur side to take part in Division 1 competition in 1995. He remembers all too well how that went.

“We got destroyed most times but almost managed to stay, losing the decisive game in front of the whole Antwerp baseball population, who were hard on us,” Dassy wrote in an e-mail. “I will never forget that.”

Shuttling back and forth between Divisions 1 and 2 for the next decade, Namur finally seems entrenched in Division 1 after a string of top-six finishes. Competition within the Belgian top league, however, remains decidedly favored toward the Flemish teams.

“Due to their location, Antwerp ball clubs often bring over some Dutch players,” Dassy said. “The level in the Netherlands is higher and they can get good players at a discounted price. In Namur, we have mostly local guys but we also have a Dutch Antillean player and we bring two U.S. players every year. We wouldn’t survive at this level without that help.”

“Not yet, at least,” he added.

Like so many other recent college graduates, Henry Perkins was not immune to the financial collapse in the fall of 2008. A senior from Skaneateles, N.Y., he finished his four years at Columbia with a political science major and an Ivy League championship in baseball, and as the 2008 Ivy League Player of the Year—only the second player to win the award in Columbia history. He landed a job with Tellutt Prebon, a brokerage firm, and started training for a career in finance. His baseball days were behind him.

But by December, Perkins was unemployed. His initial thought was to begin the job search again in earnest. But an e-mail forwarded to him by Columbia baseball head coach Brett Boretti two weeks later changed that. It was the message that led to his acquaintance with Chris Dassy and the Namur Angels.

“I didn’t reach out to him at all,” Perkins said. “It’s something that came to me.”

For the most part, players who want to continue their careers overseas have to do most of the legwork in order to get noticed. Mister-baseball.com, for instance, is a Web site with a message board on which players can advertise themselves to teams looking for foreign players.

Teams then scout the boards and contact the most promising prospects.

“My approach is a little more complicated,” Dassy said. “I do it myself.”

As Dassy explained it, he only looks at recent college graduates, “guys who are borderline pros but didn’t get a good shot at it.” The reasoning for this is mostly economical—“I can’t afford pro guys,” he said. Once he’s targeted some players using statistics found online, Dassy e-mails their former coaches to get an assurance of the player’s character and to set up a direct correspondence with the player.

Usually, Dassy aims for Division III players, preferably from schools with good academics. But last season, he brought in an American shortstop from a decidedly different background. His name was Morgan Brown, and like Henry Perkins, he was an Ivy League graduate.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Brown ended up in Belgium. A walk-on to the Harvard baseball team his freshman year, Brown came from a small public high school in New Hampshire that did not encourage any baseball attention from large colleges. Brown had wanted to play coming out of school, but no coaching staff was interested, including Harvard. When he eventually approached head coach Joe Walsh, however, he was allowed to try out.

Over his four years in Cambridge, Mass., Brown experienced his fair share of successes and disappointments. He pitched at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, during a Beanpot tournament game against the University of Massachusetts. His sophomore year, he was named the starting shortstop for the Crimson.

That same year, he dislocated his shoulder in his second at bat of the season, tearing his labrum. Months later, things got worse. An inadvertent ball to the face in a New England Collegiate Baseball League game broke his left eye socket and nose and ruptured an artery in his face.

“It ultimately required three surgeries and countless trips to the emergency room over two weeks finally to stop the bleeding and re-model my nose and eye area to allow me to breathe freely and to see again out of my left eye,” Brown wrote in an e-mail.

The injuries Brown suffered, along with a developing interest in seeing the world, brought his dreams of pursuing professional baseball to an end. Instead, he took a year after graduation to go to India where he worked in the slums, helping out with an HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment program. On his return, Brown applied for the Rhodes Scholarship and made it to the national finalist level before being turned down.

But baseball had not left Brown’s mind during his time abroad. He still thought about the pre-draft workout for the Mets that he took part in at Shea Stadium, just one day before his Harvard commencement, and his stint in a Canadian independent league the summer before he left for India.

“I eventually decided to try to play baseball again, but I knew after taking a year off it would be difficult to get signed by a U.S. independent team or to get tryouts for MLB teams,” Brown said. “So I tried to work myself back into shape and I Google-searched for international baseball teams looking for players.”

Namur was the first team to respond. According to Brown, it took them less than three minutes. Brown agreed to join the team on the condition that he could play a few games there and then return to the U.S. to join an American team. But a quadriceps injury caused him to miss the preseason, and so he stayed in Belgium for the entire season.

Returning to top playing form was not easy. Brown had never been to Belgium and spoke no French. He had not played baseball in almost two years. On top of that, Namur’s home field was almost unusable for practice because of weather conditions during the first month.
“I felt perpetually rusty,” he said.

He still led the team in batting average, hits, home runs, runs batted in, and just about every other offensive category in his first and only season with the Angels.

“Compared to Division I and the Ivy League, it [the competition level in Belgium] is certainly well behind,” Brown said. “There are a few quality players to be sure, but there is not the depth to make them competitive over an extended competition.”

While he was in Belgium, Brown, along with other expatriates, would occasionally scrimmage with the Belgian national team. The team of foreigners, cobbled together with former collegiate Division III players and the occasional military personnel from a nearby NATO base, never lost a game to the cream of Belgium’s baseball crop.

With Dassy’s offer in hand, Perkins continued to debate his future. He talked to his parents and to Boretti, to his friends and other players who had gone overseas, Brown included. But in his mind, Perkins could not shake the feeling that he wanted to pick up a bat and glove at least once more.

“It was especially hard for me after having come off such a successful season individually and being named the Ivy League Player of the Year to have it all stop there,” Perkins said.

So in January, Perkins agreed to join the Angels. His contract was modest: a 400-Euro monthly stipend, although the team covered housing and food expenses, as well as travel to and from the U.S. In addition to joining the Angels as the starting shortstop and occasional relief pitcher, Perkins would also work maintenance on the field, along with a job as an instructor for the Angels’ youth players.

From the very start, however, Dassy told Perkins not to harbor illusions about being a professional baseball player in Belgium.

“He said, ‘A lot of American players that we talk to think this is going to be some sort of guaranteed springboard to furthering a professional career and something that will get you noticed,’” Perkins remembered. “He made it very clear that that’s probably not going to be the case.”

Four games into the 2009 season, Namur is 3-1, and tied for first place. That includes a win over the Port of Antwerp Royal Greys, who have won four straight Belgian league titles. In the victory, Perkins collected two hits and the game’s lone run batted in. Zachary Potter, a fellow former collegiate player, struck out eight for the Angels in a four-hit shutout.

So far, Perkins has enjoyed his time across the Atlantic. In an e-mail sent after a weekend sweep of Borgerhout, Perkins wrote that he had found everyone in Namur accommodating and friendly. His teammates have been eager to talk baseball with someone from the U.S. A number of them keep tabs on MLB games online, although public coverage of baseball in Belgium remains low. Perkins has even been able to take part in international tournaments, including one in the Netherlands against members of the Dutch WBC team that shocked the world in March.

Perkins is scheduled to play in Belgium until the end of June, at which point his visa will expire and he will have to leave the country. Then Perkins will have to decide where to go next—come home and hang up his spikes or continue to cross the globe for another opportunity.

“I’d love to be able to build something out of it,” Perkins said in March before leaving for Belgium. “But I don’t have all my eggs in one basket. Like I said, I was looking for a job before I became interested in doing this baseball thing and I’m still looking for a job for when I come back to the United States if I need it.”

Morgan Brown continued playing professionally after his time with Namur ended, heading to Australia. He is now back in the U.S. and, in an e-mail sent earlier this month, said that he had been invited to spring training with an unnamed Can-Am League team. His name does not currently appear on any Can-Am League roster.

Reflecting back on his time in Belgium, Brown mentioned the conflict between his expectations and the outcomes.

“I went with the wrong idea of what I was getting into,” Brown said of Namur. “Clearly it was not a way to prepare to play professional baseball later in the summer. The expectation should be geared more towards trying to enjoy what baseball is played and especially finding something meaningful to do in the massive time away from baseball.”

While playing in Belgium, Brown traveled Europe. He helped maintain the playing field at Namur and taught the younger players about baseball. He tried to learn French. He performed odd jobs here and there, such as helping a teammate build a patio. He privately tried to come to terms with the opportunities he had been afforded which contrasted so much with the abject poverty he had worked to combat while in India. And he tried to enjoy the game that meant so much to him.

“Any time someone gives you a chance to continue to play baseball, get paid to do it, and live overseas, you almost need to pinch yourself because it sounds too good to be true,” Brown said. “I can never say anything critical about such an experience.”

One year ago, Henry Perkins and Columbia had just completed a four-game sweep against Penn to secure the Lou Gehrig Division regular-season title. Within a week, they were the champions of the Ivy League. Two weeks later, Perkins was the Ivy League Player of the Year.

This weekend, Perkins and his new team will travel just over 60 miles from Namur to Mortsel, a suburb of Antwerp, where the Angels will battle the Stars on May 2 in the fifth game of the young Belgian season. After the second game of the series the next day, the Angels will have their customary week off, during which Perkins will try to fill the downtime however he can.

When asked what the draw was of leaving home to play in a country where baseball was a very distant afterthought, Perkins answered the most straightforward way possible.

“I love to play baseball, and this is an opportunity to do it more,” he said. “That’s the initial draw for me. I don’t care if at the end of the day I’m on the Yankees or whatever. I just love playing baseball.”

There are no Yankees in Belgium. There are no major league scouts or stadiums filled with thousands of cheering fans. There are simply small fields and repurposed team names and games for the players who never had the chance to go pro but didn’t want to stop playing. But no matter how far the dirt fields of Namur are from the finely manicured greens of the majors, places like Belgium are the opportunity for players like Perkins and Brown to continue their careers while the opportunity is still there.

“There will certainly come a time soon when I will explore some other avenues that are not focused on baseball,” Brown said. “But I will enjoy every moment until then spent between the lines.”