A WORLD SERIES rematch between the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals highlights Major League Baseball’s opening day on Sunday but did you know the Irish Baseball League season is already under way?
The 2016 season opener saw the Greystones Mariners beat the Dublin Black Sox 6-1 back on 19 March.
The top-tier of Irish baseball has four Dublin-based teams but there are also teams in Belfast and Wicklow.
It was dominated last year by the Dublin City Hurricanes who went undefeated in the 18-game regular season before sweeping the Greystones Mariners 2-0 in the League Final.
The jewel in the crown of Irish baseball, however, is home to the Ashbourne Giants who play in the country’s second tier.
They play in the Ashbourne International Baseball Centre (AIBC), Ireland’s first and only international standard playing field and home to the Irish national team.
The AIBC has already played host to an international tournament with teams travelling from Mexico, the USA and Belgium to take part and Baseball Ireland president Peter Kavanagh described it as key to helping his organisation identify ‘high potential, young athletes’ and put them in a structured coaching programme with a view to representing their country at a later stage.
And if you think that baseball is just a US sport, you’d be very wrong.
According to Sean Mitchell of the Ashbourne Giants, it’s a sport that is second only to soccer in terms of global appeal with huge swathes of support across Central and South America and Asia while there is even a semi-professional European league featuring teams from the Netherlands, Czech Republic and San Marino.
Mitchell, along with Dave Shier, were two of the driving forces behind the AIBC and he told The42 that the seeds for it were sown on a trip to the US in 2010.
“When we were over there we saw the facilities a little league club had in Rhode Island and it was just a nice, family-oriented set-up with hot dogs and plenty of things to keep you occupied between innings and I thought ‘why couldn’t we do something like this?’
“When we came back to Ireland we started to look for a suitable site and that took a while. Eventually we found the site where we have developed the project but it took a lot of time to get it off the ground.
“If you think about it, we started back in 2011 and by 2012 we had a lease agreed but it was August 2015 before we opened it so that’s a good three-year development. We got some funding through the LEADER Programme and it meant we had to be very involved and on top of everything.”
Mitchell admits that playing baseball during the Irish ‘summer’ can pose its challenges but anyone looking to catch a game or even try their hand at the sport shouldn’t let that put them off.
“It’s a bit of a miserable game if it gets too wet,” Mitchell says of playing in Irish weather conditions “but we’re not as quick to call a game off as the would be in the Major Leagues.”
He also says the standard can be very high here.
“The Irish League is split into two divisions, A and B with A obviously being the higher standard. There’s some ex-professional players in the A Division so the standard can be very high indeed.
“The B Division typically sees younger players get a chance as kids as young as 13 and up can play at that level but it gives them the opportunity to learn the sport and develop.
“We also host the national team in Ashbourne and this year we’ve teams coming over from the US again and these guys are pretty good and it will be tune up for the Irish team who will be going to the European Championships at the end of July and they’re training hard already to play in that.”
Mitchell says that growing the game here is important and that he’s encouraged by the number of young people taking up the sport.
The goal now is to keep them playing.
And while Meath might be a long way from AT&T Park or Wrigley field, a development like the Ashbourne International Baseball Centre could set an Irish baseball fan on their way to the Major Leagues.
The Ashbourne Giants begin their season tomorrow (Saturday) with a home game against the Dublin Spartans, first pitch at 2pm.
