Baseball in Europe: A Country by Country History (review)

When casual fans, and even many baseball scholars, think of baseball as an international game, their thoughts likely gravitate to the many players from Latin America, the Japanese major leagues, or maybe the powerful Cuban national team. If they know something of European baseball, they probably think of Holland and Italy's dominance in European competition. While soccer may forever remain enthroned as the king of European sport, Josh Chetwynd's Baseball in Europe provides a comprehensive survey of the game in Europe, detailing its place in the eleven countries where it's most popular, offering capsule assessments of baseball in twenty-nine others, and including numerous historical and factual data in several appendices.

Chetwynd once played professional baseball in the United Kingdom, primarily as a catcher; today, he hosts a television show there that provides coverage of Major League Baseball, likely to a small coterie of fans in a soccer-crazed nation. Chetwynd previously worked as a reporter for USA Today and Newsweek and published a book on a professional East London baseball team of the 1930s. All of these credentials contribute to making Baseball in Europe a well written, highly informed, carefully researched, and scrupulously documented addition to international baseball scholarship.

Devoting single chapters to the eleven countries in which baseball has enjoyed the most success, Chetwynd begins each by explaining the game's origins in the country under discussion. He chronicles the importance of Albert Spalding's late nineteenth-century and Charles Comiskey's early twentieth-century world baseball tours, the presence of U.S. serviceman, and significant exhibition games, often connected to an Olympics. Fans and historians alike will be surprised to learn that such an exhibition at the 1936 Berlin Games drew possibly the largest crowd ever to see a baseball game. Among the estimated 125,000 in the stands to watch two teams of U.S. players compete were Hitler, Goring, and a passel of Nazi generals.

Chetwynd also introduces less sinister figures into the nascent moments of the game in various countries. Sweden's Siegfried Edström, for example, a world-class sprinter in the early twentieth century and later president of the International Olympic Committee, assembled a Swedish team to play a team of Americans in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and worked for years to promote baseball is this unlikely country of winter sports. Edström's efforts, Chetwynd reports, created small but dedicated groups of Swedish players and fertile ground for the reintroduction of baseball on a wider scale by Americans stationed in Stockholm after the war. Turin born but U.S. bred, Max Ott returned to his homeland to become one of the fathers of Italian baseball with an assist from American GIs Charles Butte and Horace McGarity, who were part of the Anzio campaign and stayed on with a post-war detachment in nearby Nettuno. Today, the town hosts one of Italy's best pro teams. More recently, Jan Bagin, a Czech, worked to fulfill his dream of building a first-class baseball facility in Prague. He built it, and they came. Today, this ballpark hosts "Prague Baseball Week," an international amateur tournament, which has been featured as one of ESPN.com writer Jim Caple's top ten baseball experiences.

Like Butte and McGarrity in Italy, many Americans helped develop the game in several other countries, but few have had influence comparable to that of coach Bill Arce or the extraordinary experience of Ohio-born pitcher Jimmy Summers. A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and Patton's Army, Arce became a professor and college coach but often coached in Europe, teaching the game in fifteen different countries and managing Holland and Italy to European championships. Arce remains the only manager to win the competition with two different countries. Jimmy Summers, once a small-college pitcher, refused to flee Croatia during the Serbo-Croatian war despite hearing bombs falling around him in his team's hometown of Karlovac, near the Serbian border. According to...