As American parents, Shane and I are morally (perhaps legally?) obligated to teach our kids how to play baseball. Even while living abroad.
We both played ball growing up (softball for me), and we both spent our childhood rooting for disappointing professional teams: the Phillies and the Pirates.
We love baseball, Shane especially. He reads about it and/or thinks about it for, oh, a good 23 1/2 hours a day. I spend less than half a minute on the subject most days now. But there are few things I enjoy more than sitting in the ballpark, beer in hand, cheering on the home team. Doesn't get more American than that, am I right?
So, imagine trying to teach your children about baseball in a country that not only considers it a "minority sport" but, according to Wikipedia, adds insult to injury by describing it as "trailing in popularity FAR BEHIND sports such as rugby union and cricket." Not that easy.
But do we Americans give up easily? Well, yes, if we have a Netflix series to binge instead. ;) But these Americans have found a way to teach our kids America's pastime in New Zealand.
It's called Kiwi Ball.
Kiwi Ball is the nomenclature of choice for t-ball here. It's a way to "cute" up the sport and make it appeal to New Zealanders who are actually quite fond of pun-ny names. (Case in point: The Tall Blacks basketball team, a play on the famous All Blacks rugby team. Get it?? They're tall?? Anyway...)
A really great group of guys runs a baseball club that offers Kiwi Ball here in our community. The older gentleman in charge, Wayne, is about as American as a Kiwi comes, and always wears a full-on baseball uniform to practice. He's a true proponent of the sport and has infinite levels of patience for these 5 to 9 year olds who somehow make baseball look like rugby.
There's about 15 kids on the team, half boys, half girls. They meet every Friday at 5:30 and spend the first half of practice running drills to learn how to run the bases, catch a fly ball, stop a grounder, etc. Then they break off into two groups to play a mock game. Every kids gets the chance to play the field and hit the ball off the tee.
It's a lot of fun -- for the kids and the parents, even if it results in tears for one or two of the boys on the field (usually mine). I mean, only one kid can really whack the ball. And the fielding looks more like tackling at this point. But for some of the kids -- mostly the girls -- you can see the wheels turning as they figure out how to play this awesome sport. And that's all that matters.
Shane has been helping out with coaching and he loves it. He gets ribbed by the boys for being American: "Do you even know how to play this sport??" they like to ask him. Silly kids.
As we're Americans, I feel our kids should be the professionals on the team. Unfortunately, though kids in the U.S. might be born with a love of apple pie and cold drinks, their baseball skills have to be acquired.
We decided to buy some gloves for the Adorables so we could practice at home. Finding a baseball glove in New Zealand turned out to be ... not so easy. They don't sell them at the Warehouse (our Walmart) or K-Mart or, heck, the gas station like they would at home. You have to go to a specialty store, and the equipment is expensive.
We ended up buying two so-so quality gloves for about $80 and splurging on one $15 baseball. (This was torture, as I vividly remember storing all of our mitts and balls in my mom's basement just before we moved. Grrrrrr.
(Sidenote: The sports store where we finally found the gloves had only 2 feet of shelf space dedicated to baseball gear. BUT, they had an entire wall full of baseball caps with American team logos on them. Are that many Kiwis following the MLB??)
The investment was it worth it though.
Yesterday, we took the kids to see one of Auckland's most famous waterfalls. The kids were not nearly as impressed as they should have been but after our walk to the falls, we got out the baseball mitts and practiced throwing and catching in a field nearby.
I doubt any American t-ball player has practiced in such a unique location. And I guarantee no Kiwi had ever played baseball in that spot. It felt kinda special to be so far from home, doing something so utterly, wonderfully American.
It felt kinda like ... a home run :)
