After I
found out that I got the job teaching in Croatia, I searched the Internet (to
the point of obsession) to find all the information I could about the new city
I was about to move to. One thing that I wanted to do was to expand outside my
American School community and American home life and force myself into Croatian
culture. I wanted to hear the language in context with real people so that I
could learn more of it. So when I came
across the Zagreb Baseball Klub on the Internet, I translated the page through
a Google app. I jumped at the chance to
know more. I started a correspondence with the president of the Klub through
email. We sent many emails back and forth and I gave him the date of our
arrival in Zagreb.
So the day after
our extremely long flight, I got an email saying that we should meet so that he
could show me the field. I struggled
through trying to pronounce the street names and he eventually picked me up
close to our hotel. I got into the car
with a man I had only communicated with on the Internet, driving through a town
that was completely foreign and unfamiliar. I thought to myself, how did I get here? We made very short small talk, with his
limited English and my limited Croatian. 15 minutes later we were at the field.
I didn’t have cleats, a hat, or baseball pants with me. So I showed up with only
a glove. I was thinking to myself that I
was far from being the lean college athlete that I was ten years ago. Now I’m balding
and a bit overweight wondering if I had something worth giving. There were about 4 players on the field
warming up for practice, if you can call that enough for a practice. The players were coach Mario Manojlov and
Dino Kondic and two high school aged players, whose names I can’t remember. Croatian
names are generally tough to pronounce and are not commonly used in America.
 |
| Mario Monjlov (player coach) |
 |
| Dino Kondic (catcher) |
So there I was, throwing some pitches to Dino, the
21-year-old catcher, in their over-grown grassy bullpen. It felt like an abandoned
sandbox. The bullpen grass was up to my
knees in some spots. There was a large
hole in front of the rubber about 5 inches deep. The dirt hole looked like it
hadn’t been replaced for years. Imagine a small baseball stadium being built in
the mid 90’s and then fast-forward to the present day with literally no
maintenance being done by the city or anything.
The only ones that actually taking care of it are the players who also
have full time jobs.
Besides my
surroundings, I felt okay with my pitching. My location was a little off, but I
was close to the plate with most of my pitches. I thought it would just take a
little fine-tuning and a couple more bullpens to find my placement. I asked Dino how I did and he said “good” with
no real emotion on his face. Croatians
in general are very hard to read. So with no measuring stick to compare myself
to, I left the field with a lot questions still unanswered. Were they going to accept
me as an American? Would I have enough talent to compete with these guys? Would somebody be upset if I took their
position? All these questions had to wait because I left on a three-week vacation
to the Dalmatian coast.
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