Russian Baseball: Repost

Somebody emailed me asking why Russians don't play baseball. It turns out that I blogged about this a while ago, so I am just going to repost it. I wrote this on September 10, 2003. Notice the overabundance of external links - a characteristic of an early-Irina blog post.
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Does the absence of a free market economy somehow make one incapable of hitting a ball with a bat? Obviously not. So, it must be the weather. Only that doesn't make sense either. Climate conditions that are acceptable for soccer are equally acceptable for baseball. A great deal of Russia's major cities enjoy the same climate as the American North East (and even more cities, the weather climate of Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, and Chicago).

But, I won't go into a speculative discussion about what makes Russians so disinterested in baseball. For now, I am more interested in understanding what makes Russians so darn awful at it.

I discovered a most devastating website about the Russian National Baseball Team. In May 2003, the team went on a tour of the North East League, facing the Brockton Rox, Berkshire Black Bears, New Jersey Jackals, and Allentown Abassadors. The results were not pretty.

Game recap headlines read:

GAME 1: BROCKTON BEATS RUSSIANS, 5-2
GAME 2: BERKSHIRE HAMMERS RUSSIANS, 15-3
GAMES 3 & 4: JACKALS SWEEP RUSSIAN NATIONAL TEAM
GAME 5: GRAND SLAM LIFTS ALLENTOWN BY RUSSIANS

A team comparison of Russian National vs. Northeast League is of the 1962 Mets vs. 1927 Yankees variety.

So, how to explain this? Why do they suck? Because nobody cares? And if so, is absence of public interest sufficient cause for the demise of a sport? Or can it be the case of the chicken and the egg? There was a small surge of interest in Russian baseball when the National Team made it to the final rounds of the European Championships in 2001. They knocked Italy out of the finals for the first time ever, but that only warranted a two paragraph clip in the paper's sports section.

A further google search of Pravda.Ru for "baseball" was fruitless, although very amusing.

Certainly, Russia is far from entering the world of baseball in any sort of legitimate capacity. But maybe we have to think smaller. Maybe the fate of Russian baseball is still unrealized ....

The Moscow Little League 2-0 shut out of Guam is certainly hope inspiring... But reading on -

[coaches] Eltchaninov and Kornev both learned baseball when they were children in New York. Their parents worked at the United Nations, and the boys learned to play stickball with the other kids nearby.

So, is there hope for Russian Baseball? Sure - but only by way of New York.