Tom Kelley, President, Baseball Ireland
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The grass will be just a little greener at League Park in Cleveland on August 19.
That’s when Tom Kelley, a St Ignatius alum, will appear at the Baseball Heritage Museum at League Park to discuss his efforts to promote baseball in Ireland.
While attending Trinity College in Dublin, Kelley became increasingly more involved with the promotion and the eventual rise of baseball in Ireland.
Kelley has been living in Ireland since 1995.
In addition to Kelley, Dan Coughlin, former Plain Dealer and Cleveland Press sports columnist, WJW Fox 8 reporter and author will be on hand, signing books and participating in a Q & A.
The event will additionally consist of a baseball clinic for players of all ages, starting at 5:30pm.
Kelley, a Cleveland native, is a founding member of the Dublin City Hurricanes, former Irish League MVP and National Team coach and player.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to avid baseball fans that the Irish have been well represented in Major League Baseball, especially with 44 players born in Ireland.
Despite popular belief, baseball in Ireland itself does have a brief history.
According to author Josh Chetwynd, the first recorded game taking place in Ireland occurred on August 24, 1874, a game which featured the Boston Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics who made a brief trek to The Emerald Isle to showcase America’s national pastime.
Baseball popped up, once again, in Ireland during World War II.
In July, 1942, in Belfast (east coast of Ireland), a game among U.S. serviceman was featured between the 34th Infantry Division Midwest Giants and First Armored Division Kentucky Wildcats, a July 4th game which drew 7,500 spectators.
By November, 1942, the 34th Infantry Division left Northern Ireland to participate in Operation Torch, an American-Anglo invasion of French Morocco and Algeria during the North African campaign of WW II.
By May 1943, historians note, a 12-team league, featuring the New York Eagles, Medical Corps Pill Rollers and Californian Eagles, among other teams, played games at Belfast’s Ravenhill Rugby Grounds.
The active participation of baseball among young Irelanders themselves in their home country wouldn’t take hold until the end of the 20th century.
Cormac Eklof, (now living in Seattle as program manager in the IT world) who played baseball on the Dublin City Hurricanes from 1997 through 2015 and on the Irish National Baseball team, across Europe, from 1996 through 2006, tells me that baseball in Ireland started in the blustery winter of 1995.
It was in that year when about 20 ball players in Eklof’s inner circle were looking to do something more than just play softball. So, they started meeting more regularly to play hardball.
As Eklof explains it, they began scheduling some scrimmage games with the long-term hope of perhaps fielding a team in the European B Championships in August, 1996 in Hull, England.
Scrimmaging became more earnest in the summer of 1996; they were helped, mightily, when the young Irish organization received two coaches from Major League International to coach the team.
Before you knew it, what started as a grass roots movement with no real field to speak of, no perfectly trimmed grass to play on, not even a backstop, just a desire to play baseball on weathered soccer and rugby fields, usually in the sporadic, driving rain, resulted in this group (what they lacked in talent was replaced with plenty of heart) representing Ireland in the 1996 European Championships.
Their first venture into competitive baseball wasn’t pretty. The Czech Republic cleaned their clock, 23-2.
The drubbing the Irish team absorbed wasn’t the real story of Ireland’s first offensive into competitive baseball. The real story was when realizing they could compete against the world, hit and field the ball, and even score some runs.
Ireland ended up losing the first four games of the tournament with a whopping 35 errors. Still, in the final game, they were able to beat Yugoslavia, 8-6. “It felt like we won the tournament,” Irish player Gus Hernandez (a native of Mexico) told Dan O’Neill of the St Louis Dispatch.
Ireland soldiered on in subsequent years: winning two games in the 1998 European Championships and another one in the 2000 tournament. By 2002, Ireland finished fourth, though their improved success was helped greatly by adding American-born players who acquired dual citizenship; a popular practice followed throughout Europe.
By 2004, Ireland came away with the bronze medal, beating Serbia-Montenegro in the European B Pool Championships held in Regensburg, Germany. In 2006, they earned a silver medal at the European B-Pool Championships in Antwerp, Belgium.
Many argue the reason Ireland doesn’t produce many quality pitchers, stems from the island’s most popular sports (hurling, soccer, rugby, and Gaelic football), lacking much throwing.
P.J. Conlon was the rare exception.
On May 7, 2018, Conlon, born in Belfast, Ireland, made his major league debut for the New York Mets (with an Irish tricolor stitched into his glove), making him the first major league player born in Ireland since World War II.
U.S. Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith throws the first pitch at dedication ceremonies for the O’Malley Little League and Dodger Baseball Fields in Corkagh Park, West Dublin, Ireland. Peter O’Malley (far right), president of the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1970-98, privately built the two fields, opened July 4, 1998, which serve as the centerpiece of baseball in Ireland. From L-R: Aldo Notari0, President of International Baseball Federation; Dr. Creighton Hale, President, Little League Baseball; Ed Piszek, Little League Foundation Trustee; Ambassador Smith; Rod Dedeaux, legendary head baseball coach at USC; and O’Malley.
Photo Credit: WalterOMalley.com
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Another major leap forward for Irish baseball was when they were provided with a diamond to finally, at long last, field a team on and call their own.
On March 4, 1998, O’Malley Field was dedicated at Corkagh Park in Dublin, a facility built through the generous contributions from Los Angeles Dodgers president Peter O’Malley.
According to Cormac Eklof, “the O’Malley Field is the spiritual home of baseball in Ireland.” “There’s been hundreds of games,” Eklof says, “and thousands of innings there since the 1990’s.”
In addition to O’Malley Field, there is a brand-new custom baseball facility in Ashbourne, Meath, which is equipped with clubhouses. There are also fields in Belfast, Cork, and Limerick.
Just as baseball in the United States has served as a crazy quilt for different cultures and ethnicities in a united cause: the pure enjoyment of the game; so too has baseball brought different factions of Irish society together during some stormy times in its history.
In the prize-winning 2006 documentary, “Emerald Diamond,” a film about the history of Baseball Ireland and the Irish national baseball team, director John Fitzgerald captures how baseball served as a bulwark against the raging Catholic-Protestant conflicts of the 1990s.
Will baseball, America’s national pastime, ever become as popular as soccer and Gaelic football in Ireland?
Not likely, at least according to Cormac Eklof.
The former pitcher (who sports a Nomar Garciaparra tattoo) tells me that baseball is a minority sport in Ireland, though it has a loyal following.
“Basketball is really popular, with clubs all over the country and thousands of registered players, some TV and media coverage,” said Eklof. “American Football has a very stable and relatively old federation with several teams and I would guess around 5,000 people involved in a relatively high-profile sport. Baseball Ireland is the minnow of that group, with maybe a couple of thousand people as members. It gets little snippets of attention in the media.”
One way to increase Ireland’s love for the game, is to see MLB players compete on Irish soil.
Since the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox traveled across the pond to play in London this year, Eklof is hopeful that MLB schedules a game in Ireland in the not too distant future.
Eklof believes Dublin has several big stadiums which could be accommodate any major league team, such as Croke Park, and the Aviva, both big stadiums.
The Irish American Baseball Society and The Irish Baseball Hall of Fame, in fact, have formally asked Major League Baseball to consider bringing an MLB series to Dublin and have requested supporters sign a petition in support.
So, to learn more about baseball in Ireland, make plans to come down to the Baseball Heritage Museum on Monday evening (August 19) and share some of your favorite Irish tales (and jokes) with Tom Kelley and Cleveland’s own, Danny Coughlin, who will undoubtedly share a few of their own tales.
You won’t be disappointed.
–Bill Lucey
August 15, 2019
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Facts, Feats, and Irish Firsts
- On March 17, 1871 (St. Patrick's Day), the National Association of Professional Baseball Players became baseball's first all-professional league in a saloon called, fittingly enough, “Collier's Café” on the corner of Broadway and Thirteenth Street in New York City.
- By the 1880's, Irish immigrants and first-generation Irish-Americans comprised between 33 and 41 percent of professional rosters.
- Of the more than 16,000 players to appear in the major league since 1876, 38 were born in Ireland, while hundreds more have been of Irish descent.
- Andy Leonard (County Cavan), who was born during the Potato Famine, was the first Irish-born major leaguer, making his debut with the Washington Olympics of the old National Association in 1871.
- More than two dozen sons of Irish immigrants, who played in the 1880-1920 period, are enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
–Bill Lucey
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Recommend Websites/Resources
The Birth of Baseball in Ireland
The O’Malley Baseball Field in Dublin, Ireland
Croke park would be the best in terms of space,but aviva capacity is closer to normal baseball parks whereas filling croke park may be too difficult.Another option is PUC in cork if people don't mind standing 24000 standing and 21000 seated.
Posted by: Joseph Boland | 05/03/2020 at 06:53 PM