Building It, and Hoping the Big Leagues Come
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Version 0 of 1. HOOFDDORP, the Netherlands — Major League Baseball wants to play ball, exhibition games or even regular-season games, in Europe. But the ballpark it is eyeing for possible games lies not in big sports centers, like London with its Wembley Stadium, or Paris, with the Stade de France, but this midsize Dutch town on land that until about 150 years ago lay deep under water. Baseball is gaining in popularity in the Netherlands, but Hoofddorp, with a population of about 73,000 and just southwest of Amsterdam, has found that bringing major league ball there has all the charms of a three-hour rain delay. Hoofddorp is toiling on a $15 million project, including a modest ballpark, capable of temporary expansion to seat 30,000, and five diamonds for use by the local team, the Hoofddorp Pioniers. When the fields are ready, sometime next spring, the Pioniers will begin playing there. But making the field acceptable for the big leagues, the town has discovered, is a major league headache. “I’ve got to listen to the club, what they want,” said Maarten Broersen, the energetic project manager and an avid baseball fan. “I’ve got to listen to Major League Baseball, what they want, and I’ve got to listen to my budget.” “Sometimes I’ve got to make a sacrifice,” he said. Take locker rooms. Major League Baseball insisted on 400 square meters, about 4,300 square feet, per team. “For daily use, what’s the sense of that?” Mr. Broersen said, striding across the construction site, a hard hat bobbing on his head. “Or showers: I don’t need a shower room with 10 or 12 shower heads, but M.L.B. said, ‘I want it.’ ” “So I’ll skip the automatic toilet flushing,” he said, exasperation evident in his voice, “to get the shower heads.” Such compromising has pushed the project ahead nicely, but not without bizarre decisions. Major League Baseball has sent some top consultants to assure that the ballpark meets its specifications. For the pitcher’s mound and batter’s circle, for instance, the league insisted on a special blend of clay, silt and gravel common in American ballparks (Fenway Park seems to have been the model), yet the mix could not be found in Europe. So the Dutch, not without some grumbling, flew in 200 tons of it from Virginia, and consultants for Major League Baseball installed it. Dutch customs officials at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, totally perplexed by a shipment of that much clay, accompanied the trucks to the building site, apparently to make sure nothing else was concealed inside the neat plastic bundles. On the less contentious question of outfield turf, both sides accepted a local solution. The league wanted a kind of bluegrass, common in American ballparks. Though the Dutch are hardly amateur gardeners — their companies handle the turf in major European soccer stadiums — it was only after much searching that Murray Cook, the official field consultant to Major League Baseball, accepted a local seed mix. “We were using bluegrass type seeds,” Mr. Cook, the president of Sports Turf Services, said in a telephone interview. “It’s a local turf type grass using Dutch seeds. After all, they need to maintain it.” Mr. Cook gave the Dutch high marks for the design of the drainage system, crucial to any ballpark but especially for one where the field is almost 25 feet below sea level. “They sure know how to move water,” he said. The idea to lure Major League Baseball to the Netherlands was hatched about five years ago when the Pioniers were told they would have to leave their old playing fields in a part of Hoofddorp earmarked for residential development. Together, the town and the team decided that new baseball fields be built to meet major league specifications, with the aim of hosting exhibition games or even regular season games. Major League Baseball officials were happy to sign on. “They’ve had a lot of success in recent years” promoting baseball, said Paul Archey, the league’s senior vice president for business operations, who visited Hoofddorp in late August. He cited recent Dutch successes in international competition, defeating teams from countries with deep baseball traditions, like the Dominican Republic and Cuba. “This showed the strength of the game,” he said. “There’s a lot of support for baseball.” The Dutch, naturally, are hoping for an early big league presence, some suggesting an exhibition game in 2014, and regular-season games by the following year. But Mr. Archey said it would be some time before major league teams began making European road trips. “That’s very premature,” he said. “Certainly, we want to play in Europe; I’m optimistic. And this facility is able to accommodate a major league game.” Yet the Netherlands, he went on, might be just the first of a number of European sites. By and large, the Dutch have bowed to the league’s demands. “The bar has been very high,” said Robert Eenhoorn, 45, a Dutch baseball official and former infielder with several major league teams, including the Yankees and the Angels. “Whether it’s the dugouts, whether it’s the turf, whether it’s the infield, whether it’s the clay. “It’s no secret Major League Baseball likes to play in other parts of the world,” he said. “There are nice places in Europe,” he went on, “but right now none has the opportunity and standards that we have.” For Hoofddorp’s politicians, the hope is that sports events like major league games will help recoup at least some of what is a major investment for a community its size. When the National Football League plays a regular-season game every year in Wembley Stadium, football fans from all over Europe travel to attend. Not everyone in town sees a pot of gold at the end of the dugout. “It’s a lot of money,” said Dennis Bontan, 26, a salesman in a clothing store. “And we’re paying for it. That’s the problem.” A few blocks away, in the big four-story Intersport Duo store, Mark van den Berg, 33, has been selling sports equipment for 15 years, though only for the last two seasons baseball gloves, bats and balls. Sales are “not so good,” he confessed, in a land where soccer rules the sporting roost. Would a major league ballgame in the new ballpark lead to a run on baseball equipment? “That’s the main reason we introduced them,” he said with a smile. |