‘Give the Old Pilka a Ride, Piotr’ : In Poland, Baseball Is a Hit With Plenty of Errors

It was a blustery day, threatening rain, but the five rows of bleachers on one side of the field began to fill up with Kutno’s faithful fans 15 minutes before Slawomir Podemski stepped up to the plate to take the first pitch from Warsaw ace Jacek Metecki.

Metecki wound up with a jerky motion and fired a fastball two feet wide of the backstop.

It was the beginning of a long day for Metecki, a 20-year-old Warsaw auto mechanic, whose frustration in the course of a 20-0 drubbing reached the point that he sometimes simply sat down in the infield and plucked listlessly at the grass, while his ever-enthusiastic teammates bounded to the far corners of the field in pursuit of the ball--the pilka, it is called here.

Despite a score that suggested some other sport, it was indeed baseball they were playing at the soccer field on this recent Sunday, while church bells rang in the distance as if in celebration of yet another Kutno victory.

Baseball Powerhouse

Kutno, in fact, is a powerhouse of the Polish Baseball Union this year. Warsaw, by contrast, is an expansion team, the Polish equivalent of the 1962 New York Mets, the team that inspired manager Casey Stengel’s famous question, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Like the Mets of yore, the Warsaw team is lovable in its incompetence. And, Polish baseball enthusiasts point out, it is not really representative of the caliber of baseball in a country where the game was virtually unknown until about six years ago.

Now, remarkably, the sport is catching on. In towns like Kutno, in the factory city of Katowice and in the surrounding coal-mining areas of Silesia and Rybnik, baseball is said to be outdrawing soccer as a spectator sport. The spectators are even paying to watch--a ticket usually costs the equivalent of about 25 cents--and exercising the bleacherite’s apparently universal license to razz the opposition.

“You oughta be playing music!” a Kutno fan shouted as the Warsaw shortstop, for about the fourth time, threw the pilka over the first baseman’s head.

Told Not to Use Their Heads

Since there is no sport native to Poland that involves the throwing and catching of an object, the development of baseball here has had to progress through a halting acquisition of the sport’s basic skills. Or, as Juan Echevarria, the Kutno coach, put it, “I had to teach them how to throw the ball, then I had to teach them not to knock it down with their heads.”

Blocking the ball with the body was the natural instinct of young men who grew up playing soccer, Echevarria explained, but trying that with a baseball made for some nasty bruises.

Echevarria is a Cuban who grew up playing baseball, and he figures that he must be as big a fan as Fidel Castro. While a student of engineering in Czechoslovakia, Echevarria married a Polish woman and settled in Kutno. When he heard that some Polish sports clubs in Rybnik, in the south of the country, were playing softball, he investigated and joined in the effort, already under way, to persuade the softball players to try baseball instead.

“It was,” he said, “a more attractive sport.”

Polish Baseball Union

The Poles agreed. By 1985, there were six baseball teams playing regularly in Silesia, in addition to Echevarria’s club in Kutno, and the Polish Baseball Union was officially registered with the Ministry of Sports.

“This was recognition,” said Dariusz Luszcyna, a sportswriter with a Socialist turn of phrase, “of the dynamic development of the discipline of baseball.” The fact that baseball has been made a full Olympic sport for the 1992 games in Barcelona also helped gain recognition from the state.

Luszcyna, a convert himself, now coaches the Warsaw team and serves as baseball’s unofficial historian in Poland.

“Here is an anecdote for you,” he said. “The first Polish baseball glove was purchased from the Czechs for a bottle of vodka.” That was back in the early 1970s, he said, and the glove was used for softball.

Equipment From Cuba

Gloves, bats and balls are still hard to come by in Poland. Most of the equipment the teams use comes from Cuba. Most players wear soccer shoes, not baseball shoes, and uniforms are rudimentary. Echevarria has outfitted his players in blue running pants with knee-length socks. The teams are hoping for donations of equipment from the International Baseball Assn., or from anyone who wants to encourage the dynamic development of Polish baseball.

One area where the sport lags far behind its American counterpart is the rigorous recording of statistics. Echevarria may be the only player in Poland who knows how to fill out an official scorecard, and he doesn’t bother.

The matter of batting averages is somewhat hazy. Some players, when asked their averages, say “90%,” by which they mean they hit the ball (not necessarily safely) that often. Echevarria, who plays shortstop for the team he coaches, hit about .340 last year and was the third-best hitter in the league.

The best hitter is also the best pitcher--Piotr Cnota, a 25-year-old coal miner who plays for Silesia-Rybnik and is justly feared by the opposing hitters for his blinding speed and erratic control.

Unbeaten Over 2 Seasons

Cnota, a strapping 200-pound right-hander, has won 25 games over the last two years while losing none. As a batter, he says, with some modesty, he gets a hit “one time out of every three.” Some Americans from the U.S. Embassy who have seen Cnota play think he might be good enough, with a little coaching in the fundamentals, to play Class A professional ball in the States.

Cnota, taking a breather between innings at an exhibition game in Katowice a couple of weeks ago, was dubious about that, but he said he would welcome the chance to get some professional coaching.

“I know I have much to learn,” he said.

Most Polish ballplayers are proudly aware that some stellar Polish names ornament the history of American baseball. Virtually all seem to know of Stan Musial ( Stan-ley Moosyow , as the name comes out in Polish), the magnificent St. Louis Cardinal hitter and member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Carl Yastrzemski, retired after 18 years as a Boston Red Sox slugger, is also famous among the ballplayers here. Many of them also know the name of Tom Paciorek of the Texas Rangers.

Drabowski Born in Poland

Other Polish-American players are not so well known here. They include Moe Drabowski, who was born in Poland and played for 17 years with four major-league clubs before retiring in 1972; Ted Kluszewski, the muscular first basemen who retired in 1961; and Ron Perranoski, a major-league pitcher for 13 years who is now the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitching coach and a member of the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame.

In addition to Paciorek, active Polish-American players include the Niekro brothers, Joe and Phil, who pitch, respectively, for the Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Indians; pitchers Mike Krukow of the San Francisco Giants, Frank Tanana of the Detroit Tigers and Mark Gubicza of the Kansas City Royals, and infielder Alan Trammel of the Detroit Tigers.

Lately, there has been talk that the baseball fans at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, which is delighted with the spontaneous adoption of an American sport here, might ask one of the great Polish names of American baseball--Musial or Yastrzemski, for example--to make a good-will visit and perhaps undertake a little coaching in the process. Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth has been approached on the matter, and hopes are high.

Game Keeps Improving

In the meantime, Polish baseball goes on and, its advocates say, keeps improving and drawing crowds. Echevarria expects a crowd of more than 2,000 this weekend when Kutno plays host to Piotr Cnota and company from Silesia-Rybnik.

For Dariusz Luszcyna, the harried sportswriter-coach of the Warsaw team, with its 0-10 record, it’s a year of “dynamic development” (the term “rebuilding” hasn’t reached here). But he has a determined outlook for next season, a five-year plan condensed down to one.

“It is already arranged,” he said. “Three Cubans are coming to take over the coaching.”