Category: Sports

Okay, here’s my feel-good story of the day.

Gray-shirted Brusiks filled the bases in the final inning when the potential winning run strode to the plate — Kamaran Sabir, the team’s 14-year-old slugger.

Kamaran clenched his teeth. The Nawruz pitcher, Diller Fakhraddin, stared back. Parents in the stands wrung their hands and shouted. Diller’s fastball whizzed in, and Kamaran hacked.

Strike one. Strike two. Then, “Strike three!” yelled the umpire, U.S. Army Capt. Deron Haught. “You’re out!”

And what may have been Iraq’s first organized baseball game was over, with the red-shirted Nawruz — the Kurdish word for New Year’s Day — beating Brusik, or Team Lightning, 10-7.

The teams of 13- to 17-year-old boys are the only two in Altun Kupri’s new league, and Wednesday was opening day in this northern Iraqi village, a clutch of blocky buildings named for a 16th century Ottoman bridge that once spanned the Little Zab River here.

It was a perfect evening for baseball. Parents crunched pistachios to the ding of aluminum bats. Soldiers from the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade stood guard at the soccer field-turned-ball diamond, with a Humvee parked at each outfield foul pole and another sitting just beyond the center field fence.

This is real hearts-and-minds stuff. While I normally view such activity with a jaded eye, I think this is the kind that can work. Involve the children and families. Let them know that there’s life without war, without terror, without the boredom of soccer. Okay, it’s not time for this in the Sunni triangle, but perhaps it is time for more, much more of this in the majority of Iraq.

Haught, commander of a platoon that occupies a small base in this town 205 miles north of Baghdad, said the soldiers hope America’s favorite pastime catches on in Iraq.

“I’d like to see one of them get a scholarship at West Virginia University and then go and play for the Pirates,” said Haught, 37, a Pittsburgh fan who hails from Harrisville, W.Va.

It’s not an impossible dream. Baseball has thrived in some countries where U.S. troops have deployed, including Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic.

….

The idea for the league arose after Haught’s soldiers began playing baseball among themselves. They made a ball from wadded paper wrapped in duct tape. An aluminum cot leg was the bat.

Haught said he mentioned the games to his sister back in West Virginia. “She felt bad. We were over here serving our country and we were playing baseball with a tape ball and a cot leg,” he said. “So she started Operation Home Run.”

Packages began arriving filled with baseballs, bats and gloves.

At the same time, the platoon was trying — and failing — to unify Altun Kupri’s sports clubs, which are grouped, like the town, into Turkomen and Kurdish camps. So the soldiers started their own sports club and made it a baseball league. In July, Haught persuaded the city council to send over a few dozen kids.

He wasn’t sure it would work. Iraqis play soccer and volleyball, sports that don’t involve catching or throwing. But the kids picked up the basics.

I think this is great stuff. I look forward to hearing about a future Iraqi counterpart talking of his childhood hero, Keith al-Hernandez.

With the final out on opening day, Diller, the winning 16-year-old pitcher, and his teammates poured off the field, their arms in the air, shouting “Nawruz, Nawruz!”

“I like this game. It’s better than soccer,” the lanky boy said.

Perhaps we’re really not so different after all.

EDIT: More on Operation Home Run here, here and here.