Photo by Dick Thomas Johnson
This year, for the first time ever, there will be a baseball Team Europe. The new team’s formation was announced by Riccardo Fraccari, President of the World Baseball Softball Confederation, and Team Europe will take part in exhibition games in Tokyo, Japan, in early March.
This is the first pan-European team to be established and its debut matches will be a series of two games against the number one Japanese National Professional Baseball Team, Samurai Japan, in Tokyo.
The matches will take place in the Tokyo Dome, which seats 55,000, from 10-11 March 2015. It’s the first time a whole continent will have been represented by one team in an official international baseball competition.
The WBSC Global Baseball Match-Up 2015 will be hosted by Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), 2014’s second most attended sports league in the world.
So who will be on the team?
The members of Team Europe will be selected from among the top baseball players in Europe. There are 43 European nations that belong to the WSBC, and it’s hoped that Team Europe will help to raise baseball’s profile in both Europe as a whole and each participating nation.
Team Europe’s manager will be the current Netherlands National Team manager, Steve Janssen, the man who led the Netherlands team to victory in the CEB European Championship last year. Italian National Team manager, Marco Mazzieri, will also be a part of Team Europe’s coaching staff and will work with Janssen to pick the players for the matches in Tokyo.
As for the official look and apparel of Team Europe, this is still under development and will be revealed before the team’s inaugural match in March.
Currently, European baseball fans interested in tournaments such as the World Series can get bets on their favorite team at betting exchanges such as betfair. It may soon be possible for European baseball followers to get behind their own continent-wide team in the betting stakes.
-Justine Williams
