In Ireland, a diamond is rough to find
Liam Shier brought his black Rawlings glove across the Atlantic on his recent trip with his dad to Westchester County and a circuit of East Coast ball parks, from Little League to minor leagues to Yankee Stadium. A 14-year-old shortstop from one of Ireland”™s scant outposts of organized baseball ”” Ashbourne in County Meath outside Dublin ”” the redheaded diplomat of sport has the rangy, high-stepping, colt-legged look of a young Derek Jeter. At rest he lays his broken-in mitt high across his chest much like Jeter does.
Not that he studies Jeter”™s every move on television or follows Major League Baseball closely back home. Televised games from the Bronx are not available in a country still fairly benighted when it comes to America”™s national pastime. Not many more than 500 Irish adults and kids are said to play the game in organized fashion, and baseball parks are still as precious there as, well, emerald diamonds.
“It”™s the best place to come if you”™re trying for baseball,” Liam said of the U.S., which he visited before with a junior national team from a country that only discovered the game in the last 25 years. “Over in Ireland, it”™s only Gaelic football and hurling and rugby.”
We met Liam and David Shier ”” the shortstop”™s father owns Corks, a wine bar in Ashbourne to which all of us are invited should we pass that way, and on the side coaches T-ball, though claiming “no sports bones in my body” ”” at Hardball NY, an indoor baseball training center in Fairview Corporate Park in Elmsford. Liam”™s American host and chauffeur from Valhalla, John Fitzgerald, had signed him up for Hardball”™s two-day summer baseball academy. Only one other kid showed up for the second day of sweaty summer school ”” enough for a double-play combo with the Irish shortstop and a pickup game of whiffle ball with coaches.
Fitzgerald is a video producer and documentary filmmaker who runs Harlem Line Media in Valhalla. The nonprofit he founded, Baseball United Foundation, paid Liam”™s airfare here.
Shier is the first visiting Irish player sponsored by the foundation, which sends much-needed equipment donated by Westchester Little League teams, money raised from donors and online sales of Ireland National Baseball Team merchandise to aid the sport”™s growth and infrastructure ”” backstops, anyone? ”” and coaches to run instructional clinics in a land where home runs historically have been the feats of James Joyce, Yeats and other hallowed literary sluggers.
“Baseball is kind of like the redheaded stepdaughter, the dark horse of sports over there,” said Fitzgerald. The game is promoted there as a cheap alternative to the fee-heavy organized leagues of the island”™s more traditional sports. “That”™s one of the reasons we send equipment over, so if a kid wants to try a new sport. ”¦ It is kind of an underdog sport,” said Fitzgerald.
The video producer was in his late 20s when about 10 years ago he learned of Baseball Ireland, the sport”™s governing body, and the national team it had sent to international tournaments, and quite often to lopsided or tears-in-my-Guinness defeats, since 1996. Fitzgerald had played high school baseball in Valhalla and a year of college ball in New Jersey.
“I was definitely at the end of my baseball career and I knew it,” he said. “But I thought there was a chance to go out playing for the Irish national team.” Go out with “Pride and Honor,” that is, with “Bród agus Onóir,” the national team”™s bilingual motto stenciled on those Baseball Ireland T-shirts sold by Fitzgerald”™s foundation.
The New Yorker with Irish ancestry was ruled ineligible for the green-jerseyed squad because his grandfather, though a citizen of Ireland, had not been born there. If he could not compete, he”™d tell the story of Baseball Ireland from the sidelines, begorra.
Fitzgerald was working as a production assistant in New York. “I said, I can keep getting coffee for people making movies or I can make a documentary ”” so that”™s what I did.”
Over three years, Fitzgerald made a series of visits to Ireland for his baseball documentary. “I put it all on my credit cards too,” he said. It cost him about $60,000.
Released in 2006 in 90-minute and 48-minute versions, “The Emerald Diamond: The True Story of Ireland”™s National Baseball Team” won the Critic”™s Choice Award at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Fitzgerald is working to get financial backing from the Irish Film Board for a feature film based on his Emerald Diamond story. He has lined up a screenwriter, director and producer for the film.
“It”™s been a long process,” he said. “Eight years of just trying to figure out what is the story?”
After his documentary”™s release, Fitzgerald did a 20-city promotional tour ”” cities with plenty of O”™Connors and Murphys and Fitgeralds in their phone directories ”” that was paid for by an Irish vodka distillery.
At question-and-answer sessions on the tour, “People wanted to know how to donate” to the cause of Irish baseball. “That”™s when I decided I really need to start the charity,” he said.
Founded in 2008 as Emerald Diamond USA, the Valhalla nonprofit had a name change lest it be mistaken for a mall jewelry store chain.
Though it”™s still a long drive on sheep-clogged roads between ball parks, baseball has grown in the decade since the documentarian began his Ireland project. “Just in terms of sheer numbers, I would say it”™s almost doubled in terms of kids and adults playing in the country,” he said. “Ashbourne is a perfect example. They didn”™t have a team five years ago.” Now it has produced Liam Shier, whom Fitzgerald said was tagged as one of Baseball Ireland”™s top three youth prospects.
At Baseball United Foundation, “What we”™re doing in Ireland, we want to use as a model and work in other countries,” said Fitzgerald. He has spoken to sport officials in Croatia and Poland
about exporting American coaching know-how and donations there. He hopes the foundation can bring a young player from Eastern Europe to Westchester by fall of next year.
Liam has graduated from Little League to an adult B-league team in baseball-happy Ashbourne, competing with players of Jeter”™s age. With no high school baseball teams in Ireland, “At this point he is kind of in a no-man”™s land,” Fitzgerald said. On his visit here, “The idea is to just give him a week of immersive baseball experience.”
“What John is doing, it”™s a great opportunity for Liam,” said David Shier, who spent 15 years in San Diego before returning home to a restaurateur”™s life in County Meath. “He”™s learning so much.”
Are you really good at baseball? We put the question to the kid from Ireland.
“I”™m not sure,” Liam replied with Jeter-like brevity. “Hopefully.”