That spring of 1989 in Leningrad, a group of Cubans living in our university dorm challenged me to a baseball game. I scoured my fellow American students for players but found only one volunteer. Seven Japanese businessmen, studying Russian in anticipation of an opening Soviet economy, came to the rescue. They even had their own baseball gloves. Eager Zhenya agreed to play second base. We called ourselves the Shipbuilders’ Dormitory baseball team.
Baseball had arrived in the USSR a few years earlier. After the sport’s inclusion in the Olympic games, the Soviet government directed resources towards its development, hoping to repeat earlier successes in basketball and hockey, two other sports not native to the Soviet Union. By the time I arrived in 1989, the sport was getting traction in cities like Moscow and Leningrad. Sports Illustrated carried a 5-page spread on baseball in the Soviet Union in July 1988 that described how former javelin throwers, wrestlers and team handball players were being converted into catchers, pitchers and hitters. The lead photo showed an iconic Moscow building– with a red star at the top — looming over a baseball game in progress. What a juxtaposition! There were high expectations about the sport fostering diplomatic progress as well. “Baseball can be a bridge between our two countries,” a high-ranking Communist official told Sports Illustrated.
A baseball game underway at Moscow State University as captured by Sports Illustrated magazine in 1988.
In February 1989, as a Russian-speaking former centerfielder, I felt like I was crossing that bridge, if not putting some actual planks in it. I had a pretty good pedigree, having played four years of varsity baseball at Williams College. Shortly after I arrived in Leningrad, Mikhail, the coach of a local team, invited me to dinner. When I entered his apartment, I saw Easton bats hanging from the wall as well as a collection of baseball cards. Mikhail was a pioneer, coaching a city-based team and instructing another team in the suburbs. “Baseball’s the only important thing in my life,” he told me. So much for the threat of communism.
So back to the game against the Cubans. We played on a makeshift dirt field surrounded by high-rise Soviet apartment buildings. There wasn’t a blade of grass in sight. I can’t remember the score, but I do remember Zhenya being so fascinated by his baseball glove that he could hardly concentrate on putting it to use. His sheer, unadulterated joy at being part of an “American” baseball game caused us to break into peals of laughter. At the plate, he swung furiously and unsuccessfully until we told him to reduce the foot-long gap between his hands.
A picture taken after the game shows our mixed team of Japanese, Americans and Zhenya. He’s crouching in the first row, his arm around another player and his face beaming with a smile. Life was dynamic and hopeful. And Zhenya remained optimistic: “I have lots of problems which stand before me like a huge wall,” he wrote to me after I had returned to the U.S. in June 1989, “but I think I will deal successfully with these barriers.”
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 