ED MASON, the first president of the NZBF, relates how baseball got started in New Zealand. This is a complete transcript of his edited interview featured in the KIWIBALL documentary. Interview was conducted in September of 2006.
HOW DID YOU START LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL IN NEW ZEALAND?
Ed: I think to a certain extent it started in my head. It was around 1985-86, I’d been living in New Zealand for about 5 or 6 years. I find softball a lot of fun to play, but I don’t find it very entertaining to watch.
I was raised with baseball, so I thought to myself why not do something about this? So I fired off a letter, as you did in those days in the late 1980’s, to a guy in Queensland at the Australian and Oceania Baseball Confederation, and he basically got on the next plane, came over here in 1987 and spent a few days in Auckland talking to various people including me about getting baseball started. He was really keen to get it going and that led to starting to try and get people together.
WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST STEPS?
Ed: I met these two old fellas named Gil Nichols and Peter Lichtmann, and between them and a number of other people, we put together a list of about 130 people who at one time or another said that they were interested in baseball.
And there were all kinds of people on the list. Many of them were softball people, but not just softball people. And what happened was, I phoned every one of those people. 30 of them said they would come to a public meeting. Of those 30, 7 including me actually turned up in December 1988. And I guess that’s what started it, they must have been the right 7 people.
WHAT’S THE CURRENT STATUS OF YOUTH BASEBALL IN NEW ZEALAND?
Ed: Baseball is well-established now in Howick-Pakuranga, Te Atatu, on the North Shore of Auckland and it’s well established in Christchurch now as well so it’s based in the two biggest metropolitan areas in the country and the biggest ones in each island so it’s a matter now of expanding beyond that.
It would be wonderful to be in Wellington. I think from a political point of view it’s important to be in Wellington and they’ve got a big population down there and there’s a real solid knowledge of softball which could be leveraged.
WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG FOR BASEBALL TO COME TO NEW ZEALAND?
Ed: I think the establishment of softball early in the 1930s as a major secondary sport had something to do with it. A lot of people think they know about baseball when they really know about softball. The games are quite distinct but they’re related.
Baseball is the original game, baseball is the big league game and baseball has a much bigger international following than softball does. So I’d like to see both games played at the best possible level.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BASEBALL AND SOFTBALL?
Ed: A baseball’s about the size of a cricket ball. I guess the other thing is the distance from the pitcher to the plate is about 15 feet, about 5 metres longer on baseball and they pitch off an elevated mound. The outfield is much bigger, the bats are slightly different and in the major league they’re all wooden bats and the games last nine innings instead of seven. Essentially it’s been developed as a game for men, and in lots of places women and kids play softball and men play baseball - but of course we know that’s not true in New Zealand. New Zealand has a propensity to turn everything that’s a recreation into a sport and they’ve done an excellent job with softball.
I think baseball is more athletic than softball is, and the pitching is more technical, there’s no question about that, there’s a wider range of pitches, the baseball pitch is more dangerous to the pitcher, the pitcher’s shoulder, and the health of the pitcher’s pitching arm - maybe that’s why baseball pitchers get paid so much!
WHY DID SOFTBALL CATCH ON FIRST IN NEW ZEALAND?
Ed: Peter Lichtmann, one of those old fellas that I met in the 1980s, had actually been at the original meeting back in 1934 when they were discussing what they were going to do in Auckland, and apparently a Canadian guy walked in and said “you don’t want to play baseball, you want to play softball.” He showed them what a softball diamond looked like – you could fit 3 softball diamonds into the space one baseball field would take. This was an opportunity in a period in history when people needed recreation and softball got itself very well established and baseball didn’t.
HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO GET BASEBALL STARTED HERE?
Ed: Well, every time I drove around Auckland and I saw a big, flat field, it had a cricket wicket in the middle of it.
Recruiting players is never that difficult, but actually finding money was difficult, until we had a meeting in the Pioneer Hall downtown in Auckland in 1989. A friend of mine, Don McCloud, who runs Team Sports Manukau, turned up with the Rawlings world sales representative and at the end of the meeting he seemed to be impressed with us. He came up, he pulled 200 American dollars out of his pocket and put it on the table and that turned out to be the exact amount of money we had to pay to affiliate to the International Baseball Association. And then he said I’m going to send you guys 7 thousand dollars worth of equipment for free. So we had bats and gloves and bases and all the stuff we needed to get going. That was just the kick start that we needed and by May 1988, we had a 4 team competition that played right through the winter. Fantastic.
It’s an odd sort of thing starting a new sport, because you have to establish a new culture as well. We had some early teething difficulties with softball players coming across to baseball thinking they knew everything. In fact we had one of the top high school coaches from the USA running a training here, an indoor training in the middle of winter, and one of the New Zealanders ventured to lecture him on baseball and what he didn’t know. I thought that was absolutely hilarious, because we were starting from absolute scratch. This guy had been to Lenin Stadium in Russia teaching Russians how to play baseball. And Russians now can play baseball.
In 1992 we sent our first ever national team to Florida to play in the Merit Cup which was set up by the world body to promote the game with emerging countries.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE FUTURE OF BASEBALL IN NZ?
Ed: I think the profile of baseball has been raised because of Travis Wilson, the softball player, having such success at least in the minor leagues in the United States - and with Scott Campbell from the H-P Club signing with the Toronto Blue Jays after being drafted by them - he’s the first new Zealand player who’s never played softball, who’s only played baseball, to be drafted by a major league club. So he’s got a hard row to hoe, but if he makes it to the major leagues, well, that’ll be such a boost because the money is money that All Blacks can only dream of. If a professional contract were to come somebody’s way, that’s largely down to their character more than the size of the sport - after all, in American football we’ve had two New Zealanders go all the way to the NFL.
Baseball, some people want to try it because there’s more of it on television than ever before. There’s at least 3 games on Sky a week, so they get to see it, they get to see all the hype around it, and they even get something like the Little League World Series. I watched some of that, the quality is fantastic, and the attendance and the public interest attracts kids.
