Archive for Lars Anderson Discovers Australia

Over the last several weeks, Lars Anderson has regaled us with stories from his time in Australia. If you’ve been following along, you know that the 30-year-old former big leaguer began his Down-Under adventure with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, then took his talents to the Australian Baseball League’s Sydney Blue Sox. Along the way, he experienced a cultural joy ride that was sometimes thoughtful, often absurd, and nearly always entertaining.

In the final installment of this series, Lars says goodbye to Australia and, in all likelihood, to his baseball career.

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Lars Anderson: “Yet another season has come to an end. Another round of heartfelt thanks and goodbyes both given and received. Another locker room left empty, with trash bins full of worn-out spikes and sweat-stained hats. And once more, as faithful as the rotating seasons, a ‘summer’ that started with complete strangers ended in solemn friendship and brotherhood. I watched them recede down that well-worn road into my past. Odds are, we’ll never see each other again.

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Last week, we heard about some of the more colorful characters Lars Anderson has encountered playing baseball in Australia and got a snapshot look at how the ABL is structured. Today, in the penultimate installment of this series, we learn why his Sydney Blue Sox teammates are the best he’s ever had.

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Lars Anderson: “The 2017 Sydney Blue Sox are a collection of both Australian players and foreigners (referred to as ‘imports’). The imports for the Blue Sox are all Americans, with the exception of an old teammate of mine, Chiang Chih-Hsien — we played together in the Red Sox organization, from Low-A Greenville to Double-A Portland. Chiang is Taiwanese, and although he has put on a few pounds since I last saw him in 2009, he is still as lethal as ever with the bat… and equally cumbersome in the field. Fortunately for the Blue Sox, he is now playing third base instead of second, so his lack of range is not nearly as exposed as it was yesteryear.

“He is our best hitter, and watching him take at bats is a joy for us all. Smooth and effortless couldn’t begin to describe his swing. He makes it looks easy. He also looks like a little boy in the box. He’ll smile at the pitcher when he’s fooled on a breaking ball, as if to say, ‘Nice pitch!’ Or he’ll shake his head and look at the sky when he fouls a ball off or takes a bad swing, as if to say, in the most gentle way possible, ‘You idiot! Whaddya doing?!’ And then he’ll adjust and hit a video-game line drive somewhere. I would love to be a fly on the wall inside his brain.

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Earlier this week, we learned about how Lars came to join the Sydney Blue Sox. Today, in the sixth of what is now planned as an eight-part series, the itinerant slugger-cum-wordsmith introduces us to Feathers, Tank, Chuckles, and Numbers. He also explains how his sightseeing plans went awry.

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Lars Anderson: “My ‘permanent’ living situation was still being sorted out when I arrived in Sydney. For the first two nights, I crashed at Tony’s high-rise apartment that he shares with his exceedingly cool wife, Katie. The apartment overlooks Parramatta, a groovy, multicultural neighborhood 30 minutes from the heart of Sydney. Tony is originally from Adelaide. Tony is also an assistant coach for the Australian national team, occupying that role for almost two decades. From what I’ve gathered, he’s a ‘who’s who’ in the baseball community here and seems to be garner nearly unanimous respect.

“When Tony isn’t managing in the ABL, he is a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates and is in charge of all players in the Pacific Rim. He spends his summers scouting in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Australia.

“In my limited time around him, I see why he has earned said respect: he’s been accommodating beyond reason with me off the field. On the field, he is even-keeled, honest, positive (yet stern and serious in the right moments), and he supports and defends his players. After a tough loss in Brisbane, we walked into the locker room to find that there was no postgame meal. Tony, frustrated with the loss and the way Brisbane had played host, walked outside and yelled, ‘Give us some fucking food! You kicked our ass on the field, you could at least throw us a bone off of it!’ The team erupted in laughter, and the bitter taste of defeat was lessened by his calculated antics. It was an uncanny bit of leadership.

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In the previous installment we learned how Lars ended up with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, while Ryan Kalish landed with the Canberra Cavalry — the ABL team Anderson had journeyed Down Under to join. In Part 5, Lars makes the jump to Australia’s top league, where multiple teams wanted him but only after they could find room for an import on the roster. Would the former big leaguer wait on the Aces or the Bite, or was wearing his third color of Sox a better option?

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Lars Anderson: “Looking back at my career, I reckoned I had run the gamut of professional baseball experiences and transactions, from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I’ve been drafted, called up, sent down, designated for assignment, claimed off waivers, traded, released, entered free agency, signed free-agent deals. I thought that I had done it all, but while Gary and Ryan were visiting me in Adelaide, I found myself in a unfamiliar world: I was a relatively hot free-agent commodity in the midst of a modest bidding war.

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In the previous installment, we learned that Ryan Kalish — Anderson’s friend and former teammate in the Red Sox and Cubs organizations — would be coming to Australia to play in the ABL. In Part 4, we’re regaled with stories about what happened upon his arrival, including how Anderson’s benevolence impacted where each of them would be playing “The baseball.”

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Lars Anderson: “While I still was on a beach in Cambodia, the Canberra Calvary contacted me with an offer for both myself and Ryan Kalish to play for them for the upcoming ABL season. Ryan had initially planned on playing in the Puerto Rican winter league, but Hurricane Maria put an end to that — the Caribbean league was forced to cancel the first two months of their season, leaving Ryan jobless. Having been sidelined for the past 20 months recovering from a major knee surgery, he was itching to play and realistically needed a job to prove to major-league teams that he is, in fact, healthy.

“We were both stoked. The thought of sharing the field again was something I’d previously thought was as likely as sharing a coffee with a Mormon, and the prospect of it all was quite frankly awesome. But, once again, the ABL’s import rules thwarted my plans. Canberra’s coach informed me via email that there was only one spot left, so Ryan and I would not be sharing the field, at least not on the same team.

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Last week, in Part 2, we learned about one of Lars’s colorful teammates with the Henley and Grange Rams. Today, we get reintroduced to Birdman Bats cofounder Gary Malec — previously featured in the Lars Anderson Discovers Japan series — and hear about a visit to a tattoo parlor that prompted an ink artist to say, “So, you lost a bet, did ya?” We also get a story about the cosmic jest and excruciating mental math that comes with the International Date Line.

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Lars Anderson: “The 2017 Birdman World Tour/Strategic Universal Takeover continued down under, rolling through Adelaide with a visit from the boss himself, Gary Malec. Since Gary was the catalyst for both myself and our bats being in Australia, it was only fitting that he’d check on the seeds he’d sown.  

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Last week, we ran Part 1 of what is planned to be a six-part series chronicling Lars Anderson’s experiences in Australia. As was the case last summer with Japan’s Kochi Fighting Dogs, Anderson is enjoying a different brand of baseball, and culture, than he did as a member of the Red Sox, Cubs, and Dodgers organizations.

In the second installment, Lars introduces us to a colorful member of the Henley and Grange Rams, and explains what happened after he cleared a fence while acclimating to velocity he hasn’t seen since the Clinton administration.

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Lars Anderson: “My personal favorite player on the Rams is 39-year-old Wayne Ough (pronounced ‘Oh’). An Australian national who spends his summers managing in the German professional league, Wayne arrived a couple weeks after me. ‘You’re going to love him, mate,’ our manager Russell told me before I met him. He was right. Wayne embodies the role of journeyman ballplayer with that certain lack of grace only obtained through years spent in dugouts with underdeveloped man-children.

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If you read this past Sunday’s notes column, you know that Lars Anderson has taken his left-handed stroke — and his storytelling skills! — to Australia. After beginning his escapades in the Southern Hemisphere with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, Anderson is now playing for the Sydney Blue Sox in the Australian Baseball League. More so, just as he did last summer as a member of the Kochi Fighting Dogs, he is chronicling his baseball experiences on the other side of the world.

Once again, the multi-talented former big leaguer has agreed to share some of his stories with FanGraphs readers. Following up on last year’s well-received Lars Anderson Discovers Japan series, here is the first installment of Lars Anderson Discovers Australia.

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Lars Anderson: “I took my first steps in the Southern Hemisphere in my trusted black flip-flops. The rest of my wardrobe consisted of a thin, long-sleeved shirt and shorts (overdressed by Cambodian standards, but hey, airplanes can be cold). Being that it was, in fact, summer Down Under, I thought I’d be overdressed again. I was wrong and I was freezing.

“The research I had done prior to landing said Adelaide, my new home city, boasts two seasons: cold and super hot. Although it was technically summer, the heat wave had yet to come. I had shipped all of my warm clothes back to the states before leaving Japan so I was high, cold, and dry. A Radiohead remix.

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