Baseball in the Netherlands started in 1911, having been introduced to the country by English teacher J.C.G Grasé of Amsterdam following a holiday to America. The first professional baseball league (now the Honkbal Hoofdklasse) began in 1922. The national governing body for baseball is the Koninklijke Nederlandse Baseball en Softball Bond.
The Netherlands National Baseball Team is consistently ranked in the top ten of the IBAF World Rankings and has won the European Baseball Championship twenty times. Although baseball is a minority sport within the Netherlands, Dutch overseas territories such as Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles have a strong baseball tradition.
Famous quotes containing the words baseball in, baseball and/or netherlands:
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)