Long-time area coach guides German baseball team

Baseball has been in Don Freeman’s blood since he was a child playing the game in a Blaine cow pasture.

“For whatever reason, I liked baseball,” he said. “It was always my first love.”

Freeman still remembers his first official game, an international event in White Rock, British Columbia, as a member of the Cub Scout baseball team from Blaine.

“It was a long trip from south of the border covering five miles or so,” he said. “But I was hooked. I think back to 1958 and can’t believe where that great game has taken me.”

He used that fondness for the sport during a trip overseas last summer as an age-group coach for five different teams in Mainz, Germany, just outside of Frankfurt. After that stint, he was asked to stay in the country to become pitching coach for the German national team, which was preparing for the European Championships in September.

Freeman said he was “flabbergasted” by the latter offer. He has served as coach of the U.S. national team in the past, but never as part of a foreign team.

“To be asked to coach another country’s national team is beyond my comprehension,” he said. “What an honor. Putting the aspirations, training and future of Germany’s qualification placement in the hands of a person from another country is truly an honor.”

Many of the players vying for spots on the German team had just traveled from the U.S. after their professional minor league seasons ended. The list of hopefuls even included one player from Hillsboro, OR.

“It was a very talented group with a wealth of baseball experience and high enthusiasm,” Freeman said.

Three of the team’s pitchers had either previous minor league experience or were on active rosters in the U.S. The club’s top catcher and third baseman both played minor league baseball. The first baseman had just arrived back in Germany after playing in the Diamondbacks organization.

Players from Europe don’t approach the game much differently than U.S. players do, Freeman said. His job was to teach the basics and make sure each player performed at his best.

“Obviously, they don’t have as many people who play baseball in Europe as play soccer,” Freeman said. “They wanted to get young players involved.”

They came to the right man to instruct the age-group players. Freeman is the former Clark College baseball coach and coached high school teams for 38 years, including Prairie.

“A lot of people just want to coach the top kids, but I have a soft spot for the youth level, having been a high school coach,” he said.

Besides coaching in Germany, Freeman also participated in training sessions for coaches and put on a coaching seminar about the mental side of baseball.

“I’ve been a student of the game so I’ve been asked to speak at clinics,” he said. “It’s always fun to go to places you’ve never been.”

Freeman is a history buff who enjoyed sampling the culture of Germany when not on the baseball field.

“A lot of people took me on tours to visit castles,” he said.

He noticed that Germans speak English as well, if not better, than Americans do. Most people there know three or four languages, he said.

“They consider (English) the number one business language in the world,” Freeman said. “You intermix so often with other countries that it forces you to know all these languages.”

The only down side to the trip was that coaching the German national team caused Freeman to miss the start of Clark College’s fall baseball season. He didn’t think it was fair to the players to be without a head coach, so he resigned his position while still in Germany.

He won’t be away from baseball next summer, though.

“I’m going back to Germany to do pretty much the same thing I did before,” he said.