Hanoi Capitals Baseball

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on the Hanoi Capitals:

Field of Unlikely Dreams - Wall Street Journal

Pictured above: On their trip to USTSA U-11 World Series in San Diego, the Capitals found a familiar place to practice: A straw field behind the Quality Inn!

By JOSHUA ROBINSON, WALL STREET JOURNAL (2011)

HANOI, Vietnam

There are no baseball fields here. Just places where Tom Treutler lays down bases and rolls out a bucket of balls. It could be a soccer field or a tennis court. Wherever it is, Mr. Treutler's improvised diamond is the one place in Hanoi where Vietnamese 11- and 12-year-olds are playing baseball.

They have gloves, bats and red pinstripe uniforms with their first names on the back. From a distance, they look a little like the Philadelphia Phillies. But these are the Hanoi Capitals, Vietnam's only organized youth baseball team.

Since Mr. Treutler, an intellectual-property lawyer from Michigan, founded the Capitals in 2008, building a team from scratch has been his all-consuming project. He has spent more than $50,000 of his own savings on gear and travel to tournaments. He runs several practice sessions a week with two assistants.

"We haven't had a weekend for three years," said his wife, Thuy, who spends practices explaining the game to parents. "It used to drive me crazy. Now I love baseball more than Tom [does]."

Baseball has sprouted sporadically in several Southeast Asian countries, always as the result of a single committed person, according to Rick Dell, Major League Baseball's director of development for Asia. In most cases, it fails to take hold. "Unfortunately, although the growth is initially rapid, it levels off many times as interest remains localized and the vision does not include the big picture of spreading the game," he said in an email.

What Mr. Treutler's project may have going for it that others didn't is that Hanoi is bidding to host the 2019 Asian Games. If it is successful, officials will hope to field competitive squads in every event, including baseball.

When Mr. Treutler's connection to Vietnam began in the early 1990s, baseball had nothing to do with it. Working in Silicon Valley, he loved the sound of the language when he heard it spoken by a colleague. He enrolled in night courses at Stanford to learn and volunteered for an immersion program in Ho Chi Minh City.

In the next decade, Mr. Treutler married Thuy, returned to the U.S. to study law and, ultimately, relocated to Hanoi in 2007 after a stint in southern California. It was there that his oldest son, Ben, started playing baseball. Mr. Treutler wasn't going to let moving 12,000 kilometers get in the way.

"My father was a football coach for 30 years, so I grew up with team sports," Mr. Treutler said. "I didn't want my son to miss out on that. It was kind of a selfish thing at the beginning."

Word spread among Ben's classmates that someone was teaching baseball—bong chay in Vietnamese. Many of them had a vague understanding of the game from a Japanese comic book about a baseball-playing cat named Doremon. Here, at the very least, was a chance to make sense of him.

Mr. Treutler and his wife lugged suitcases of gear back from California. More equipment followed in the mail. A coach in Seattle began sending him whatever used gear he could sneak past the Vietnamese ban on importing second-hand goods.

The Capitals made their debut against the Japanese School of Hanoi in February 2009, but they failed to get a single hit and lost 16-0. The one run they thought they had scored was erased. The runner, who had advanced by stealing bases, had not touched home plate.

"It was like a dagger in the heart," Mr. Treutler said.

It was a harsh reminder of how much work there was to do. He registered the team with Pony and Little League, two American youth-baseball organizations, so it could enter tournaments abroad—there were no other Vietnamese teams for the Capitals to play.

Baseball in Vietnam, where other sports such as soccer and badminton dominate, is still seen as an American curiosity, though several universities have loosely organized clubs. The few adults who have played, like Mr. Treutler's assistant coach Pham Ngoc Phu, learned it from American humanitarian workers in the years after the war.

Unprepared as the Capitals were, Mr. Treutler shelled out $15,000 to take them to a tournament in Jakarta that summer. And when they first laid eyes on a perfectly manicured diamond, they turned to their coach and said, "It looks like ESPN."

The trip turned into a reality check. They lost every game by the mercy rule. "At that point, I thought, 'Maybe we made a mistake coming here,'" Mr. Treutler said.

Mr. Treutler reached out to Mr. Dell.

He sent them coaches to run clinics and turned them onto MLB's recommended training regimens. During practice Mr. Treutler, who was never more than a Little League dad before this, treats the programs as gospel.

Through 2010, the losing streak swelled to 34 games. Mr. Treutler could tell that it was wearing on his team.

"If we didn't go through that period of going to tournaments and seeing how other teams do it," Mr. Treutler said, "we'd still be where we were two years ago."

Their turn came last month, when the Capitals hosted Vietnam's first-ever youth baseball tournament in Vinh Phuc, the province just north of here. More than 400 practices after they first threw a baseball, four victories came in quick succession. Suddenly, they were pitching crisply, fielding cleanly, and hitting with more confidence.

"Last week when I worked with the pitchers, catchers, and hitters, I saw 11-year-old boys as good as any youth players in the world," Mr. Dell said. "In many ways it has turned in to a version of the Bad News Bears."

The buoyant Capitals capped the three-day event in front of a home crowd by overcoming a team from Indonesia on a temporary diamond. Finally, they were the ones lifting a trophy.

For the first time, Mr. Treutler felt like baseball could have a home in Vietnam. Even if it did not have a permanent field.