Thanks
Humble Origins
Few ideas worth celebrating are ever the sole province of one person. Inspiration and ideas often spring from a variety of sources, before finding full expression in the strangest places. Certainly baseball is not a sport which jives well with many aspects of the modern world. A sport with no clock? A game which gives the defense control of the ball and the action? These are very contrary concepts to the constant advancement of more extreme, viscerally intense forms of competition, except perhaps to those inclined to think that the modern way of life has become perhaps too obsessively hurried and impatient.
One such man was
Christos Antonakos, without whom this story would not be possible. The basic structure of the game was formed over time, and had influences in many of his friends and business associates, as well as the many disparate travelers he encoutered as a necessary part of the thriving tourism industry in one of the world's most celebrated cities. But his enthusiasm for the game was a driving force behind a small but continously growing band of enthusiasts in the 1990s. As the millenium approached and speculation grew about the possibility(eventually realized in 2004) of the Olympic Games returning to Athens, a surprisingly large element of the youth generation took an interest in the novel sport, a competition that evoked a powerful image of simplicity most appropriate in this particular corner of the world.
It was at the Athens Games themselves that Christos was struck by the need for a formal competition if the game was to grow. Sport is in many ways the religion of modern times, and nowhere was this more obvious than in the pageantry of the Olympics. Baseball was a somewhat interesting local fad, but that's all it would ever be without a way to showcase it's virtues and improve it's quality through the fires of competition. The germ of an idea, formed there, eventually found it's way into reality in 2009, with the formation of the Greece Baseball League(GBL).
The GBL was little more than a recreational summer league, with a 60-game schedule set for mid-June to mid-August of the first season, set to commence in 2010. The league would begin with four teams, with Antonakos taking the reigns of the first, the Aiyion Jets. The Ilioupoli Avengers, Nakaia Riverkings, and Patrai Clerics would round out the charter members of this bold endeavor.
In the early spring of 2010, the league moved from idea to reality in a week of tryouts, with a few hundred able-bodied(to some extent) young men making an appearance. The list was eventually pared down to less than 200 capable of not making complete embarassments out of themselves(again, relatively speaking). Although most were decidedly not in the finest athletic condition, their were a surprising number of fairly capable players even then, which speaks to the rapid growth and local popularity of the game, as well as to the desire to prove themselves in competition for many who don't possess the ability to excel in soccer or one of the other established sports.
An initial player draft of the remaining hopefuls was set for two weeks ahead, in late May. There was no great fanfare, no cameras watching every move, but there was great optimism. The birth of a new and exciting opportunity, however short-lived it might eventually become, was imminent. Antonakos, now 45, was probably more excited than any of the potential draftees, some of which were less than half his age. A dream which was barely even an idea 15 or 20 years ago was about to become reality.
**Inaugural draft preview upcoming**