Some of you know Ron Monks. He was the original founder of Roy Hobbs baseball. He has played with the Antiques in tournaments for many years. He played a couple of years for the Antiques in TriValley.
He is now living in Odessa, Ukraine. He has been promoting baseball in Odessa. Friends in the US have been sending equipment and apparel to help get the program up and running.
Ron has a Facebook group if you want to track what he’s doing.
Here’s a 5 minute Youtube video. It’s in Russian, but you can see what’s going on. Ron appears at about 3 minutes in.
Hello Antiques and friends. I just had this post from Denny come through and yes, I’m in Odessa but am planning to work in Ft Myers next month then return to Odessa to continue what I’ve started here.
What I’ve started is this: I have more than 50 kids ages 6-17 practicing and playing baseball for the first time since the break up of the Soviet Union. The field you see in the video has been improved, all by shovel and rake, and the grass cut with a weedeater, but it is still a far cry from acceptable. This month, I intend to bring in a grader to finish the leveling and get it ready for seed.
I remember the first Roy Hobbs World Series back in 1989 when Lanny Ropke, after reading an article about baseball in the USSR suggested I try to contact someone in Moscow about inviting the Mendeleyev Red Devils to the event. Through the US Embassy there, I was able to get in touch with them and with money from Joe Bendy of Chicago, a budding documentary film maker, we brought them to Boardwalk and Baseball. The weren’t official entrants due to the fact that most were under 30 but we had some really good exhibition games set up for them to play.
So fast forward to 2011 and having had a “perfect storm” come my way, that being my acquiring the ability to speak Russian, a pulmonary embolism in July 2010, and starting to receive Social Security…(oh, and another divorce), I decided to plant and grow baseball in this seaside city of over a million people.
Do “friend” me on Facebook so I can add you to the group “baseball for Ukraine” which is a closed group to keep some of the kids who have internet from spying on my thoughts that I post there.
BTW, do any of you know Andy Weissmann? He’s been in Kiev off and on for the past several years and also built a field and coaches kids. I only this week started chatting with him on fb. He has a bat company here making bats from Ukrainian beechwood. I haven’t tried them. He calls his company YaYa bats. Not sure how he arrived at the name, which means I, I. I guess he likes the idea of the logo which in Russian is those double backwards “R”s. Anyway, the reason I ask is that Andy is from the Bay Area. I’m toying with making Odessa a wood bat league at all ages.
This Youtube video was actually repeatedly broadcast on the local TV stations. The narration is in Ukrainian but the interviews are in Russian…just to confuse you all.
To those who are going, good luck in Woodland. I would love to be there with you and see my old pals, but it seems I’m needed here more than at any other time or place. Most of this kids have no fathers or have fathers who are drunks. The other day I overhead a new kid asking another, “Is that a REAL American?” It gave me goosebumps for my country. Don’t let anyone tell you Americans are hated and despised around the world. It’s absolute nonsense. We have Peace Corp volunteers and missionaries all over this world who selflessly serve and at the same time build America’s image. There are missionaries here of all denominations serving the spiritual needs of a culture starved and corrupted for 70 years by state socialism.
I realize this is getting long, so I’ll stop here and just hope you’ll all go to my facebook page.
Best in Baseball,
Ron Monks