The sport of baseball has popped up in some unusual places over the years, but few may seem as unlikely as Vietnam. Some 35 years after the final pullout of American troops from the Southeast Asian nation, a very American game is beginning to take hold. It hasn’t been easy, but a dedicated group of ballplayers are trying to spark the fire.
Vietnam’s first baseball club formed six months ago in Hanoi, and still has only one bat and a few balls and gloves. According to 25-year-old Bui Hai, the club does not have any formal coaching or instruction, so members who have learned what they know about baseball largely from the internet played the game on a trial-and-error basis to better understand the intricacies of the sport. Said Bui, “At the beginning, we debated all the time because none of us knew deeply about the rules. We learned knowledge about this sport via cartoons and the internet. We had been playing a long time before we realized we had been playing wrong.”
Since then, other similar teams have formed in Vietnam, with weekly friendly matches the norm. American lawyer and baseball coach Thomas Treutler has opened a free baseball training course for children in Hanoi. Treutler tells the VietnamNet website that nowhere did people play baseball in deprivation like these youngsters, adding, “One day, if baseball develops in Vietnam, they may be your first generation of coaches.”
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Sports Betting Casinos includes baseball in their betting platforms. Although the Americans are the primary focus of the games, but the country will soon develop their own generations of high valued baseball players.
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