ABOUT ME

My name is Philip and I’m the playing-coach of the two-times danish champions Aarhus Havoc, President of Syddjurs Baseball Club (newly formed club with focus on developing baseball5 in Syddjurs, Denmark), Member of the Danish Baseball5 Committee & the head coach of the Danish Baseball5 National team. It’s safe to say that I love to involve myself in Baseball5!

Originally, I wasn’t into baseball5 when it was first introduced to me at the General Assembly of Dansk Softball Forbund back in 2020. 

In the beginning I was actually more against Baseball5 than I was for it. The reason was that I didn’t like the fact that this idea for a new street-version of baseball didn’t have a bat. I knew about stick ball and bottle cap baseball and thought that those were much better ideas to push on the international scene as street-variants of baseball. But back then I hadn’t tried it yet – I only saw it being played.

Fast forward 4 years I find myself sending off a team to the first ever Baseball5 tournament in Denmark. The tournament was hosted by the danish softball federation. The team we sent off was 3 baseball players, 1 softball player and myself. We signed up on a whim, didn’t read the rules until the night before and when we got there we warmed up poorly. Not because we were arrogant (not that much at least), but mostly because we hadn’t realized how intense the game was.

We were lucky to play a team of young teenage boys in our first game. Their ages was at that perfect time during puberty when your energy levels are at their lowest, that certain age were “caring” about something isn’t all that cool and mixed with a scent of “we would have rather been home playing video games”. The fact that the team we faced in this first game was this specific team meant that we could learn the rules as we played.

We won that game, and the next, and the next and all of the games that day. We ended up winning the tournament undefeated. When the tournament was over I realized a few things:

Firstly; I had the most fun I had ever had playing any kind of sport. Secondly, I asked myself how we could win all those games without practice and proper warm up (well the lacking warm up did end up punishing me for an entire week afterwards) and I realized that Baseball5 has a low level of entry – but winning games was determined greatly on pure athleticism. And even though I’m not the most athletic person I know, to put it nicely, the team we showed up with on that day was the most athletic team – no doubt. Thirdly; I realized that Baseball5 worked so amazingly well – not despite lacking the bat I was missing 4 years before – but because of the lacking bat.

Baseball5 is interesting and fast paced because all the time wasting elements of baseball has been removed from the game: Going deep into the counts, pitchers pitching around the zone, foul balls, batters getting in and out of the batters box, strikes, balls, pick-offs, walks etc. And not having a bat is one of the things that contributes to the fast pace of the game.

On top of that I realized that not having the bat, gloves or any other special equipment was the reason for this low level entry barrier that essentially means that anyone can start playing a game of baseball5 without any prior coaching in specialized skills. It’s all about having the feel for the ball: throwing & catching.

But yes; there is a lot of technique if you want to compete on a higher level – and hitting with power does take a lot of practice – but you can still play the game without it. Try playing a normal baseball game without someone who had intensively practiced pitching, hitting and catching. That’s called tee-ball and you can only really play that for a certain amount of time before you get bored!

Fast forward a year: I’ve involved myself as much as I can with developing Baseball5 in Denmark and spending most of my free time researching the sport and researching sports with similar skills sets. I like to do deep dives into specific areas of techniques and I enjoy developing drills and mini-games for the purpose of bettering athletes while keeping an element of “play” to engage the players. I believe in Baseball5 because the game is inherently a play-like sport and I think our finest job as a coach in Baseball5 is to ensure that we conserve the “game” within the sport of Baseball5.