Towson Rec Baseball 02-18-2026
Hello! This post is coming out of the Study Lounge in Building 3 of Kansai Gaidai's Nakamiya Campus. It has been a while since the last post, I apologize for that. I have been busy learning Japanese, being a little bit under the weather, and eating food. Today I am going to talk about one of, if not the, greatest baseball teams ever.
The 2001 Mariners? No. 1927 Yankees? Not today. None of the 1990's Atlanta or Toronto squads either. Not even one of the Orioles teams from the 60's or 70's, nor any other group of O's from 1960-1990 responsible for the most total wins in the MLB during that 3 decade stretch. Yankees were second. Little bros. No, today we will be talking about the 2013 and 2014 Towson Rec Nationals. Not only were they back-to-back participants in the May Classic, but in 2013 they engraved their names into the history books winning the championship in dominant fashion, closed out by yours truly. I'm sure many 9 and 10 year olds have been to consecutive championships and some have definitely won both. I do, however, question how many of these teams have had players re-become friends at the end of high school, and if any of these teams had a player give another a tour of Osaka, Japan after a 12 year hiatus.
The 2013/14 Nationals had both. After losing to him in a chess tournament that forced me into retirement back in 5th grade, I finally forgave my old teammate Leo a couple months before graduation and that Spring, Summer, as well as the 2 years that followed, we worked together at Camden Yards and bonded over not only the most fun Orioles teams we had seen in years, but our absolute dominance over fellow 8 year olds a decade ago - and how we would do it again if allowed back into the league. We were not allowed, likely due to the gap between 12th and 4th grade, but still worked on our once-unstoppable game playing catch almost every night the summer before leaving for college. Yes, Calvert Hall and the Orioles deserve some credit for our friendship's revival, but Towson Rec baseball deserves a lot more.
The second case is a lot more random. About a week after watching Anthony Bourdain's Part's Unknown episode from his travels through Tokyo on the basis of food, my dad met up with Owen at a mutual neighbor's Christmas party, another former teammate of mine who had moved to Japan after a full year of studying abroad in Kyoto. Owen's experience with the big 3 (baseball, food, exploring) in a country I was sorta thinking about accelerated my approach and a couple days later I was all in. Or as my dad would say, balls to the wall. This past Saturday, I met Owen (for the first time since we were way smaller and way better at baseball) and we walked around Osaka, seeing baseball stores and ginormous castles built almost 200 years before America was founded. At dinner with a couple of new study abroad friends, we talked about how crazy and unique it was that 2 rec baseball all-stars from the same street in Baltimore, Maryland were in Japan talking about WRC+ and Baseball Savant.
One of the coolest aspects of this study abroad program is living in a dorm with students representing over 40 countries, and the other side of the spectrum is cool too. I have met people from Baltimore and people that go to Syracuse that I otherwise would not have and there is an intrinsic bond over the absurd journies that landed us in Japan.
Last week, I booked my hostel in Tokyo for the entirety of the World Baseball Classic next month and finally, finally ate sushi. It was as good as it looks in the attached picture. The weather is getting consistently nice, spring training begins this weekend, and my Japanese class got approved to be Pass/Fail. Life is good. Thank you for reading.
Oliver
