Introduction
This is a story of daring, hardship, triumph over tragedy and self belief. It is a story that marries the modern and the ancient, heavy defeats and improbable victories, rapid growth and difficult uphill battles. You will now learn the story of the 2004 Greek Olympic baseball team, a rag-tag squad that looked to emulate the heroic deeds of the Hellenic soccer team a few short weeks before at Euro 2004. You will learn of the legacy they left behind and where that is going as Greek baseball matures and evolves.
The sporting tradition in Greece is ancient. After all, this is the birthplace of the Olympic movement both in its ancient form thousands of years ago and its modern form starting from 1896. Baseball is much more of a recent addition to the Greek sporting cannon. A national baseball federation was assembled in 1997 and preparations put in place to field a team when the IOC announced that the 2004 Summer Olympics would go to Athens. It is worth noting that Greek Americans have been well acquainted with the game much longer. Think of Milt Pappas and Gus Triandos who were plying their trade in MLB as early as the 1950s or Nick Markakis (more on him in a bit) in more recent years.
Building Up To Athens 2004
Olympic hosts typically get automatic berths in the Olympic tournaments for team sports. However, there was no such certainty for the Athens 2004 baseball tournament. After all, Greece had no baseball history or much infrastructure to build on and the argument was that Greece had no chance of fielding a competitive team in time for Athens 2004.
The journey towards proving the assessment of the IBAF wrong began eight away. The Hellenic Amateur Baseball Federation was constituted in 1997. By 2000, the HABF president Panos Mitsiopoulos was meeting with MLB International and had gone ahead with setting up the first Greek national championship. Filling the ranks of the six teams involved in the affair would require the recruitment of Greek Americans and Greek Canadians but a healthy number of locals also showed up.
Still, help was very much needed. Mitsiopoulos found it in American ambassador Nicholas Burns, today the US ambassador in China. Burns was a baseball man and had taken an interest in the growth of Greek baseball before he was even approached about it. He also knew somebody that knew somebody, never a bad thing. Burns was close with former Maryland senator Paul Sarbanes, the son of Greek immigrants. Sarbanes in turn was a personal friend of fellow Greek American and Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos. Angelos would provide the financial muscle needed to make it all happen.
Angelos took a glance at his team's scouting department and handpicked Robert Derksen, a highly respected and experienced scout for a rather unique job. Derksen was tasked with scouring the globe for any ballplayer worth his salt that happened to have ties to Greece. By late 2002, he had accumulated a list of about 75 players. He had also enlisted coaches such as Dusty Rhodes and future Blue Jays and Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos for the braintrust. The player pool would be trimmed to 22 Americans and Canadians of Greek descent plus 2 players from the nascent Greek league.
The next order of business was the 2003 European Championships. First though Greece had to make it into the main tournament which they did rather handily. Now came the hard part. Greece had never won a medal at the Euros, and they needed at least a silver to secure a spot in the Olympics. To get that medal they would need to stare down perennial European contenders Spain, Italy and the dominant Dutch team that has by far more medals than anyone at the European Championships. Incredibly, they pulled off a 2-1 win over Italy to make it into an unlikely semifinal match with Spain which they won 10-0. Luck ran out against the Dutch in the final, but the medal they needed was there, Greece was going to send a baseball team to the Olympics. Yes the squad was loaded with Americans and Canadians, but other European countries do this also. Derksen had not only assembled the squad, but also piloted it through the gauntlet into its destination. Greek baseball was on the rise.
Going Into The Games: A Series Of Unfortunate Events
The architects of the Greek success at the 2003 European Championships began work right away in polishing the squad for the games themselves. In June of 2004, Derken undertook a scouting trip to New York on behalf of the Greek national baseball team. He would pass away suddenly from a heart attack. He was 44.
With him went the engine that had made Greek baseball run. He was the manager, the scout, the smooth talker who convinced the American and Canadian born players to take up his cause. But he had also built a good staff around him and upon his passing Dusty Rhodes, head coach at the University of North Florida would take the reins. He would lead the Greek squad into Athens.
He would take a squad battered with injuries though. No less than three pitchers would be ruled out of the games. Three quarters of the starting rotation was gone just like that. Still, there was a job to do and it was going to be done with whoever was available. The 2004 Greek Olympic roster would be a hodgepodge of minor leaguers and retired players. Some of the more notable names included Markakis, Erik Pappas, Clay Bellinger (father of Cody) and Canadian catcher George Kottaras.
At The Olympic Games
Game 1: Greece vs Netherlands (L 0-11)
Talk about baptism of fire. The game started innocently enough, scoreless through three. The Dutch then exploded for six runs in the fourth. There would be no more scoring until the ninth when the Dutch tacked on five more runs to make the final score 11-0 in this rematch of the 2003 European final.
Game 2: Greece vs Cuba (L 4-5)
After a lopsided loss to the Dutch, few expected anything less than a drubbing at the hands of a powerhouse like Cuba. Indeed Cuba scored once in each of the first two innings. But Greece would answer with a run in the fourth. A run in the sixth and two in the seventh put Cuba up 5-1 after seven innings. In the ninth however, Greece scored once, twice, thrice! Suddenly it was 5-4. Alas, it was not to be. Cuba would hang on to win but Greece had a famous result in spite of having lost. They had given a major scare to a team including stars like Yuli Gurriel, Frederich Cepeda and Alexei Ramirez.
Game 3: Greece vs Taiwan (L 1-7)
After nearly shocking Cuba, this game was perhaps a bit of a letdown. But it was very close (2-1 Taiwan) until Taiwan popped off for five runs in the bottom of the seventh. In the top of that inning Cory Anthony Harris had hit the first Greek homer of the Olympics. CPBL legend and current Uni-Lions team president Pan Wei Lun got the win.
Game 4: Greece vs Canada (L 2-0)
Another loss but again a creditable effort against a strong team. Former Blue Jay Paul Spoljaric would shut down the Greek bats with another former big leaguer Aaron Myette getting the save. Canada got a run in the first and one more in the seventh. Greece were held to four hits and committed three fielding errors.
Game 5: Greece vs Australia (L 11-6)
Having scored only five runs across four games, few expected Greece to take a 4-0 lead after two innings and yet that is what they did. Australia responded with three in third before Greece tacked on one more in the sixth to make it 5-3. However, Australia would tie it at 5-5 in the bottom of the sixth before pounding the Greek bullpen for five in the seventh and one more in the eighth. Greece would add a run of their own in the eighth but the damage was done. Peter Maestrales and James Kavourias did homer for Greece.
Game 6: Greece vs Italy (W 12-7)
The breakthrough finally came in game six. Close calls finally gave way to a win and it was emphatic. It also showcased Greek grit. Down 5-0 after three, Greece would score twice in each of the next three innings and four times in the seventh to take a 10-7 lead into the ninth. Two insurance runs were tacked on in the ninth for a 12-7 final score line. Panagiotis Sikaras, then a AA pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks minor league system, picked up the historic win, Greece's only Olympic baseball win to date. Clay Bellinger, Nick Markakis and Cory Anthony Harris (again) all homered in the historic win.
Game 7: Greece vs Japan (L 6-1)
The Olympic journey ended with a loss to Japan. It was hard fought with the score a competitive 2-0 after six innings. Four Japanese runs in the seventh would seal the win though. Erik Pappas, the retired former MLB catcher, would homer to give Greece a consolation run. It would be the last act of his playing career and of the improbable journey undertaken seven years before.
After Athens: Greek Baseball Since The Olympics
No Greece did not advance to the medal round and they did finish seventh out of eight teams in the tournament but they did give an impressive account of themselves given the circumstances leading up to the games. They nearly turned around a game against the eventual gold medalists and beat one of Europe's strongest teams. Maybe it wasn't the Cinderella story of the Greek soccer team at Euro 2004, but a laudable effort nevertheless.
The run to the Olympics had also given Greece a berth in the 2006 Baseball World Cup. Here is where the more frustrating part of the post-Olympic story comes into play. In 2005, the Greek Ministry of Sport significantly reduced funding for the HBAF making it difficult to recruit players, fund training and so forth. Even so Greece conserved a spot in the A tier of European teams at the 2005 European Championships, finishing 9th.
The haircut became a total cutoff the following year, forcing Greece to withdraw from the same Baseball World Cup that it had qualified to for the very first time. Greece would lose its spot in the A tier at the European level after failing to send a team to the 2007 European Championships for the same reason. The Greek baseball scene had become yet another victim of the severe economic crisis that would grip Greece over much of the next decade.
2010 would see a re-emergence though. Greece worked its way back from the B tier to the A tier for the European Championships. Some support from the American University of Athens helped, although players were still forced to finance part of the trip to Stuttgart themselves. A strong 4th place result would re-establish the prestige of Greek baseball and secure qualification to the 2011 Baseball World Cup. Funding threatened to derail it all again but private donations and the fact that only travel costs (not accommodation etc.) had to be covered would provide much needed relief. Greece would go 0-7 in the tournament but they had finally taken the opportunity denied to them in 2006.
As far as European competition is concerned, Greece fell back into the B tier in 2016 after a poor European Championships. Further trouble came the following year with Greece falling into the C tier. Greece would recover B tier status in 2019 and qualify for the main tournament of the European Championships in 2021. However a poor showing means they will need to qualify again from the B tier for 2023.
Greek baseball continues to show flashes of potential including some impressive tournament showings. However chronic underfunding continues to undercut Greece's potential in international baseball. Improvement in Greece's economic situation can help this but the reality is that baseball remains lower on the priority list for the ministry of sport. This means the HBAF will need to be creative in securing funding. Leveraging the Greek diaspora will help, especially if they can enlist someone with deep pockets like Peter Angelos. In today's world of PayPal, Patron and Twitch streaming, there are new ways to attract much needed donations to grow the game and fund the scouting, coaching, training and travel costs needed to make waves on the international scene.
The Players: What Became Of Them
**I was not able to find something on every player that represented Greece at the 2004 Athens Games but here is some information on what some veterans of that team did after their Olympic journey.**
Nick Markakis: He debuted with the Orioles in 2006. He would achieve an all star selection in 2018, win three gold gloves and retire with 2388 hits at MLB level after the 2020 season.
Clay Bellinger: He coached for the Chandler, Arizona Little League team at the 2007 Little League World Series. That team featured his son Cody who has played in the majors since 2017 with the Dodgers.
George Kottaras: He made his major league debut in late 2008 with the Red Sox. He played in the majors through the 2014 season and represented Canada at the 2017 World Baseball Classic.
Cory Anthony Harris: He continued to play minor league ball through the 2009 season. He was selected for Greece ahead of the 2005 European Championships but could nor play due to passport delay issues
Erik Pappas: Represented Greece again at the 2005 European Championships, hitting .358 with 3 RBI. He has since coached in the minors.
Chris Demetral: Also represented Greece at the 2005 and 2010 European Championships and starred for Greece on both occasions.
Meleti Melehes: Would be Greece's pitching ace at the 2005 European Championships going 2-0 with a 3.00 ERA.
Panagiotis Sikaras: Continued to play in the minors until 2009. He then played a season of pro ball in Italy.
Jim Kavourias: Represented Greece at the 2005 European Championships hitting their only homerun. Retired from professional baseball after that season.
Pete Rasmussen: Also represented Greece at the 2005 European Championships.
Robert Kingsbury: Continued to play in the minors until 2007.
Jared Theodorakos: Continued to play in the minors until 2005.
Peter Soteropoulos: Closed out his career in independent ball after the 2005 season.
Mike Tonis: Represented Greece at the 2010 European Championships and 2011 Baseball World Cup. Made two major league appearances for the Royals in 2004.
Christoforos Rompinson: The only Greek born player on the team, he also represented Greece at the 2005 European Championships.
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