Lil’ sluggers anticipate first Halifax Minor Baseball Classic

Stock up on peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and earmark the weekend of July 10 to 12 for time to visit the Halifax Commons, because Halifax Minor Baseball is getting all their lil’ sluggers together to put on a pint-sized World Series of sorts in the form of their inaugural Halifax Minor Baseball Classic on the Commons.

Halifax Minor Baseball is essentially a house league — for recreation only — so the players tend not to get the chance to enjoy the tournament experience very often, except for the memorial tournaments held at each division level (Rookie for eight and nine-year-olds, Mosquito for 10 and 11-year-olds, and Peewee for 12 and 13-year-olds), each held on different weekends over the summer.

“Kids that play at a competitive level, they play in tournaments like this all summer. They travel the province, and get to enjoy the tournament atmosphere,” says Brandon MacLeod, a HMB parent for over 30 years, and the chair of the HMB Classic on the Commons committee. “House league kids normally do not. They play on their week nights after school, and in the summer, it’s basically just a normal schedule that they just play.”

This year, the league has decided, instead of hosting each memorial tournament separately, they’ll all go down on the same weekend, and in the most central and highly-visible field in all of HRM — the Halifax Commons.

“We have had these individual tournaments in the past. This year is the first year we’re bringing them all together and doing them all in one spot on one weekend,” says MacLeod. “We can have all of our events going on in one area, rather than people traveling all over the city to different fields. There’s nine fields on the Commons available to us that we have booked for that weekend, so just the sheer fact that we can have so much going on in a centralized area is [one] reason we chose the Commons.”

MacLeod estimates that the tournament will include more than 300 players in the league and their families, as well as some teams outside of HMB, which is very exciting to parents like Shawn Kelly and his kids.

“This is an opportunity to play, hopefully, some teams from different organizations [who will] come in and give it a little more of a feel of a little more excitement around the game, as opposed to something you do every Tuesday or Thursday night,” says Kelly, who has two sons in the league, one in Rookie, and one in Novice. “More people, more excitement, more baseball. Hopefully people from outside of Halifax will be there and enjoy the weekend.”

“We have teams coming from Sackville, from Lake Echo. We have an all-girls team coming from Dartmouth, which we’re excited about,” says MacLeod. “There’s a lot of buzz.”

Buzz is one of the big things the organizers of this tournament are really after, because on top of giving their players a great tournament experience they might not otherwise get to have, they’re also hoping it will make Halifax Minor Baseball more visible to those who might not know it is here.

“Sometimes, the baseball that’s played by the young guys on a little diamond in the neighbourhoods, people won’t necessarily know that they’re around if they don’t see them,” says Kelly, who is also volunteering on the HMB Classic planning committee. “If they’re driving around and they don’t see kids playing ball, they might assume that there isn’t an organization. But if they see it, and it catches their attention, hopefully it will spark other people to try it.”

“We’re trying to draw kids in to baseball. So if we can have upwards of 1,000 people on the Commons for the weekend, it’ll draw exposure to baseball – especially minor baseball,” says MacLeod. “People are going to be driving by, seeing the Commons packed with kids playing baseball, and they’re going to think, ‘gee, I should get my kid into that next year.’”

MacLeod says that there will be more than just games to watch — there will be games to play, too, including pitching targets and batting tees for the younger spectators.

“Anybody that doesn’t play baseball now, they could bring their kids out to this and they can join in on Saturday,” says MacLeod. “So anybody outside of the association has the ability to come down and see what baseball is all about, and participate.”

So if you’re free on the weekend of July 10-12, and you find yourself on the Commons, you should drop by and take in a game — your mere attendance is helping more than you know.

“How it helps us, the biggest thing is the exposure, to be honest,” says MacLeod, who says this Classic is just the first of many for years to come. “Just letting people know that they have a great baseball organization in this city.”

The opening ceremonies for the HMB Classic on the Commons start at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 11.