September 2, 2024
On Facebook Page from August 30, 2024
It has been known for half a day that Samuel Aldegheri will become the first pitcher born and raised in Italy to debut in MLB tonight in Los Angeles.
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For half a day now, everyone has known, except the Italian press. With the worthy exceptions of the sector and a few others.
It is clear that we are biased here. And as such, perhaps led to exaggerate and think that this is the only sports news worthy of being examined in depth of the day, of the week, of this entire last month. Incredulous and annoyed by the indifference with which those who are not interested in baseball – that is, almost everyone – will tend to belittle the matter.
And yet no: Samuel Aldegheri in MLB is great news not for baseball, but for all Italian sports. And even more. For a strictly technical aspect, as such if anything negligible: given the level of Italian basketball, that one of our young players arrives in the NBA is an exceptional fact but with a logic. For the sidereal distance of our baseball from that of the professionals, that a boy raised by us arrives in MLB is a stratospheric feat.
Baseball is not basketball, baseball does not come to the Major League directly from the Italian championship as Belinelli or Gallinari did. In baseball you have to go through the Minors, an exercise in discipline and mental strength that those who are playing down this news cannot even imagine. Simply Sam, like all the other foreign and non-foreign boys in the Minors, had to make do, always under scrutiny day after day. In an environment where everything is organized in detail but where you then have to do a lot of things, sports and life, alone.
And he, more than others coming from a baseball in the suburbs, had to improve himself. And he did it, practice after practice, game after game. Surprisingly, in a season in which out of nowhere the Philadelphia Phillies decided to give him up in a trade. He ended up in Alabama, in the Double A (not ballists: it’s the C series) of the Angels. And there he was, serene, until yesterday afternoon.
Then, suddenly, boom: called to Los Angeles. And, the MLB website certifies, departing. Departing. But then it’s not even that. The MLB is literature, it’s cinema, it’s the history of the last century and a half of the United States of America. Like other sports are not. That tonight on the mound in Los Angeles a boy who grew up in Verona steps is a story that has to do with culture, not just with sports. In fact, perhaps first with culture rather than with sports.
What’s more. Sam is a pitcher. Just over half a century ago there were those who maintained that Italians, and by Italians they meant Italian-Americans, did not have the intellectual, moral and perhaps not even physical-athletic requirements to be able to pitch… Then came Vic Raschi, Ralph Branca and Sal Maglie.
There was Ruggero Ardizoia, born in the province of Novara, a pitcher for just one game, with the Yankees, in 1947. For just one game, precisely.
Now, for the first time, a boy who was not only born, but also raised, and educated, here with us is pitching. Tonight at 3:38 Italian time: Sam Aldegheri’s first pitch for the Los Angeles Angels against the Seattle Mariners will be a great moment for sport. For culture. And also historic for Italian baseball.
If the Italian press downgrades him, it’s out of laziness. Not by choice.