ALLENDALE, MI – The first time Huy Nguyen tried to play catch with a baseball and mitt, his face took the brunt of it.
“We warm up and we start playing catch,” the 16-year-old recalled. “The first ball ever to me, it hits my face.”
Did you get a black eye?
“No, purple,” he said with a smile.
Nguyen has come a long way since first picking up a baseball glove as a youth. Now he’s one of the best pitchers on the Hanoi Capitals 16U baseball team from Vietnam, which is competing this week in a Grand Valley State University summer tournament, which is held at GVSU and Hudsonville High School.
The team was started by Grand Haven native, Tom Treutler, an attorney who wanted a place for his young son, Ben, to play baseball.
Baseball is not a popular sport in Vietnam. In fact, it doesn’t have a national team or any programs at all. So, by default, the Hanoi Capitals are the national team.
“There is no national team,” said Ben Treutler, 16, who was born in Vietnam. “Some of us consider ourselves representing Hanoi. But we are the most competitive team in Vietnam right now. It’s interesting because it’s not a popular sport over there. But we’re kind of representing the national team. We want to prove ourselves.”
Playing their first two tournaments in Michigan was no accident. In fact, half of the team has West Michigan ties, including its coach, Adam Poel.
Ben Treutler will be a junior at Grand Haven High School, where his grandparents Carl and Sue Treutler live. Six of the 14 players attend Muskegon Catholic Central High School and one (Ty Jackson) goes to Holland Black River High School. They aren’t part of an exchange-student program; they are here to get a better education and move on to an American college.
The MCC boys – Hai Nguyen, An Pham, Hoan Lam, Khanh Chu, Duy Nguyen and Huy Nguyen – all were apart of the Crusaders baseball program that won the Division 4 state title this past spring.
The Capitals coach? Well, let’s just say he felt more like he was being roped into coaching the Bad News Bears at first.
“Tom (Treutler) reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in working with the boys on Saturdays,” said Poel, a student at GVSU and a former pitcher on the Lakers baseball team. “I said, ‘OK, I guess.’ I wasn’t really that interested. I went through the first practice and the kids (the six MCC players) started calling me ‘Coach’. I said ‘Am I your coach?’ ‘Yeah, you’re our coach!’
“So I just started coming around more often. Then Tom asked me if I’d be willing to coach the boys long-term. By then I fell in love with coaching them. It was way too good of an experience to pass up.”
Now Poel – who also played baseball at Grand Haven and Muskegon Community College – is wearing a jersey with “Hanoi” across his chest and he’s trying to learn Vietnamese.
“I get some funny looks when I wear my Hanoi Capitals gear out in public,” Poel said. “People say ‘Hey, you aren’t from Vietnam.’ But I say, ‘No, I’m not, but I coach THE Vietnam baseball team!”
Huy Nguyen taught himself how to pitch. Well, actually, YouTube videos of Toronto Blue Jays knuckleball pitcher R.A. Dickey did.
Now, Huy has a nasty knuckleball, too.
“I taught myself,” the right-handed Huy said. “I saw R.A. Dickey of the Blue Jays. I first seen him throwing the knuckleball. And I thought ‘What did he do to the ball?’ He’s a really good pitcher. I told the coach I was going to throw it, too. I spent almost a year and a half practicing it until it got really nasty.”
One of the other teams in the GVSU tournament were victims of Huy’s nasty knuckler on Friday, a game the Capitals won.
“They can’t hit it,” he said with a smile. “They are just like ‘Ooohhh.'”
Ben Treutler injured the labrum in his left shoulder earlier this spring, so he isn’t able to play with the team. But he acts as an assistant coach, encouraging his teammates.
Ben was born in Vietnam, where his father is an attorney with Tilleke & Gibbins. The family moved to Southern California when Ben was about 2. It’s there where he fell in love with baseball and the Los Angeles Dodgers. When he returned to Vietnam, he had no baseball outlet. So Tom decided to start a team.
The problem is, there were no programs, equipment, fields or players. The team still doesn’t have a full field to play on. It heads over to a rocky soccer field and uses some plywood for a pitchers mound.
“We play on a soccer field,” Ben said. “Our field is completely flat, so there is no pitcher’s mound. This is the first time many of them have pitched from a mound (at the GVSU tournament).”
Ben’s love for the University of Michigan drew him to the Mitten State.
“After middle school, I wanted to move to the U.S. because there are more opportunities,” said Ben, who lives with his mom, Thuy Nguyen, in Grand Haven while his father lives and works in Vietnam. “I wanted to go to Michigan to get an education. And my grandparents live here in Michigan, so it was convenient.”
Poel, however, is willing to leave Michigan to continue to coach the team. But he’ll have to get a passport first.
“I would love to continue to coach them,” Poel said. “Next summer, I think we’re planning on a tournament in California. If they want me to coach in Vietnam, I will go get my passport right now. Wait, I don’t have a passport yet. But I will make that happen.”
Does he speak any Vietnamese?
“I know about 15 or 20 words, most of them inappropriate,” he said with a laugh. “They teach me a little bit. It’s a cool language. I’m going to get Rosetta Stone (a language learning software) in case I do go over there.”
Tom Treutler, who is missing this week’s tournament because of work overseas, is doing is best to build youth baseball in Hanoi. He has gotten funding from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to help with travel and build a small baseball facility, which has a turf infield and batting cages. Treutler even got former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park to visit the facility this summer.
