A Note to New Readers: Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jakob Van Wyk. I cover the Johannesburg Gold for the South African Tribune, and I’ve been doing so in one form or another since local professional and semi-professional teams were still playing spring games in old tin-roof stadiums, serving biltong out of Styrofoam coolers behind third base.
This column, The Gold Standard, is your weekly chronicle of everything Gold: the wins (occasional), the losses (frequent), the personalities (unruly), and the machinery of hope that is professional baseball in this dusty corner of the Global Baseball Consortium. I’ll be traveling with the team, loitering in the press box, dodging foul balls, and eavesdropping in clubhouses so you don’t have to. I promise honesty, the occasional statistic, and at least one obscure cultural reference per column.
If you’re here for box scores, they’re online. If you’re here for context, chaos, and a closer look into this marvelous mess of a baseball club, you’ve found your spot.
April 8, 2063 — The First Seven
Baseball, like a poorly-cooked soufflé, often collapses under its own expectations. The Johannesburg Gold, entering the 2063 campaign with a new front office, a billionaire’s mandate to win, and cautious optimism, began their season by offering up a little bit of everything: a crisp win, a late collapse, five consecutive losses, a rain delay that may have aged a man a year, and a redemption game that would’ve made Hercules reach for the ice pack.
Let’s begin with the good news.
Opening Day was, in many ways, a love letter to new beginnings. Max Dawe, the club’s newly-signed ace, delivered a workmanlike 6.2 innings, scattering six strikeouts and allowing only one earned run in a tight 3-2 win over the Cairo Pharaohs. Designated hitter Antonio Roman drove in the go-ahead run in the sixth with a clean single, and 2B Prabhu Vogelsang collected two hits and scored twice. A clean save by Cesar Torres capped off the affair. Hope swelled.
Then Game Two arrived, and brought with it the wisdom of age in the form of Cairo’s 36-year-old Willard Labonte. Labonte struck out eight over eight innings, walking no one and scattering just five hits in a 4-2 Pharaohs win. Antonio Bonía homered early off Gold starter Kiminobu Seki, and although Johannesburg's Fareed bin Sa'eed responded with a solo shot of his own, it wasn’t enough.
Game Three was less poetic and more bludgeoning. Bonía returned with three hits, including a triple, and Johannesburg starter Manny Ortiz couldn’t survive the fourth inning, surrendering five runs in under five innings. The 7-3 loss dropped the Gold to 1–2 and exposed early signs of an inconsistent rotation and the same offensive thinness that plagued the club last year.
Enter Sydney.
Games Four through Six saw the visiting Sharks do what their names suggest: circle, strike, and leave only bones behind. Despite a three-run bomb from James "Jimmie Jack" Belinda in the first inning of Game Four, Sydney’s Greg Godwin countered with a three-run homer of his own, and the Sharks swam away with a 7–5 win. Game Five saw the Gold leap to a 4–0 lead by the second inning, then surrender 11 unanswered runs. Vogelsang’s ninth-inning homer was too little, too late in a sloppy, rain-soaked 11–7 loss marred by six fielding errors, three of them from Vogelsang himself. It should be noted that he made only seven all of last season, so it should raise legitimate questions about new General Manager Graham Luna’s off-season gamble to "get more glove-focused.” For all the talk of “range” and “run prevention,” this looked more like a team allergic to leather. Or simply unaware of how baseballs bounce on wet turf.
The next day featured more rain, and in this case, rain is not a cleanser. Game Six featured a 100-minute delay, and when the teams returned to the field, Sydney’s Buddy Uytenhage hit a home run and scored twice in a 6–2 win. Max Dawe, in his second start of the season, couldn’t overcome a three-run shot from Grigori Perunov in the third. The Gold fell to 1–5. Some fans fell silent. Others fell into their beer.
But baseball remains an opiate with a short memory, and on Game Seven, Johannesburg rediscovered its heartbeat. Back in Cairo, the Gold finally snapped their five-game slide with an 8–7 victory. It took everything they had. Antonio Roman delivered a thunderous three-run homer in the seventh inning to give the Gold the lead. Simao Hayagawa chipped in with his first home run of the season. Cairo’s Zhao-hui Mei did his best to ruin the evening, launching two homers and driving in four, but Bronson Beaton held on in relief for the win.
There was rain. There were seven errors in one game. But there was also a heartbeat.
Through seven games, the Gold are 2–5. The defense is porous. The pitching is volatile. The offense is equal parts boom and banality. But the stadium is full, the lights are on, and they’ve still got 155 chances to rewrite the story.
I’ll be here for every chapter, typing until the ribbon runs dry.
Until next week,
—Jakob