Cedar Rapids native Phil Richmond chases pro baseball dreams in Poland

WARSAW, Poland — As a teenager, Phil Richmond hung around the minor-league ballpark in Cedar Rapids, collecting autographs of future Angels such as the late Nate Adenhart in 2006 and getting to videotape an interview with Mike Trout.

“I also grew up right near where the field is at Coe,” said Richmond, who played there after attending Kirkwood Community College.

A 2008 Washington High graduate, Richmond also grew up hearing Polish spoken by his maternal grandparents who had emigrated from Poland in Eastern Europe after World War II.

Now 34, Richmond never dreamed he would end up living in Poland and chasing his baseball dreams as a right-handed pitcher and sometimes position player.

“I had no idea baseball existed in Poland,” said Richmond, who played pro independent ball in New Mexico, Washington state, New York state and California before taking the mound for the first time in Poland in 2019.

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On a recent Saturday morning, Richmond sat in a French coffee shop in the capital of Warsaw, a city of about 1.8 million that saw about 85 percent of its buildings destroyed during World War II but is now called the New York City of Eastern Europe by some admirers.

After playing for a club in Australia, he used a website that helps mostly American baseball players find jobs overseas. He had hoped to play in Italy or the Netherlands, two of the top countries for baseball in Europe, but wound up in Poland — which did not qualify for the 16-team European championships last summer in the Czech Republic.

“Baseball in Poland? I thought it would be a good reason to go to Europe,” Richmond said.

Richmond is one of the few Americans to play in the Polish league in the past few years. Another one last season was Matt Foster, who played at East Central University in his native Oklahoma.

Polish American Ray Wojtala knows how unusual it is for an American to play baseball in Poland.

“When I came to Poland over 10 years ago, there weren’t very many Americans playing baseball in Poland and it was rare for a team to have a full-time player,” Wojtala, who lives in southern Poland, wrote to The Gazette. “Now, it is still uncommon, but we see teams investing in bringing in full-time players from the U.S. as well as other countries to be competitive in Poland as well as at international tournaments.

“The challenges here are plentiful, but I think the biggest is how teams and players approach the sport. Players usually are not full-time players and have jobs or families, which means that baseball is not a priority for a lot of players but rather a passion. It is also difficult to get the sport into schools, which is key to getting younger children involved and interested. The language barrier is the smallest issue as just about everyone can speak basic English if they are not already fluent.”

Thanks to his experience at the college and pro level — a rarity for Polish players — Richmond was a coach for national team of Poland in 2022 at a tournament in Belgrade, Serbia.

That is a long way from the field of Cedar Rapids.

From indy ball to Poland

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Richmond was not highly recruited out of high school or while at Kirkwood.

“I really thought I was going to go Division II, at Tarleton State” at one point, he said. “There were some issues with recruiting.”

Richmond, after transferring from Coe, ended his college career at Judson, an NAIA school near Chicago.

His first pro experience took place with two teams in the New Mexico PECO Indy league in 2013. He posted a record of 0-1 with an ERA of 6.23 in 13 games with no starts and three saves.

The next year he returned to Raton, also in the PECO, and was 2-6, 8.73 in 25 games with seven starts.

Richmond then pitched for Ellensburg, Wash., in the short-lived Mount Rainier League in 2015. He was 0-1, 9.32 in two starts.

He played for a club team in Australia in 2016-17 then for Sullivan in the Empire League in 2017 in New York.

The right-hander made his first appearance in the Pacific Association with Martinez, near San Francisco, in 2018 and was 2-1, 5.40 in 21 games out of the bullpen. His home games were at Joe DiMaggio Field, named after the Yankees’ Hall of Famer.

The next season, 2019, he played in Poland for the first time with a team in Kutno — about 80 miles west of Warsaw.

While with the team in Kutno until the beginning of last season, he played his home games at Stan Musial Field.

A Hall of Famer with the Cardinals, Musial was born in western Pennsylvania to a mother of East Slavic descent and a father who was a Polish immigrant.

Musial, after his retirement, came to Kutno in 1987 to give a clinic to Polish youth. He was accommodated by Moe Drabowsky, a former pitcher who broke into the majors with the Cubs in 1956.

Drabowsky is one of just four natives of Poland to play in the majors and the only one to appear in the World Series, in 1966 with the champion Orioles. He was the winning pitcher in Game 1 out of the bullpen. He was born in 1935 and left southeast Poland in 1938 with his American mother as Hitler was coming to power in Germany. Drabowsky’s Polish father joined the family about a year later in Connecticut; Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

Drabowsky grew up on a small farm with his parents in Ozanna, Poland.

“They were raising chickens in their backyard,” Rita Drabowsky, a widow of Moe, said in a telephone interview from Florida. “He was out there and that was just toys for him at 2 or 3 years old. It was not a big farm thing; it was just raising these chickens. As a little boy, he would be out there playing.”

Drabowsky died in 2006, Musial in 2013.

“I didn’t know about him going to Poland before I came here,” Richmond said of Musial.

Aiming for the Poland national team

Richmond had been commuting several times a week from Warsaw to play in Kutno, a town of about of 40,000 people.

Last season, Richmond switched to a club in Warsaw — Centaury. He had to miss a few games due to complicated transfer rules, but Richmond was eventually able to suit up for Centaury.

He is back with the team this season and there is plenty of international flavor with players. Richmond said the club includes a few players with American fathers, and players with Venezuelan, Korean, Japanese, Russian and Ukrainian roots.

He once had a fastball that reached the mid-90s, but after some shoulder problems he is happy these days if he can reach the upper 80s. With his U.S. college background, Richmond sees action as a position player when he is not pitching.

“I had not hit in like 10 years; it has been a learning experience,” said Richmond, who bats from both sides.

The level of play in Poland is certainly several steps below NCAA Division I college baseball in the United States.

“The high-end talent here could be at star at a competitive (junior college) like Kirkwood,” he said.

And while making the Polish national team this year is not likely or even a goal, Richmond is aiming to do just that before he stops playing.

“I figure I have four more good years left to do it,” said Richmond, who has applied for his Polish residence permit.

The Polish national team will play this July in the WBSC Europe baseball event in Kutno. The new manager for Poland (one does not need Polish roots) is former Major League pitcher Dennis Cook, who began his minor league career in Clinton while in the Giants’ system in 1985.

While his maternal grandparents, who came to the U.S. in 1951, have both died, Richmond has taken a real interest in the history of their native land. They both experienced pain during World War II.

“My grandmother and her family were taken out of Poland when the Soviets were pushing back the Germans,” he said. “When the war ended, they were in Germany and not repatriated to Poland. Their mother had tuberculosis and signed all the children over to an orphanage. They were sent to live in different places.

“My grandma and her sister were sent to live in Iowa City. My grandfather’s story is trickier. What we know is that his mother was taken to Germany as a forced laborer before the war ended. My grandfather was still in Poland and did not leave until 1948.”

Richmond has stronger ties to Poland these days since he got married last year and his Polish wife, Aleksandra, is an English teacher in Warsaw while he focuses on baseball.

“I have always been curious about World War II,” said Richmond, a history major in college. “What I learned is not the Polish perspective which I am aware of now. Being able to study here, and have more Polish sources now, it really increases my knowledge of the events and that era of history. I did not know too much about Polish history” before coming in 2019.

Baseball now is one way to bridge that gap between his late grandparents and the Europe they grew up in, as Poland suffered untold horrors during World War II.

“I tried to ask my grandparents about these things. My grandfather would have this line: ‘I do not want to talk about it. That is in the past.’ I think it was traumatic enough for him,” said Richmond, on a Saturday afternoon at a modern coffee shop in modern Warsaw.