A Soccer Ball Catcher's Mitt and 30 Years of Hungarian Baseball

Baseball Europe
Feb 7
5 min read

Balazs Halmos of the Budapest Red Wolves sat down with Paul and Matthias to tell the story no federation report ever will.

This episode is a full guest interview — and it's worth listening to in its entirety. Balazs Halmos, second baseman for the Red Wolves of Budapest, joined Paul and Matthias to give an insider account of Hungarian baseball's origins and the governance crisis that's currently tearing it apart. What follows is the written version, but the conversation goes deeper. You can find the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Balazs Halmos didn't know what a catcher was when he agreed to become one. He was 16, in between classes at his Hungarian high school, when a classmate asked if he wanted to join a baseball team. There was no equipment. There was barely a team. There was definitely no league. He said yes anyway — and proceeded to fashion himself a catcher's mitt out of an old soccer ball.

Thirty-something years later, he's still playing. Now as a second baseman for the Red Wolves of Budapest, and now very much at the centre of the most dramatic governance crisis in Hungarian baseball's history.

How Hungarian Baseball Actually Started

Forget the polished origin stories. Baseball arrived in Hungary in the early 90s the way a lot of things did in post-communist Central Europe: scrappy, improvised, and held together with goodwill and whatever sporting goods you could get your hands on.

Balazs and his high school friends started with three-on-three games in a meadow near the city. When they got enough players to need a proper setup, they searched for information on how the sport actually worked — and found a single short article in a Hungarian sports newspaper mentioning that a Hungarian Baseball Federation had just been established. They called the number. Just like that.

"We are a bunch of kids wanting to play baseball — and how is this whole thing going on in Hungary?"

The first season they entered had four clubs. The second season, they were one of them.

There was one small legal wrinkle: to join the federation as an official organisation, you needed to be a registered entity. And to be a registered entity, you needed someone over 18 to be president. Their entire team was under 18. So the one guy old enough to sign the paperwork became president by default.

No Gloves, No Fields, No Problem (Sort Of)

The early years were not pretty. Balazs watched footage from that first season recently — recorded on VHS by his father — and described it as genuinely painful to sit through. Nobody was coached. Nobody knew what they were doing. The team played on a public park on an island in Budapest where the national champion club of the era, the Budapest Islanders, would set up bases in the middle of picnickers and politely ask families to move their blankets so a championship game could begin.

Equipment was the other challenge. No baseball gloves were sold in Hungary. Members scrounged what they could — a relative in the US might send a package, something might turn up in Germany or Austria. And then there was the DIY approach. Balazs's catcher's mitt made from a soccer ball is already podcast legend. In Bulgaria, we later learned, they were playing with hockey pucks wrapped in electrical tape as baseballs. European baseball's early adopters were nothing if not resourceful.

The real turning point came when Japanese volunteer coaches arrived through the JOCV — a Japanese voluntary organisation that sent people to less-developed countries to help with whatever was needed. Some of them happened to want to coach baseball. They learned Hungarian before they arrived and spent years teaching the game to teams that had previously been entirely self-taught. For context on just how committed these coaches were: Hungarian is considered one of the hardest languages on the planet for Western European speakers. The Japanese coaches, apparently, had other thoughts.

"Hungarian was somehow much easier for them to learn than English."

Make of that what you will, Paul.

Building a Field, Building a League

Getting a field was, for years, the deciding factor in whether a club survived. Teams that secured a permanent ground absorbed the players from teams that couldn't. Balazs's club eventually got an old municipal soccer field in Szentendre, a small town near Budapest, which they converted by hand — digging out base paths, building a backstop, adding fences — all voluntary labour, entirely self-taught, pre-YouTube.

The Hungarian National Championship grew quickly: four clubs in year one, 20-something by year three, then a rapid culling as the realities of field access hit home. But the teams that survived started to notice a shared problem. With only two or three genuinely competitive clubs in Hungary, most games weren't developing anyone. You can only learn so much from blowout wins.

The solution was the Interleague — a cross-border competition idea originally championed by a Croatian player named Krunoslav Kari, who would later become Secretary General of WBSC Europe. Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary started playing each other. Slovakia joined. Occasionally, Austrian teams came in. For years, this was where Hungarian baseball found its real competition — and it's the same framework that, ironically, the expelled clubs now use to play in the Slovak Extra Liga.

The Scandal, From the Inside

Balazs was careful with his words — and upfront about the limits of what he could say publicly — but his account of the 2024 federation crisis filled in some crucial gaps from what Paul and Matthias had reported in the previous episode.

The June 2024 revote wasn't just cancelled for vague "technical reasons." According to Balazs, club representatives showed up to a hotel on the morning of the scheduled election and received an email — before they'd even walked in — saying the facility couldn't host the event. The hotel staff had no idea what was going on. The federation had called it off.

The eventual July 2024 election that brought in Dr. Nando Tordi as president happened with 14 new member organisations having joined the federation in the preceding weeks — not the 5 initially reported. None of them were traditional baseball clubs.

When the four established clubs - Budapest Reds, Debrecen Tigers, Érd Aeros and Sleepwalkers - announced they wouldn't participate in the Hungarian Championship under those circumstances, the new board didn't negotiate. They excluded them. Not just from the championship, which would have been within their rights, but from the federation entirely — something Balazs argues was legally overreach.

"If we allow this to happen with us, then we lose our integrity or dignity or whatever. So this is just something that is not acceptable in any means."

The clubs went to the civil courts. The courts ordered the federation board to be suspended. But the board was also not really cooperating. Which left Hungarian baseball in 2025 in a state of mutual paralysis — a suspended board, clubs playing in a foreign league, a national team cobbled together from whoever was still technically eligible, and a 26-2 loss to Austria as the public result of it all.

Is There a Way Out?

Balazs didn't pretend to have all the answers. Some things, he said, he couldn't discuss publicly. But on the question of whether a reconciliation with the current federation leadership was possible:

"That will not happen."

Not a while. Not eventually. Not happening.

What might still be salvageable is the national team. There's no shortage of talented players — including Hungarian-heritage players based abroad who want to represent the country. The issue, as Balazs framed it, isn't interest or availability. It's politics and who controls the selection process.

If the legal situation stabilises and the federation board remains suspended, there may be a path. But Hungarian baseball has been thirty-plus years in the making, and it may take a few more yet to untangle.