Bima bullish on Medicine Hat
Published Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016 10:32 a.m.
Bima takes national pastime north of the border
By Kevin Hieronymus
Bureau County Republican
khieronymus@bcrnews.com
Logan Bima grew up on the ball fields in Princeton playing for his dad’s youth teams and later in area travel leagues, St. Bede Academy and IVCC.
He’s now taking our national pastime across the borders to Canada.
Bima, 21, is playing for the Medicine Hat Mavericks (Alberta, Canada) of the Western Major Baseball League, which is regarded as Canada’s preeminent summer collegiate baseball league. He had planned on trying to find a team in Illinois to play for, but was steered to Medicine Hat from his coach at Upper Iowa University.
The WMBL, a wooden bat league, boasts a long standing tradition of creating a showcase for top Canadian pro and college prospects while offering American college players like Bima the opportunity to hone their skills in front of enthusiastic fans in towns and cities throughout the Canadian Prairies.
“The coaches are all Canadian, and it’s run like a professional team,” Bima said. “We have three different sets of uniforms and have a clubhouse. We take charter buses to games, and stay in hotels on road trips. It’s a long and tiring season, but it gives you the feel of how it would be to play professionally.”
There are 16 Americans on the Mavericks’ 22-man roster, coming from all over the U.S., mixed in with six native Canadians. The Mavericks’ average about 900 fans weeknights and 1,400 weekends from all ages who Bima said really get into the game.
“People are very polite up here, and the town is pretty clean for its size (65,000),” Bima said. “It’s cool to have little kids and their parents wanting you to sign balls, hats, gloves and stuff. Kids also go crazy if you throw them a ball or give them a broken bat,” Bima said.
There are 12 teams in the WMBL split evenly between the Western (Alberta) and Eastern (Saskatchewan) divisions. The Mavericks (30-17) finishing second in the West, three games behind the Okotoks Dawgs (33-14),
The Mavericks swept the first round best-of-five series over the Lethbridge Bulls Tuesday night. Their first two wins were walk-offs in extra innings.
While the Mavericks didn’t have to make the 14-hour trip to MacMurray, Alberta, this year, they often have to travel six hours to play ball, Bima said.
Bima said the calibre is similar to the collegiate league he played in Colorado last summer since there’s so many Americans playing there.
“The ball flew all over the place in Colorado, but the ball doesn’t carry like that here. These are stadiums and not just fields,” he said.
Bima, who is playing first base for the Mavericks, homered in his very first game on Canadian soil. He stands second on the team in homers (four) and among the team leaders in RBIs (29). He had a walk-off hit on July 23 in front of the home crowd against Lethbridge (visit @bcrsportsed on twitter for this link: https://twitter.com/search?q=Logan%20Bima&src=typd). He also homered in the July 23 game.
He was a featured guest on the Mavericks insider TV show, and talked about learning the game playing with his dad back home in Princeton, Ill., and being able to connect with his dad. He described his hometown as “nice place to grow up.”
Bima’s role on the show was to teach the host how to hit a baseball. He said when it comes to hitting, you can’t be afraid to fail, because even the best hitters only get a hit three out of 10 times.
“It’s not the easiest thing to do, but for some reason it’s a lot of fun doing it,” he said. “It’s best not to think and to just do and you build instinct off that.”
When it comes to hitting homers, Bima said it always “feels good to jog around the bases rather than to run at full speed because obviously I don’t like to run.”
Bima and his fellow Americans are still learning the ways of life in Canada.
“The biggest surprise to me is the usage of coins instead of dollar bills for one and two dollars,” Bima said. “They have the Looney, $1 and the Tooney, $2. Otherwise they have the regular 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100s. They also round to the nearest five cents so either 5.80 or 5.85 for example. There is no. 5.83 or odd number, unless you pay with a card.”
It’s also taken awhile to get use to driving around with the metric system with speed limits and distances shown in kilometers, Bima said, and paying for gas in liters.
And then there’s all the “ehs” thrown out in every day conversations.
“’Hey’ and ‘eh’ get used a lot as well as saying ‘sorry’ for no reason,” Bima said. “They use Cs in certain spellings like defence instead of defense and centre instead of center.”
However you say it, or spell it, Bima is enjoying his time playing the game he loves north of the border. He will return to the States when the playoffs are complete, transferring for his senior year to Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa.
Kevin Hieronymus is the BCR Sports Editor. Contact him at khieronymus@bcrnews.com.