With the Red Sox stuck in idle, here’s a promising baseball story. All the way from Ireland

As baseball stories go — and they are legion in the annals of American literature, from Ring Lardner’s hilarious story “Alibi Ike” to Roger Kahn’s nostalgic memoir “The Boys of Summer” to Harry Stein’s overlooked “Hoopla” — this one might be hard to match.

The tale begins in Slovakia (homeland of former Bruins captain Zdeno Chara, and thus familiar to this Hub hockey fan), travels west to Ireland for a brief time, then comes to rest in Alberta, Canada, culminating in a seventh round selection, 216th pick overall, in the 2019 MLB amateur draft.

My own part in this baseball yarn is small and inconsequential.

But I’ll tell you about it anyway.  

Among my various tasks as a stay-at-home dad in Dublin in the early 2000s, I made sure to school my Irish-American son in the subtle arts of baseball. I undertook this essential skill-building as soon as he was able to fit a fielder’s mitt onto his miniature left hand. (For the record: Feeding, clothing, and counseling the boy — often on matters more important than sports — was also in my job description.)

To supplement his baseball education, I was directed to the Greystones Mariners club in County Wicklow, Ireland’s oldest promoter of America’s national pastime.

After a few practice sessions on the village green in Greystones, I came on board as coach and mentor to an interesting mix of boys and girls: Irish kids returning from life in the U.S. with a taste for baseball as well as relocated juvenile Yanks who wanted to pick up where they’d left off. We also included in our ranks youngsters who had never caught or thrown a ball of any description. There was no talk of training academies or elite travel teams. It was all for fun.

Then, in 2012, along came 11-year-old Bratislava-born Adam Macko. Adam’s devotion to the game caught his coaches in Ireland off guard. We’d never seen a kid operating at his skill level or with his determination.

As it turns out, Adam’s infatuation with baseball was something of a fluke. His initial experience of the game came in his home country during an elementary school Sports Day, which gave kids a taste of games popular in other countries. Adam was sufficiently impressed after a brief try-out and signed up for an introductory youth team.

This surprised his family. Slovakia’s main athletic pursuits are hockey and soccer and there were no established youth baseball leagues, so competitive games were going to be scarce.

A short time later, the Macko family arrived in Ireland — an English-speaking country that suited their plans for an eventual move to Canada — and through a quick Internet search Adam found the Greystones Mariners club. 

Adam’s English language skills at the time were only emerging, making his coaches’ rudimentary instruction even less enlightening, but our unlikely phenom’s interest in baseball only intensified as he studied online videos of fellow pitchers David Price and Justin Verlander. Meanwhile, our main aim as coaches was to get Adam to keep his fastball under control, out of concern for the safety of opposing batters.

After a year or so in Ireland, which included two seasons with the Mariners Little League team, Adam and his family emigrated again, this time to Alberta, another hockey stronghold but also a place with a strong baseball development system.

Adam soon drew the attention of coaches there, and he was approached to enroll at the Vauxhall Baseball Academy, an elite preparatory school that boasts on its website of a 100 percent graduation rate as well as 18 MLB draft picks. To no one’s surprise, Adam excelled at Vauxhall and then got the opportunity to take his talent and intelligence to Purdue University.

But Major League Baseball came calling. Adam chose to defer college, after being selected by the Seattle Mariners (a nice touch there) in the 2019 amateur draft, making him the first Irish youth player that I know of to scoop such an honor.

After performing well at minor league level for the Mariners, Adam was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in November 2022, and the determined southpaw would definitely have featured for the Jays in MLB’s most recent Spring Breakout Series except for an unfortunate knee injury in February. Still, Adam remains on course to contribute at Triple A level in 2025, according to MLB.com, with perhaps an appearance in the Bigs in September to shore up the Jays’ rotation depth.

I’d like to think I’m partly responsible — along with my coaching colleagues here — for Adam’s development, but that’s like saying a fellow who once shouted some general encouragement to Paul Skenes during his days as a high school hurler somehow contributed to his 2024 National League Rookie of the Year performance.

It’s a stretch.

But I’ll take it.

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest publication is the column collection “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations.”