Clair ’09 Pens Book on Czech Republic’s Historic Baseball Run

Michael Clair ’09 has loved baseball ever since he was a child, but this Writing, Literature & Publishing alum never expected to build his professional career around it.

Today, he’s a reporter for MLB.com and his debut book, We Sacrifice Everything to Baseball: How the Czech Republic’s Amateur Underdogs Became World Baseball Classic Heroes, will be released next month.

“I started writing about baseball, initially as a side hobby,” said Clair, who moved to Los Angeles after graduation to work on various comedy productions before his love for the sport led him to create the Old Time Family Baseball blog.  

“It was to keep in touch with my Emerson roommates since we talked about baseball and we’d watch it together, and I missed doing that. So at first it was going to be this blog that we all could write on. I ended up writing a lot and I started to gain a bit of a following,” he said.

That blog led to freelance writing gigs, and he was eventually hired as a reporter for Major League Baseball, which is how Clair found himself in Germany in 2022, covering the World Baseball Classic qualifiers. There, he started covering—and was inspired by—the Czech team, leading him to write his book.

Clair said he was drawn to the team’s underdog status in the tournament. What impressed him the most was their lack of “professional players”—the roster included firefighters, teachers, neurologists, and others juggling careers and responsibilities far beyond the game.

Despite the team consisting of non-major-league talent, it delivered remarkable performances, such as when Ondřej Satoria struck out Japan’s otherworldly baseball star, and now Major League Baseball superstar, Shohei Ohtani.

Clair shared many moments with the team, including the 2023 WBC in Tokyo, where they made Czech Republic baseball history with their first-ever WBC win by defeating China. 

“Their whole lives are baseball. But to me, the thing that’s most captivating is who they are as people, the devotion they have to the game and to each other,” said Clair. “They say they are a family, and it is true, that team is a family.”

Clair, who focuses on covering baseball at the international level, said he enjoys the cultural aspect of the sport. “I have friends in Greece who play baseball, or the Czech Republic, and you see the sacrifices they have to make to play baseball because it’s not popular,” said Clair. “And I think that just leads to great stories.”

Clair knew that the journey of the Czech Republic team was a great story, even before deciding to write a book. He said he hopes that readers are as inspired by the players’ devotion and sacrifice as he is.

“This is a group of people who were not chasing fame. They were not chasing a book. They weren’t chasing a chance to go play against Shohei Ohtani. They just wanted to play baseball and they sacrificed everything for it,” said Clair. “I think what I would want people to take away from this [story] is whatever that is to you—whether it’s baseball or writing or cycling or raising children—whatever it is, devote yourself entirely and you will get the best reward.”

The Czech Republic team will continue to take swings on the international level in this year’s World Baseball Classic beginning March 5.

The team is again a heavy underdog in the tournament, and nobody knows it better than Michael Clair ’09.