Baseball Bats Put to Deadly Use in Poland

RADLIN, Poland — The first blow struck Krzysztof Jarzabek in the face and sent him tumbling into the brush. Dazed and hurting, he somehow knew to bury his head beneath his arms.

It probably saved his life. A baseball bat cracked against his shoulders. Another pounded his back. Then his forearms, his neck and his knuckles. Ten blows in all. Or maybe 15. Who could keep count?

“When it was finally over, I called out to my friends,” Jarzabek said. “There was no answer. I figured they had all gotten away.”

All but one. A few paces away, hidden in the willowy spring grass of a neighbor’s front yard, lay Remigiusz Thiem, a high school senior who would have graduated this week. When discovered at daybreak, Thiem’s body was so battered that the neighbor--a teacher at his school--did not recognize his own history student.

Thiem was killed last month when he and three friends were ambushed by soccer fans hunting down supporters of a rival club in this bleak Silesian coal-mining town near the Czech border. The late-night bludgeoning fits an unsettling pattern of baseball-bat violence across Poland: As the American national pastime gains popularity here, the palka baseballowa has emerged as a weapon of choice for hooligans, thugs, extortionists--even some ordinary citizens frantic about self-defense.

“What sort of thing is this baseball bat?” implored Romana Jarkulisz-Thiem, the 19-year-old’s teary stepmother, who had never laid eyes on a bat until the investigation of her stepson’s slaying. “He was black and blue everywhere. There was almost no blood, just a little running from his nose.”

First spurred by contacts with sport-crazed Cuba in the 1980s, baseball has become one of Poland’s fastest-growing sports since the collapse of communism here in 1989. There are more than 3,000 players enrolled in amateur and youth leagues nationwide. The U.S.-based Little League Baseball Inc. is building a $5.5-million international training center west of Warsaw--the first such facility outside North America. The Polish Baseball and Softball Assn., which has its headquarters about 10 miles from here, has been selected to host the 1999 European youth championships.

But success has come at an unexpected price.

The baseball-bat crime epidemic has grown so severe in recent months that municipal authorities in the southern city of Krakow have appealed to merchants to pull bats from shelves until the “fashion for violence” passes.

The extraordinary move is supported by the baseball association, which says the crime wave threatens the sport’s good name.

“It is a desecration of the game,” association President Jan Liszka said. “The relationship between a baseball player and his bat is something sacred. I can give you my word: No baseball player in Poland would use a bat for any purpose other than playing the game.”

Police concur. In the growing wave of baseball-bat crimes, authorities say they have found no link to the organized sport--beyond a morbid fascination with the lethal power of the bats, many of which are undersized knockoffs that can be purchased for as little as $3 at most sporting goods stores.

The palka baseballowa has figured prominently in police dispatches across the country this spring:

* An honors student at Jagiellonian University in Krakow riding on his bicycle was beaten to death in March by two 15-year-olds wielding bats. The boys, who had earlier terrorized an elderly woman at a bus stop, had been drinking beer and were looking “to do somebody,” police said.

* Thirty-seven police officers were injured, 76 people arrested and scores of baseball bats confiscated in April when drunken hooligans rampaged through the streets of Warsaw after a hotly contested soccer match. Polish television broadcast scenes of retreating police deflecting bats with riot shields.

* A postal carrier in the northwestern city of Szczecin was severely beaten with a baseball bat last month by a 21-year-old thief. The assailant fled with $700 in social security payments.

* About 200 thugs armed with baseball bats and hammers last month terrorized a popular cafe in Ciechocinek, a town in central Poland best known for its medicinal waters and elderly convalescents. About 50 police from neighboring towns were summoned to put down the clash, which was set off when the cafe owner refused repeated extortion demands.

* More than a dozen teenagers attacked three boys in March with baseball bats and knives in Nowa Huta, an industrial suburb of Krakow. A few weeks earlier, about 50 hooligans demolished a discotheque with baseball bats in a dispute with the club’s security guards.

* Four men are awaiting trial this month in Skawina, near Krakow, in the beating death of a restaurant bouncer. Police said the men pulled bats from their sleeves when the bouncer refused them admission; two other restaurant employees were seriously injured.

“Most often, the person who commits a crime with a baseball bat doesn’t even know about baseball as a game,” said Lt. Cezary Budny of the Krakow regional police, which began tracking bat crimes after the slaying of Jagiellonian student Michal Lysek brought thousands of protesters into the streets.

“The bats were being used first by skinheads, punks and criminal gangs. Then they spread to so-called soccer fans,” Budny said. “Then security guards and bouncers. Now when our officers stop motorists on routine patrols, they find bats in the trunks of ordinary citizens.”

Like the vast majority of Poles, Piotr Thiem, the anguished father of the slain student, occasionally watched baseball games on satellite television here in the plundered coal region of southern Poland.

But neither father nor son owned any baseball equipment or even understood the sport’s complex rules.

The elder Thiem first learned about violent adaptations of the bat several years ago when fellow workers showed up in the mines with bruised arms and legs. The men drank too much, Thiem said, and had been beaten by bouncers at the local discotheque. Later, father and son, who sometimes traveled to soccer matches together, began seeing bats in the stadiums as well.

“Finally, I refused to go to the matches anymore because I didn’t want to get hurt,” said Thiem, a burly man with tattooed forearms and piercing eyes, as he reverently unfolded Remigiusz’s favorite soccer scarf and jersey. “He still wanted to go, so I told him to be careful. . . .”

Choked by emotion, Thiem returned his son’s belongings to the bedroom, which under Silesian custom cannot be disturbed for 30 days. A homemade weight bench takes up most of the carpeted floor, with the barbell and weights stacked as Remigiusz had left them. History textbooks and classroom notes remain spread out on the desk; a history exam would have been the last before graduation.

In the hall, Thiem turned to Remigiusz’s 6-year-old brother, Sebastian, whose downcast face was shaded by the brim of a baseball cap, “Chicago” sewn across the front. “They killed my brother with a baseball bat,” the boy explained. “It’s just me and my sister now.”

Franciszek Marian Trela, a forensic expert at the Medical College of Jagiellonian University, said doctors have observed a surge in bat-related injuries over the past three years. Criminals have taken to bats, he said, because they are solid, deliver powerful blows and are easily handled and concealed.

Most of the bats referred by police and prosecutors to the Jagiellonian forensic laboratory are cheap imitations of the real thing, Trela said; a genuine Louisville slugger has yet to cross his desk. “The bats we are seeing would never hold up in a real game,” he said. “They are being manufactured and purchased for one purpose: To disable a person.”

An informal survey of sporting goods stores in several Polish cities supports Trela’s observation: Regulation baseball bats are virtually impossible to find, but inexpensive copies are abundant and come in a variety of handy sizes. Merchants say they are mostly imported, although Polish customs officials cannot track quantities since baseball equipment is classified simply as “other” under regulations for sporting goods.

Liszka, the baseball association president, said only a handful of shops in Poland carry genuine bats because serious players usually buy them directly from the association, which imports bats, gloves and balls from the United States and Taiwan and sells them at cost to teams.

About 90% of bats used by the Polish leagues, moreover, are made of aluminum, not the hardwood preferred by criminals, he said. The difference in quality is also dramatic: Wooden bats imported by the association cost 10 times more than those sold in retail outlets.

“There are bats in shops only because some people choose to profit from negative phenomena,” Liszka said.

Sporting goods stores that offer baseball “sets”--a package including a ball, glove and bat--report that they rarely sell, while bats marketed separately are a hot item among youths, some of whom even slip them under their sleeves for size as shop attendants look on.

“They buy them for beating,” said Lidia Garus, a sales clerk at the Victoria sporting goods store in Rybnik, where Remigiusz Thiem attended school. “We purchase them wholesale. All sizes. Whatever is available at the warehouse.”

Is it possible that Thiem’s attackers--11 teens were involved in the ambush, two of whom have been charged in his death--purchased their weapons at the Victoria shop?

Garus fell silent, raising her shoulders indefinitely. “It could have been,” another clerk offered from across the sales floor.

At the high school, principal Jan Delong said Thiem was a popular student with average grades who had ambitious plans to become a lawyer. His love for soccer, in particular the local Ruch Chorzow team, was well known, but Thiem was by no means a “soccer hooligan,” Delong said.

Even so, the principal canceled a memorial march for Thiem, fearing it could turn violent if it attracted soccer fans from outside the school. About 2,000 people, many of them Ruch Chorzow fans from across Poland, attended the student’s funeral, which the Radlin priest insisted be held on a weekday to keep the turnout down.

Delong said Thiem’s killing stems from a growing “aggressiveness and brutality” among young people in Poland, reflected in everything from insolence toward teachers to bloody fistfights in the hallways. School officials lay most blame on parents, who have less time for their children as they struggle to meet the demands--and pleasures--of making do in Poland’s new free market.

“This freedom came too soon to Poland,” said Thiem’s father, tearfully studying a dogeared snapshot of Remigiusz at a summer job picking blueberries in Germany. “It was too sudden and abrupt. We are behaving like wild animals freed all at once.”