I Walked Away From a Baseball Club. Then I Accidentally Built One.

How a falling-out in a small Thai baseball team led to Bangkok Catchball Club—and something much bigger than I expected.

There is an alternate version of 2026 where Bangkok Catchball Club doesn't exist.

No Saturday morning catchball.

No jerseys.

No group chats.

No scrambling around Bangkok looking for fields.

No 30-plus people turning up with gloves.

No MONOMAX camera crew.

No Bangkok Catchball Club players finding their way onto rosters at the Baseball Thailand Championship.

Nothing.

And strangely enough, that version of reality probably exists if things had simply gone better for me at my previous baseball club.

Bangkok Catchball Club wasn't something I'd been secretly planning.

I didn't leave one club thinking, Fine. I'll make my own.

There was no five-year plan. No market research. No membership target. No business model.

I walked away from a situation I no longer wanted to be part of.

Then I thought:

What if we just got some people together and played catch?

That was basically the business plan.

And somehow, here we are.

First, you need to understand baseball in Thailand

Baseball is tiny here.

And when I say tiny, I mean tiny.

Thailand doesn't have a professional baseball league. The people playing adult baseball aren't doing it for salaries or contracts. We're amateurs. People have jobs, families, university, businesses and everything else going on in their lives, and then they sacrifice some combination of their money, weekends and sleep because they really, really like baseball.

That also means the community is small enough that people tend to know each other.

Players know players.

Coaches know coaches.

People move between teams.

Someone you've played against may eventually become someone you play alongside.

There aren't hundreds of adult clubs scattered around Bangkok where you can have a falling-out with one group and simply disappear into another corner of the baseball universe.

So relationships matter.

And unfortunately, so does reputation.

That's important for what happened next.

ARUN

Before Bangkok Catchball Club, I played with ARUN Baseball Team.

At first, I was simply happy to have somewhere to play baseball.

Over time, though, I increasingly found myself clashing with the way things were being run, particularly with the coach.

The moment that really changed things involved money.

I had offered to personally sponsor the club.

Now, remember: this is amateur baseball.

Nobody is being paid to play.

Players are the ones paying.

So my thinking was straightforward. If I was going to put my own money into the club, I wanted that sponsorship to benefit the players by helping reduce their membership fees.

That mattered to me.

The coach wanted to redirect the sponsorship elsewhere.

I disagreed.

This should have been a boring administrative disagreement.

It wasn't.

What followed became increasingly personal.

My intentions were questioned. My character was scrutinized. I experienced behavior I regarded as manipulative, including repeated attempts to make me question whether my understanding of events was somehow unreasonable.

There was bullying.

There were attempts to discredit me.

There was what I saw as a smear campaign within an already very small baseball community.

And there were threats.

The interesting thing about threats is that sometimes people make them because they're convinced you won't do anything.

I don't think the coach expected me to act.

I did.

But eventually, something else clicked.

Why was I fighting this hard to remain somewhere that was making me miserable?

Nobody was paying me to be there.

This wasn't my livelihood.

This wasn't Major League Baseball.

We were grown adults playing amateur baseball on our weekends.

At some point, the absurdity of it becomes impossible to ignore.

So I left.

In May 18, 2026, my time with ARUN was over.

And then…nothing

There wasn't some triumphant movie moment immediately afterward.

I didn't walk away in slow motion while inspirational music played and then dramatically unveil the Bangkok Catchball Club logo.

I just wasn't part of ARUN anymore.

And I still loved baseball.

That was the problem.

I didn't want the politics.

I didn't want the hierarchy.

I didn't want to spend ridiculous amounts of money just for the privilege of participating in an amateur sport.

But I still wanted to throw a baseball.

So I started thinking about something much smaller.

Not even a team.

Just a gathering.

People could bring their gloves.

I'd bring baseballs.

We'd play catch.

That's it.

May 23, 2026

The first Bangkok Catchball Club gathering took place at Lumphini Park.

Even calling it a "club" at that point was probably generous.

We were people in a park with baseball gloves.

I didn't know whether people would keep coming.

I didn't know whether we'd last a month.

I wasn't thinking about growth.

I certainly wasn't thinking about media exposure or tournaments.

I wanted to test one idea:

Could baseball be made easier to enter?

Because baseball has a problem that people who already play it sometimes forget about.

It's intimidating.

You need equipment.

The rules are complicated.

Throwing is difficult.

Catching a hard ball flying toward your face is not exactly instinctive.

Joining an established team as a complete beginner can be terrifying.

And in Thailand, where the baseball community is already tiny, making entry even harder seemed completely backwards to me.

So BCC started with a philosophy that remains important to me:

Baseball should be for everyone.

And:

No one should pay more than necessary to experience baseball.

Eventually, we found an even simpler way to say it:

JUST BRING A GLOVE. WE'LL BRING THE BALLS.

Then people wouldn't stop showing up

This is the part I didn't anticipate.

People came.

Then they came again.

Then more people came.

By Week 3, we had 21.

Eventually, we started seeing sessions with more than 30 people.

Experienced baseball players showed up.

Complete beginners showed up.

People who hadn't played in years showed up.

People brought friends.

Players lent gloves to people who didn't have them.

Experienced players started teaching newcomers without me having to tell them to.

And suddenly I had a completely different problem.

We were running out of park.

BCC had started in public spaces because they were accessible and cheap.

But there is a limit to how many people can safely throw baseballs around in a public park.

At some point, "Wow, look how many people came!" becomes "Oh God, where am I going to put everybody?"

So we moved.

Proper rented spaces entered the picture.

Which meant costs entered the picture.

And registrations.

And attendance management.

And scheduling.

And equipment logistics.

And safety rules.

And budgeting.

And the realization that apparently I had accidentally given myself a second job.

The 100-baht question

Once we started renting spaces, completely free sessions were no longer sustainable.

This was important to me because I didn't want BCC to recreate the very barriers I had become frustrated with elsewhere.

So we introduced an attendance fee.

100 baht.

No annual membership.

No big upfront commitment.

Come when you want to play.

Pay toward the cost of making that particular session happen.

That model isn't revolutionary.

But it reflects what I want BCC to be.

I don't want someone wondering:

Am I good enough to justify joining?

What if I pay for membership and then realize baseball isn't for me?

What if I can't attend every week?

Just come.

Try it.

See what happens.

If you love it, come back.

At some point, I stopped being able to call it "my" club

Something changed as the weeks passed.

I can't identify exactly when.

Bangkok Catchball Club stopped being a thing I was organizing for people.

People started treating it like their place too.

That difference matters enormously.

People welcomed newcomers before I could.

People helped each other.

People made friends independently of me.

People started caring whether BCC succeeded.

And that's when I realized something I wish more people in leadership positions understood:

You can found an organization. You cannot personally manufacture a community.

A community exists because other people decide it does.

I could book a field.

I could buy baseballs.

I could make posters.

I could create registration forms.

I could write rules.

I could design jerseys.

I could coordinate everything down to the last detail.

None of that would make BCC a community.

The people did that.

My role increasingly became creating the conditions that allowed it to happen.

That changed my understanding of leadership more than any management book ever has.

Then MONOMAX found us

This one still makes me laugh a little.

Because remember where this started.

People.

Gloves.

Lumphini Park.

That's it.

Then one day, Bangkok Catchball Club was discovered by MONOMAX.

And BCC ended up getting its own segment on Her Vibes.

Suddenly, I was sitting with two hosts with a camera crew pointed at us, being interviewed about Bangkok Catchball Club.

There are moments when you're living through something and part of your brain briefly steps outside your body and asks:

How exactly did we get here?

That was one of them.

We hadn't engineered some elaborate media campaign.

We weren't selling anything.

We weren't a professional sports organization.

We were a grassroots community centered around an amateur sport that most people in Thailand barely think about.

And someone thought our story was worth putting on camera.

That meant a lot.

Not because I wanted to be on television.

But because it meant people outside our little baseball bubble could understand why this community mattered.

Then BCC players went to the Baseball Thailand Championship

This may be the part that means the most to me.

BCC was never designed to produce competitive baseball players.

We're not an academy.

We're not trying to turn every newcomer into an elite athlete.

And I never want competitive ambition to become another barrier to entry.

If you want to come every week, play catch for two hours, have fun and never enter a tournament in your life?

Fantastic.

You've understood BCC perfectly.

But some people want more.

And because BCC brings people into contact with Thailand's wider baseball community, opportunities started appearing.

Eventually, members of Bangkok Catchball Club were able to join teams participating in the Baseball Thailand Championship.

That completed a pathway I hadn't even realized we were building.

Imagine someone entering BCC simply because they are curious about baseball.

They show up with a glove.

Maybe they barely know how to throw.

Someone helps them.

They return.

They improve.

They meet players.

They become part of the community.

And one day, if they want it badly enough, they can find themselves stepping onto the field at a national baseball tournament.

That's incredible to me.

Not because everyone needs to reach that point.

But because now they can.

The door is open.

How far someone walks through it is entirely up to them.

The irony isn't lost on me

Sometimes I think about why BCC exists at all.

It came from a horrible experience.

There was a period where I was angry.

Really angry.

There was a temptation to fight every accusation, correct every story and prove every point.

But eventually, that stopped mattering.

Because I had something better to spend my energy on.

I could have dedicated months to fighting over what happened at ARUN.

Instead, I built the alternative.

And the alternative started growing.

The irony is that the experience intended to make me feel as though I was the problem ultimately pushed me into creating an environment where I could test my own ideas about how a baseball community should work.

No theory.

No arguments.

Just:

Fine. Let's try it.

Some ideas worked.

Some didn't.

We've changed things repeatedly.

We'll change things again.

That's part of it.

Baseball accidentally taught me how to lead

My day job is in content and corporate communications.

I never expected baseball to become one of the places where I'd develop some of my most practical professional skills.

BCC has forced me to learn community management.

Event operations.

Venue coordination.

Budgeting.

Branding.

Merchandise development.

Supplier management.

Social media communications.

Partnerships.

Stakeholder management.

Conflict resolution.

Logistics.

Decision-making.

And, perhaps most importantly, leadership.

Not the LinkedIn version of leadership where someone posts a photograph of a lion and writes something about "mindset."

Actual leadership.

The kind where 30 people are coming on Saturday and something has gone wrong.

The kind where you make a decision and immediately discover why it was a bad one.

The kind where someone disagrees with you and sometimes they're right.

The kind where nobody notices when everything works but everybody notices when it doesn't.

And the kind where you slowly understand:

Leadership isn't ownership.

A title doesn't make a community yours.

Being the founder doesn't make every idea you have correct.

People aren't there to validate you.

If you're responsible for a community, you serve the community.

Not the other way around.

What happens next?

I genuinely don't know.

And I've grown comfortable saying that.

When we started at Lumphini Park, I didn't predict 21 people by Week 3.

I didn't predict 30-plus-person sessions.

I didn't predict renting fields.

I didn't predict merchandise.

I didn't predict MONOMAX.

I didn't predict the Baseball Thailand Championship.

So I'm not going to pretend I have some grand vision where I know exactly what Bangkok Catchball Club looks like three years from now.

Maybe it gets much bigger.

Maybe it stays roughly where it is.

Maybe new programs emerge from it.

Maybe people currently attending BCC eventually start communities of their own.

I'd actually love that.

Because the goal was never to build an empire.

It was to make baseball easier to experience.

And every person who picks up a baseball because BCC made that first step a little less intimidating is a win.

Walking away

There's one final thing I've thought about a lot.

We're often taught that walking away means losing.

You couldn't handle it.

You gave up.

Someone else won.

I don't see it that way anymore.

Leaving ARUN felt terrible at the time.

There was anger, frustration and uncertainty about what my relationship with Thailand's already-small baseball community would look like afterward.

But if I hadn't left, I probably wouldn't have asked myself what kind of baseball environment I actually wanted.

I wouldn't have tried that first gathering.

There might never have been Bangkok Catchball Club.

No overflowing parks.

No community.

No MONOMAX.

No BCC members at the Baseball Thailand Championship.

All of that grew out of something that, at the time, felt entirely negative.

So if there's one lesson I take from this strange journey, it's this:

Sometimes walking away isn't giving up.

Sometimes the thing you're walking away from has become so consuming that you haven't noticed how many possibilities exist outside it.

And sometimes you don't need to defeat the person on the other side.

You don't need the last word.

You don't need everyone to agree with your version of events.

Sometimes the best answer is simply to go somewhere else and build according to your own principles.

That's what I did.

On May 23, 2026, we went to a park and played catch.

I had no idea what would happen next.

Bangkok Catchball Club began as an alternative.

The people turned it into a community.

And I think that's a much better ending to that story.

Or, hopefully, just the beginning.