Groener

Three years out of college, former Bend High baseball standout David Groener was living the good life in Texas.

Just 27 years old, Groener was a vice president of an oil exploration company, working on the 25th floor of a high-rise building in downtown Austin. He had given professional baseball a whirl following his playing days at Texas Tech, but after a stint in Australia and a summer in the independent Frontier League, his competitive days on the diamond were done — or so he thought.

“I got a phone call from a friend in Australia,” says the 29-year-old Groener, recounting the 2012 conversation that reshaped his life. “He’d seen me in Bend, working with kids, and said they needed a shortstop for the upcoming season.”

That was music to Groener’s ears. The former Lava Bear trained for four months before eventually quitting his oil job and heading off to Perth, Australia, to join the Wembley Magpie Baseball Club.

He has been playing professionally overseas ever since.

“It’s funny,” says Groener via Skype from Valencia, Spain, the home of his current team. “I hadn’t played in a while, but I did OK and won the gold glove of the league over there.”

Being in the Southern Hemisphere, Groener’s Australian league ran from October 2012 to March 2013. His play at shortstop got the attention of the Valencia Astros, for whom he competed in spring and summer 2013. After a winter of surfing in San Diego, Groener this past March headed back to Valencia, where he is hitting .41l with a team-high 14 doubles through the Astros’ first 24 games.

“It’s a unique league,” Groener says about the Spanish Division de Honor, a nine-team league made up mostly of Cuban, Dominican and Venezuelan ballplayers. Groener and an Astros teammate the only Americans in the entire nine-team league. “We’re doing baseball about four days a week. It’s like that all through Europe where you play about two games a week.”

Having played baseball in four different countries on three different continents — he spent one summer during college with the Melville (Saskatchewan) Millionaires of the Western Major Baseball League in Canada — Groener has a stockpile of stories to tell. In Australia, he played against former Major League pitcher Virgil Vasquez, a big right-hander who spent parts of two seasons with the Detroit Tigers and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I’m pinching myself that I’m sitting on the Indian Ocean getting paid to play baseball against a big leaguer,” Groener says. “But we’re a hundred miles south of Perth with maybe 50 people watching us play in a cow pasture.

“Past the outfield,” he continues, “there are kangaroos.”

With the Spanish season running through August, Groener hopes a strong finish on his part will lead to a roster spot during the winter, possibly somewhere in Latin America.

“Last year our coach had a place lined up in Nicaragua,” Groener says. “It was good baseball, but I was more inclined to surf and relax. This offseason I’m more focused on trying to play somewhere else. I’ve got some options, it just depends on having a good season here. It makes everything easier.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0305; beastes@bendbulletin.com.