Kottaras

PAWTUCKET — Baseball has taken George Kottaras to places he never thought he would visit. Warner, Okla.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Hungary; The Netherlands; Greece.

Wait a minute. Hungary? The Netherlands? Greece? Absolutely, when you’re tuning up for the Olympics.

Kottaras, the Pawtucket Red Sox catcher, played for Greece during the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

“It was one of the most memorable events of my life,” he said before donning his mask and pads and catching Devern Hansack against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees last night at McCoy Stadium.

“Being the host team in the host country, it was great,” he said.

Kottaras is Greek-Canadian. He was born in Scarborough, Ont., but his parents were born in Greece. His father emigrated in his teens and his mother while she was a young girl. They met in Toronto, married and started a family. But their ties to Greece remained strong.

“We have a house in Sparta,” Kottaras said. He speaks Greek fluently and knows the country well, so the Olympics experience was extra special.

Baseball is not the national pastime in Greece, but as the host nation, the Greeks were allowed to field a team. They went overseas to recruit players.

“Growing up and playing tournaments in the States, this scout, I guess, saw my name and handed me a card. Somebody was putting a team together, so I made the call and said both my parents were born in Greece. It was word of mouth, basically.”

Kottaras was catching for the Fort Wayne Wizards, San Diego’s Single-A farm club, when he went overseas.

“I went to Hungary for a tournament and Amsterdam for a tournament. I never thought I’d go (to Hungary). In fact, I went to places I never would have thought I’d go to. It was a great road trip for me.”

Greeks don’t know baseball any better than American fans know cricket, but they tried.

“They were there and trying to take it in and learn,” he said. “It was like at a soccer game. They were doing chants. It was pretty neat.”

Kottaras can imagine the atmosphere in Beijing.

“When we played Japan and Chinese Taipei, some of the fans over there … they were loud, and it was really cool,” he said.

Greece finished seventh in the eight-team tournament in 2004, just ahead of Italy. Kottaras was 3-for-12 in four games with a double, two RBI and a run scored. After the Olympics, he returned to Fort Wayne and finished the season with a .310 batting average, the best in the Padres farm system. Boston acquired him in September 2006, and he has been in Pawtucket since the start of the 2007 campaign. He is hitting .242 this year with 21 home runs and 64 RBI.

“George has done a real fine job in his development over the last two years,” PawSox manager Ron Johnson said. “He has become a thinking man’s catcher. He has a feel for his pitcher that day as far as what’s working and what’s not. He follows preexisting game plans well, he reads swings well and he has become a guy who pitchers want to throw to. That’s the biggest compliment you can give a catcher.”

Johnson admires how Kottaras times his trips to the mound.

“They’re not called from the dugout, and I’ll be sitting there going, ‘You know what — this would be a good time for a trip,’ and all of a sudden you’ll see him pop up and head out to the mound. He’s really developing well. I couldn’t say enough good things about him.”

Even though the Olympics are in full swing in and baseball is bowing out as an Olympic sport, Kottaras isn’t thinking much about Beijing baseball.