Brooklyn indie darlings Petite League fell in love with baseball on a field in Belgium

If you were to pick up "Thrill Seekers," the most recent LP by Brooklyn indie rock band Petite League, you just might guess that this was a band for baseball fans. Besides the charming name -- French for, you guessed it, "Little League" -- the record cover shows a bunch of silhouettes racing atop an M subway train as it passes above one of New York's public ballfields. Flip the record over and check out the tracklist and there's the fourth cut, "Mets," where lead singer and songwriter Lorenzo Cook sings, "When the Mets don't win and it hurts like sin / On your sunburnt skin, just do it again / I was overcome."

Formed nearly a decade ago by Cook while he was attending Syracuse University, the band originally chose the name "Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez," but found it was both too similar to another group in the region and didn't quite fit with Cook's vision for the band. Having played more sedate indie pop in the past, Cook took inspiration from garage rock and punk artists like Ty Segall, The Strokes and FIDLAR. Playing with a group of guys wearing cut-off shorts and long-sleeve tees, he wanted a name that reflected both the retro-Americana look and sound of the group.

"I liked the idea of a band of sandlot kids," Cook said. "We were always wearing ratty T-shirts and cut-off jean shorts with no socks. You know, we had a look."

Hence, Petite League was born -- both in name and with a set of baseball cards for each of the members in the group.

"I was getting really into design and I just kept returning to vintage baseball stuff like old logos and baseball cards," Cook said. "I was really into that look and before even the name, I was like, 'I want to do stuff with these cards.' We'd actually played a wiffle ball game in our backyard area when we were sophomores and I made baseball cards for everyone. And then I was like, 'Oh, we should do this for a band.'"

While he was concerned about pigeonholing the band too early, he also saw the importance of branding -- something every professional sports team knows well.

"The first shirt we ever did was a grim reaper on an old Topps 1975 card," Cook remembered. "People really loved it. This was the intersection of music and sports that people were starting to gravitate towards back then. I think that it's so easy to take little elements of New York baseball, and then you bring in that sort of weird, underground thing that happens here -- like from the punk scene -- and you put them together, all of a sudden you have cool iconography. You have cool designs that people want to have on a bag."

The most popular of those bags may be a recent design, when the band mashed up Matisse's classic, "La Danse," with baseball jerseys.

"I went to the beach one day and just grabbed it," Cook said. "I saw people's eyes hit the logo or the dancing skeletons in baseball jerseys. It's the Matisse painting, so they recognize it and they look down and they see the name. You probably don't know the band, but you might go home and be like 'What was that bag?' And then look up the name and 'Oh, this is a band.'"

Cook's connection to baseball isn't just the stuff of box scores, fantasy drafts, and obsessively organized baseball card collections, though. Instead, it gets at his very identity as an American raised overseas.

Born in Rome to American parents -- his mother is from Ohio and his father is from Massachusetts -- Cook spent most of his youth growing up in Brussels, Belgium after the family moved for a NATO job at the outset of the Iraq War. How does one relate to their American heritage while growing up in Europe and attending an international school? American sports -- baseball in particular -- provided that connection.

"The whole baseball thing started because there was a Little League team there," Cook said. "Now there's a lot fewer Americans living in Brussels than there were at the time, but there's a full on Little League with kids from the U.S. So I was integrated into that at a very young age. It wasn't just baseball, they also had like a soccer and basketball league. But the baseball one was cool, because we would get real team hats and [uniforms]. It makes things much cooler than when you get like a gross, cheap basketball jersey with no logo on it."

Perhaps shockingly, Cook even grew up playing against future Major Leaguer Ryan Burr out on European ballfields.

"He played in that same league, although he was throwing so [incredibly] hard," Cook said with a laugh. "When we were kids, I was a pretty good pitcher, but I was on the team with him. And he was, like, ridiculous."

Other than games out on the field with his fellow expatriates, his attachment to American sports came from quick glimpses on the internet, video games like the NBA2K series, and his annual trips back to the States over the summer when baseball ruled all.

Headed back to New England where his diehard Red Sox fan father was from and where members of his mother's family now lived, he became fully indoctrinated into Red Sox Nation for those few weeks every year. The game could be heard crackling over the radio or blaring from the TV every night -- and then that magical 2004 season came when the Red Sox finally broke the Bambino's curse.

"I remember in 2004, getting woken up that morning when they won [the World Series]," Cook said. "[My dad] was so, so stoked. I was really young, so I don't have the context for it all, but I knew he was excited and so I was excited. I think that's why I really identified with it. Then my older cousins, my mom's family, had the game on every night, and it was a thing that we were all doing. I would get a Red Sox hat, and all of a sudden, it was a weird connective thing between my dad's family, my mom's family. Everyone, like the Red Sox fans, the now-Guardians fans, it just felt like that was an identity thing for me."

While playing in a rock band may not seem as distanced from American sports as growing up across the Atlantic Ocean, that wasn't always true. Though in recent years musicians have made their love of sports clear -- from Metro Boomin's love of the Cardinals to PUP's Steve Sladkowski rocking Blue Jays and Raptors gear on stage to Drake's embrace of every successful team under the sun -- the art kids vs. jocks battle once dominated ballfields and school cafeterias. That crumbling of the debate has allowed Petite League -- who briefly went away from the baseball-themed artwork to avoid being pigeonholed -- to re-embrace their baseball heritage.

"There is this fake separation of 'This is art. This is sports,'" Cook said. "I actually think we live in a really good time where they're so much closer than they've ever been because a lot of our favorite musicians are huge sports fans. Flea is on the court at every Lakers game. The Braves pitcher who's killing it -- Spencer Strider -- is a huge Strokes fan. The Strokes have a Mets song."

Cook finds joy in the communal celebration of sports -- regularly relaxing to the tranquil sounds of a baseball broadcast on a hot summer day -- and the iconic logos and looks of sports design have always caught his eye. His closet is full of vintage caps and T-shirts and he is constantly scouring eBay for the next find. He dreams of one day doing a collaboration with someone like Ebbets Field Flannels.

"If I had infinite money, I'd make nice jerseys," Cook joked.

He wants to see the world of music and sports continue to co-mingle, hoping to one day see something like a jazz night at Citi Field, embracing niche interests at a large stadium the way you sometimes might see at a Minor League game in Coney Island. Having grown up overseas, he knows how important it is for people to embrace their hometowns -- whether it's their sports teams or their bands.

"So much of music is also identity and where you're from -- like The Replacements being from Minnesota, it means as much to someone from Minnesota as the Twins," Cook said. "If you're passionate about where you're from and you feel represented, that can happen in music and in sports and it's great. I don't know why anyone would reject that or intentionally try to make fun of it. If you're into sports, great, that's awesome, I have someone to talk to you about. If you're into music, it's something else to talk about. If you like both, we have everything."

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Petite League's most recent release, the Suburban Speed Demons EP, is available now. The band will then be going out on tour next month. Their dates are below:

02/17 Boston, MA - Rockwood Music Hall
03/07 New York, NY - New Colossus Festival
03/08 Ithaca, NY - Deep Dive
03/09 Washington, DC - Pie Shop
03/10 Philadelphia, PA - Milky
04/04 San Francisco - Kilowatt Bar
04/06 Los Angeles - MakeOutMusic