Swedish Baseball’s Björn Johannessen Touches Down In Chatham

CHATHAM – Björn Johannessen kept calling and calling, but the baseball coach at Santa Barbara City College just wouldn’t pick up.

 Johannessen left messages, and the coach wouldn’t return them. And why would he? Some random Swedish guy was blowing up his phone.

 But Johannessen, born and raised in the Stockholm suburb of Täby, wanted to play baseball.

So he went to California to try out for the team as a walk-on. Johannessen made the team and was named captain both years he was there — in 1998 and 1999. He played more games that first season than he ever had experienced in total leading up to that point.

Thus began a life dedicated to baseball for Johannessen, an unlikely love given his nation of origin. The path, first opened when he was introduced to the sport as a teenager, has led to Chatham, where Johannessen is serving as an assistant coach for the Anglers this summer.

“It's such a global sport,” Johannessen said. “Guys don't realize it over here, but baseball is huge all over the world.”

Johannessen, like other Swedish kids, mainly played ice hockey growing up. The original encounter with America’s pastime came when he was 14 years old, on one school day during which the students were introduced to rugby and baseball. Johannessen found he could throw the ball fairly well and, on account of his hand-eye coordination from competitive hockey, could hit the ball pretty well, too.

“I was like, ‘Alright, well, this is kind of fun,’” Johannessen said.

He started playing, training once a week for a couple of hours. Game action was scarce (at most, a few games a year) due to the lack of fellow ballplayers in the country. At 18, Johannessen quit hockey, determined to go all in on baseball. That took him to Santa Barbara City College.

 After college ball, Johannessen —a catcher primarily — began a year-round tour in the sport. He went back to play in Europe but spent winters (the southern hemisphere’s summer) in Perth, Australia on a team with a handful of minor leaguers. 

It was around this time that Johannessen also made the Swedish national team. He proceeded to compete for his country on the diamond for the next 22 years. That’s how Johannessen met Dennis Cook, a former major leaguer and current Chatham manager. Cook, who’s made a post-MLB career as a globetrotting baseball coach, managed Sweden in the early 2010s.

“I caught for him, and that's kind of how that connection came about,” Johannessen said.

Baseball in Europe is glamourless. Salaries, where they exist, are basically gas money. His brother Peter, another Swede in baseball, received maybe $1,000 a month at most when he started playing in Germany more than a decade ago. Players on the European circuit get paid housing, a meal a day, a gym membership, maybe a bus pass. 

But if you’re a young, single male, you can have a good time traveling the world playing baseball. Many Americans, Canadians, even Japanese and Korean players, according to Johannessen, fill rosters of European clubs.

“You wouldn't do it for the money but for the experience and the joy of baseball,” he said.    

Back when Johannessen played (he retired at age 42), he also worked construction. It was the only job one could do while still having time in the day for practice. The guys would wake up at 4:30 in the morning, go to the gym, work from 6:30 until 4 in the afternoon, go straight to baseball duties and be home by 9. 

“It was long days, but we would at least have 15 to 20 hours worth of baseball and workouts in every week, and you do that for the love of the game, and just to get better, to treat the game the right way, basically,” Johannessen said.

Upon concluding his career as an active player, Johannessen jumped into coaching. When he was young, Sweden had no youth baseball teams and the coaching was, as Johannessen puts it, really bad. There was maybe some wispy semblance of the sport in Sweden, but nothing actually substantive. Johannessen seeks to change that.

His ideology is to bring the clubs to where the kids are. The youth in Sweden simply don’t know baseball is there in their country, so it’s on the coaches to build awareness and foster places where children could hop on their bicycles and head to the field to play a game. All the dressings of something like the Cape League aren’t required to generate interest. The sport can be played barebones on a soccer pitch.

“It was time to get into coaching and helping kids in Sweden to explore baseball and have the opportunity to find their sport, like I did,” Johannessen said.

Johannessen’s philosophy in building the sport in his native country (where he still lives) has a thesis: a small fraction of any group of people will be naturally talented at throwing a baseball. One or two people of 10 will be good at it. In a group of 100, there’ll be 10 to 20, and so on. Developing baseball in Europe is a contest of numbers. 

Sweden and Czechia, for example, used to be equals in the sport, until the latter invested heavily in youth baseball, according to Johannessen. That multiplied the country’s crop of players ten-fold, and they’ve since reached two World Baseball Classics (the game’s equivalent to the World Cup). Johannessen manages Sweden’s senior national baseball team, the roster that would play in a World Baseball Classic (the country has never qualified).

“My quest in my life back home is basically to get kids into baseball, because to me, it's the greatest sport, because you learn how to handle failure and deal with sh*t in your life,” Johannessen said.

Cook was on Johannessen’s staff last fall as Sweden’s pitching coach for the 2025 European Championship. He in turn asked Johannessen to join him in Chatham.

At Veterans Field before first pitch on game day, Johannessen can be found hitting fungos during batting practice or tending to the grounds of the infield. 

“It's such an honor to be here, and obviously Chatham is a great organization,” he said.

Johannessen’s 8-year-old son, who’s been throwing and catching since he was a baby, will soon be joining him on the Cape. The level of the Cape League, and how integrated baseball is in everyday life in the United States, will be completely new for him. But Johannessen is excited to see how his son will enjoy it.

The Anglers players, meanwhile, don’t really pick up Johannessen’s accent nor realize he’s from Sweden. In Perth, the Australians thought he was American. 

Johannessen is soaking everything in this summer, but at the same time, he knows his baseball like anyone else here. He’s played in big games during global competitions against baseball powers like Cuba, South Korea and Venezuela. The Americans might have a thing or two to learn from the Swedish baseball lifer.