Death of Marlon Snyders, 54

BY CLEMENT DU PLESSIS

IF you are a baseball person please join the challenge of posting a baseball photo. Just one picture, no description. Please copy the text in your status, post a picture and look at some great memories/pictures. Missing baseball so very much. Greatest game on earth!

A quote by one of the greats of the game Andre Alexander on his Facebook page today.

Little did anyone know that today’s picture would be of Marlon Snyders who passed away tragically.

He was 54.

Said Alexander, “He was a brilliant third base player and he was dedicated to his baseball. He was outspoken when injustices prevailed in team set ups.”

Marlon played baseball for Thistle at the City Park-based Western Province Baseball Union, and later for Silvertree of the Cape and District Baseball Association in Wynberg. See Cape District pic of Marlon, fourth from left, in the middle row.

The company he held at Thistle included some excellent baseball players in Clint Alfino, Crafton Peters, Brennan Pastor, Mark Smith, Anthony September, the brothers Ashley and Derek Frantz.

At Silvertree he was in the august company of Jerome Hendricks, Andre Alexander and Leon ‘Dupie’ du Preez. Some of the other members in the Silvertree team included, Kevin Kloppers, Mark Schreuder, Enrico Marinus, Robbie de Monk and Grant Stevens.  

Snyders represented Cape District at the South African Baseball Association level.

Well-known sportsman Oscar Layman and southpaw pitcher for Battswood and Cape District said, “Marlon was a solid team player, he did his job, played hard and scored some pretty important runs and, he could hit.”

Marlon also played in the regional inter-club competition on Sundays known as the Smirnoff Series during the 1980s.

Sean Campbell, the former Athlone Athletics pitcher in the 1980s and 1990s and presently a baseball writer in the Cape said, “A young Marlon Snyders, with his explosive hitting, forced the Cape District selectors to look at him as he challenged the incumbent third base Colin Barnes for a spot in the line-up.”

Marlon was a Facebook friend of the writer of this article who last wished him happy birthday in June 2019.

He would amuse himself with some of the articles I had written.

“Do you still have a copy of the article you wrote on the phantom stadiums’? That was classical,” he said in messenger in 2015.

No, I said. LOL, I think that was a column in the Sunday Times Metro back in the day. Don’t think so. What a memory, Marlon.

“If only the Olympic bid committee had your insight at the time. Keep up the standards, Clement.

“The week following your article, Zapiro was apt with his depiction of a dejected Capetonian on the parade with his saying, ‘Athens se ma se …’ ”

This was at the time when South Africa lost to Athens in hosting the 2004 Olympic Games.  

Rest in peace, big man – on the other side of home plate. From all of us in the baseball and softball fraternity, elsewhere and beyond.