COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — One day before he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Andruw Jones was asked about soccer, and he did not hedge.
Atlanta Braves outfielder Gary Sheffield, left, laughs with teammate Andruw Jones, of Curacao, right, while waiting to take batting practice Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2002 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The Braves acquired Sheffield from the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for outfielder Brian Jordan, left-handed pitcher Odalis Perez and minor league right-handed pitcher Andy Brown. (AP Photo/Scott Audette)
“I followed the World Cup for a month and a half, to be honest with you,” Jones said. “I stopped watching baseball. I didn’t watch baseball, man, but I watched a lot of soccer games, and I went to quite a few games.”
The reason is 1,900 miles south of Cooperstown. Jones was born in Willemstad, Curaçao, an island of roughly 156,000 people that spent the early summer of 2026 doing something no country its size had ever done.
The smallest nation ever to reach a World Cup
“I’m so proud of the Curaçao national team,” Jones said. “To get there — to put Curaçao one more time on the map.”
Curaçao qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup on Nov. 18, 2025, with a 0-0 draw against Jamaica in Kingston, finishing atop its Concacaf group by a single point. The result made the island the smallest country ever to reach the men’s World Cup by both population and land area, breaking a record Iceland had held since 2018 with a population more than twice as large.
Curaçao opened play June 14 against Germany, drawn into a group that also included Ecuador and Ivory Coast.
A shared kingdom, on both fields
The island’s path there rhymes with its baseball history. Curaçao is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and nearly the entire World Cup squad was born in the Netherlands — the same kingdom-wide eligibility that has sent Curaçaoan players to the Dutch national baseball team for decades.
Jones and the Kingdom
Netherlands’ manager Hensley Meulens, second from right, coach Andruw Jones (25) and coach Ben Thijssen watch a play in the ninth inning of their international exhibition series baseball game against Japan at Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Saturday, Nov.12, 2016. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
Jones has been at the center of that pipeline for twenty years. He played for the Netherlands at the 2006 and 2013 World Baseball Classics, hitting .333 during the 2013 run to a fourth-place finish, then served as bench coach in 2017 and 2023 under Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens.
In March 2026, he managed the team for the first time — in Miami, with his son on the roster.
“To get a chance to represent your country, manage your country, and get a chance to coach my son on the professional level was fun,” Jones told World Baseball Network. “I enjoyed every bit of it.”
Druw Jones, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2022 draft and an Arizona Diamondbacks prospect, was born in the United States and played for the Netherlands through his father’s citizenship. It was the first time in World Baseball Classic history that a father and son shared a dugout as manager and player.
Cooperstown
Andruw Jones holds up his Baseball Hall of Fame plaque after the induction ceremony in Cooperstown, N.Y., Sunday, July 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Jones was inducted July 26 alongside Carlos Beltrán and Jeff Kent, elected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in his ninth year on the ballot. He entered as the 12th player to be depicted in a Braves cap in Cooperstown.
“This is a great honor, to be here with all these legends,” he said the day before the ceremony. “It’s one of the final pieces of the Braves organization — to have one more Hall of Famer in that group.”
Andruw Jones, second from left, poses for a picture with his Baseball Hall of Fame plaque and Josh Rawitch, president of the Hall of Fame, left, Jane Forbes Clark, chairman of the board of directors of the Hall of Fame, second from right, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred during the induction ceremony in Cooperstown, N.Y., Sunday, July 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Two firsts for one island in five weeks. Jones only stopped watching baseball for one of them.
