The Windup Newsletter ⚾ | This is The Athletic’s MLB newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Windup directly in your inbox.The first item in my Sliders column today is a conversation with former Orioles All-Star Al Bumbry, a Vietnam veteran who’s being honored at the MLB alumni game in Cooperstown ahead of Memorial Day this weekend, but it needs more space than we have here. So, we’ve got the quick-hitters up now.Levi will be back after the holiday. I’m Tyler Kepner, welcome to The Windup!3 Questions With: Toronto’s rookie lefty from SlovakiaElmer Valo — born in Rybnik, Slovakia, in 1921 — played his final game on Oct. 1, 1961, ending a two-decade career spent mostly with the Philadelphia A’s. It would be 23,605 days until another player born in Slovakia — as classified by Baseball Reference — appeared in the major leagues.“Philadelphia A’s?” Adam Macko said Tuesday. “To be honest, I didn’t know that was a team.”That’s understandable; when Valo played, Macko’s team wasn’t around, either. Macko, a left-hander for the Toronto Blue Jays, was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2000, and made his major-league debut Monday at Yankee Stadium. He faced three hitters and retired them all.“I was super nervous from when I threw my last pitch in the bullpen to running out here getting on the mound,” Macko said. “That’s when everything started racing, speeding up on me. And then when I started throwing my warm-up pitches, that’s when things kind of started to come back to me: ‘OK, I know this game.’”He knows the game because he fell in love with it halfway around the world. Macko’s family moved from Slovakia to Ireland when he was 11, and then to Canada soon after. In 2019, the Seattle Mariners drafted him in the seventh round from Vauxhall (Alberta) High School and traded him to Canada’s team three years later in a deal for Teoscar Hernández.Macko — who played for Canada at the WBC this year — is the fourth player born in Slovakia to reach the majors after Valo, Jack Quinn, who pitched from 1909 to 1933, and Carl Linhart, who had two at-bats for the 1952 Detroit Tigers.None of the others lived there as long as Macko, who happily talked about his improbable journey to the top.Why did you want to play baseball?“I started at 7, but it was more like T-ball. Initially at the tryouts it was just ball-pit balls that we were hitting into a net. So it was very loose, just a little extracurricular activity after school. As I started to get better at it, they sent me up a level (where) it was actually like a team, and then I played there for a little bit.“There were only two teams in my area that we were playing. Another team, I believe, was on the other side of the country. So we just played that one team and it was a lot of fun. It was competitive; we got to know the guys on the other team. We were just kind of playing for bragging rights and medals. There’s a lot of medals that I have from those times playing in Slovakia, because we were always either first or second. Gold or silver. (Laughs.)”