So what if it’s after the All-Star Break?

Actually, since I got a (surprising) number of complaints that my invariably wrong predictions fell by the wayside this year, sacrificed at the altar of actually trying to pay my rent, I thought I’d try to revisit what I had *planned* to write now that we’ve reached (and passed) the halfway mark.

The NL was pretty easy, because there were only three good teams in a league that is clearly so inferior to the AL that it’s getting a bit tiring. In the West, I did not buy into the Rockies’ hype, largely because I had no idea Jimenez would be so dominant. However, I can’t claim I would have picked the Padres… It’s such a boring division, I think I would have picked one out of a hat, and come away with the Dodgers. Shows you what I know.

The Central is easy: I planned on picking the Cardinals (one of the aforementioned three good NL teams), although I thought the Cubs might a scare into them. Instead, the Cubs are awful along with the rest of that division outside of STL and a surprising Reds team, which I probably would have picked last in the “Non Pittsburgh Division.”

I was going to pick Philly to win the East with the Braves taking the wild card; it could still happen, but does it really matter? The AL is going to win the World Series this year, probably in five games. Watching a depleted Red Sox lineup knock around Tim Lincecum was like watching a McDonald’s All-American get schooled in his first game in the ACC. It’s just a different level of talent, and any NL team who wants a prayer in the series is going to have to get four lights out performances from their aces; I think the only team that has a chance at that is Philly, and if the season ended today, they wouldn’t even make the playoffs.

My most egregious pick was going to be Seattle; I planned on predicting that they would run away with the West and surprise everyone by putting it to rest by August, holding off Texas. (They are now 17 games out of first place). I thought that the Angels would finish under .500; they still might, but they appear far more resilient than I expected.

In the Central, I probably would have thrown up my hands and picked the Twins, after a brief flirtation with the Royals, who continue to be terrible.

Finally, in the division that has come to resemble the old NFC East during the heyday of the Cowboys, Giants, and Eagles, I predicted that the best three teams in all of major league baseball would be the Yankees, Red Sox, and D Rays (I eschew their new appellation), in that order. My guess was that the Rays would struggle out of the gate, and the Sox would edge them for the Wild Card. I did not realize how hot the Rays would start, how much the new “pitching and defense” Sox would struggle out of the gate, and how much they would be devastated by injuries at the midpoint. The quantity and quality of Sox starters on the DL or missing time due to bumps and bruises at one point was enough to staff half of an all-star team. As a result, they have dropped 7 of their last 10, and yet they *still* would lead two other divisions in baseball and be no more than 1.5 games out in the other three.

Naturally, this is ridiculous. The third best team in baseball - whether it’s the Sox, Rays, or Yankees - is going to miss the playoffs in favor of two cupcakes from the Central and West. It is time for realignment, perhaps back to the two division structure of my youth, or alternatively back to no divisions with the top four records making the playoffs. Sure, it’s all about money, so perhaps MLB could adopt an NFL-like 6-team playoff, with the bottom four playing one or three game series to advance to play the top two seeds. Granted, there’s some Red Sox bias coming in here, as we appear to be the ones on the outside looking in, but the fact is that for real baseball fans, watching crappy teams in October sucks.

The other thing I planned on complaining about is the competitive imbalance that has made a salary cap long overdue. Even recognizing that the Red Sox have benefited from a revenue base that dwarfs teams like Cleveland or Kansas City, the fact is that it’s not fair that fully TWENTY teams started the season knowing they had absolutely zero chance of winning a championship. It was all well and good when the Yankees were rich and stupid, but after spending $2 billion for a ten year championship drought (a sum that exceeds the GDP of some 38 nations), they finally have realized how to use their massive financial advantages shrewdly. When you can drop a half billion on three players during the worst recession in 80 years, and other teams are struggling to draw 15,000 a year, you’re not really playing the same sport anymore. It’s sort of like playing Annapolis in naval war games; you can put up a good fight, but at the end of the day, they’re the only team with battleships and nuclear subs.

And finally, in the category of if you can’t say something good, say nothing at all, we bid adieu to George Steinbrenner.

(beat)

We’ll see how the rest of the season unfolds. If the Sox can get healthy, they could make a run at the wild card, but they’ll have to tread water until then, and September might be too late.

I am breaking my long streak of not posting to suggest that you watch “Sugar.” It’s an HBO film that is surprisingly good… I have a weird hangup about this film, in that I don’t know if you need to be in the bizarre emotional state I’m in (four surgeries in, rehab still failing, wondering whether I’ll ever get to play baseball again) to appreciate it. It’s one of those things where I feel like I saw it at precisely the right time in order for it to have the emotional impact that it did. That said, I still feel like it’s a decent flick that stands up on its own, even if you’re not an aging never-was who tends to get all weepy for any movie that examines the relationship a player has with the game when he knows he’s on his way out of it.

Check it out. It’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s not bad.

Today is the two-year anniversary of the first surgery on my left knee. In the past 24 months, I have attended roughly 150 physical therapy sessions (not counting daily work on my own), had three more surgeries, suffered from one systemic staph infection, and gone through 8 physical therapists. I still can’t go down stairs comfortably.

It’s a horribly depressing anniversary, but there’s not much I can do about it except keep working hard on the knee, keep doing my rehab, hoping for the best. Ad Astra Per Aspera, etc.

Seeing as it’s a month into the season, I should probably get around to writing up the NL East and Central. I don’t have anything terribly insightful to say; I like the Cubs and the Phillies, with the Mets taking the wild card. The Marlins are an illusion, the Brewers have lost too much pitching, and the rest of these divisions are pretty mediocre.

I do like the Reds though. They have some young pitching, and in a weak Central, I think they’ll take second.

I can’t decide whether this is the worst division in baseball, or if that honor goes to the AL West. The AFC West and NFC West are similarly putrid. Why are all the good teams east of the Mississippi in both the NFL and MLB? I’m not sure.

For the Rockies, 2007 just keeps looking like more and more of a fluke. Even though a 5.14 ERA for the rotation isn’t too disgraceful in that park, it doesn’t matter if you fail to score 750 runs, as they did last year. How is that possible? How could that lineup possibly only score 747 runs in that ball park? Since then, they’ve shipped off Matt Holliday to Oakland, and imported Huston Street to close out the few leads they do see. This division is so putrid that anything could happen, but I don’t see them making a run.

The Padres are in rebuilding mode, even if they don’t admit it or know it. They’re also probably the most likely team in the NL to go into fire-sale mode if they’re out of the hunt in June. The trade rumors that swirled about Peavy all offseason will probably resurface if they’re well out of it, which reminds me: why do so many Padres players seem to hate the management team down there. Doug Mirabelli openly badmouthed them while he was down there, until they ripped off the Red Sox by prying away Cla Meredith in exchange for shipping The Stud Who Hits Bombs back when the freaked out because no one could catch Wakefield. Now, Mirabelli - who is now apparently a real estate agent in Michigan - was by all accounts kind of a jerk, so you can probably write that off. But then Khalil Greene shot his way out of town, and now Peavy has said he’s unhappy… I don’t know what the answer is, but three is kind of a trend.

There isn’t a whole lot of offense in this division, but the Dodgers have the best of what’s around. I know I’m supposed to have a strong opinion about the whole Manny saga, and write like 1,500 words on it, but I’m just tired of the topic. I’m tired of seeing Scott Boras’ face, tired of re-hashing the whole disgraceful way he shot his way out of town, tired of hearing the absurd argument that the Sox would have won the World Series if they still had Manny. (Note to the idiots who have made that ridiculous claim: Jason Bay hit something like .360 in the ALCS - the Sox didn’t lose to TB because of production out of left field, they lost because Josh Beckett wasn’t healthy, end of story.)

At this point, I’m just happy that Manny’s gone, not in the AL, not in pinstripes, and in a perverse way, that after all of that drama and willingness to smear feces all over his legacy in Boston, that it only got him an extra $5 million guaranteed. I like the rotation despite the loss of Lowe - particularly against the weak offenses throughout the West - and they’re the odds-on favorite to win the division.

However, I like the D-backs on the strength of their 1-2 punch of Webb and Haren. I think Upton is ready to blossom, and Jackson, Young, and Drew should all take steps forward in 2009.

That leaves me with the Giants, a team I don’t have a really good feel for. At last, they’ve stopped handing horrible contracts to people well past their primes. Look at some of the horrendous signings they’ve had over the years:

Barry Zito
Omar Vizquel
Aaron Rowand
Dave Roberts
Matt Morris
Armando Benitez
Randy Winn
Mike Matheny

You could argue that no other team has made as many bad signings over the last few years. At the very least, they’re trying to get younger now, with the exception of the signing of Randy Johnson. Obviously, Lincecum is the star here, and Cain is poised to fill in as a strong #2. Your $136m man, Barry Zito, is actually the #5 starter. (oops!) That’s a promising rotation, but I don’t have any faith in the lineup whatsoever, and I see them losing a lot of 2-1 games.

What can I say? A boring write-up for a boring division.

THE PICK: ARIZONA, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Colorado, San Diego.

I’m already running late, so I will move quickly to the AL East, which by all accounts holds the best three teams in baseball despite them all getting off to shaky starts. As I pointed out in the AL Central preview, it’s hilarious that one of the Rays, Sox, and Yankees will miss the playoffs, while one of the jokers from the Central and West will each make the playoffs.

Toronto and Baltimore are the 13o-pound-men-in-prison of this division, with Toronto having a chance to lose 95 games. The Blue Jays are horrendous. They’re in full-on rebuilding mode, and said as much by talking only about 2010 during the offseason. It makes me wonder whether Halladay might be spun out at the deadline, but they seem convinced that contention is just a year away.

In this division? Rotsa Ruck.

Fourth place belongs to Baltimore, a city for which I suddenly feel sympathy having watched an episode or two of The Wire. At the very least, they have stud rookie catcher Matt Wieters up to inspire hope.

That brings us to the Yankees, who - in a delightfully Yankee-esque combination of poor timing and poor taste - dropped nearly a half a billion on three pricey free agents amidst the greatest economic catastrophe in 80 years, some 12 months after extorting an extra $300 million in taxpayer money from a city whose tax base has fallen by nearly a third, for a new stadium that its owner has admitted has many seats that are overpriced.

You have to love the Yankees, if only so as to hate them. If they didn’t exist, we would have to invent them.

By all accounts, the MFYs improved significantly in response to missing the playoffs with a $200 million payroll in 2008. However, I look at that team and see an aging squad (Jeter, Damon, and Matsui will turn 35, Posada is 38, and Rivera is 40) with major defensive liabilities across the field. The Yankees have legitimate defensive liabilities at shortstop, left, right, catcher, and second base, which doesn’t bode well for pitchers like Wang, whose inability to miss bats has prompted me to predict his decline ever since he came into the league. While two starts doesn’t make a trend, his early struggles suggest that the league may have caught up to him.

The Yankees’ high-priced acquisitions will keep them in the hunt, but teams that old tend to break down all at once. I have for years predicted the fall of the great Mariano Rivera, and at 40, I think it’s time. Nothing would give me more pleasure than for him to collapse, forcing the Yankee braintrust to freak out and yank Joba Chamberlain back into a closer role mid-season. In any case, this team made big strides at a few positions this winter, but just got older everywhere else, and I’m not sure that’s enough to improve an 89-win team in this division.

The Rays did the opposite, simply holding pat after last year’s surprise pennant. They are the deepest, youngest, healthiest team in the division, and that’s got to count for something. They did catch lightning in a bottle to an extent last year, outperforming a 92-70 pythagorean record by five games. I see a dropoff, like the 2007 Tigers, who similarly came out of nowhere to win the AL pennant before falling back to earth. The question is, how big?

Finally, there’s Boston. The Red Sox have looked so horrible in the first week of the season that it may be necessary to hire Bill Walton to come in and shout “Hoooooooooooooooorible!” to describe their play. Outside of Youkilis, the team isn’t hitting above the Mendoza Line, and the defense looks almost Yankee-esque. As a Sox fan, I have serious concerns about the bottom third of the lineup - Ellsbury belongs there, Varitek belongs in a beer league, and the Lowrie/Lugo combo is a gruesome offensive black hole. To think that 1500 ABs are going to go to those four hitters is frankly pretty scary, not to mention the huge questions marks surrounding Lowell’s hip and Ortiz’s age and wrist.

However, despite looking like a second-division team for the first week, I can’t count the Sox out just yet, because of their pitching. They have more depth in both the starting rotation and bullpen than any Sox team I can remember. They’ll look a lot better when either Lester or Dice-K gets through the sixth inning, but the rotation of Beckett-Lester-Matsuzaka-Penny-Wakefield, with Buchholz and Masterson waiting in the wings, is the deepest in the AL. It’s probably not quite as good as the Yankees at the top, but it’s far deeper in the event of injury. Meanwhile, Epstein has assembled a bullpen that has a chance to be historically good. Even if Smoltz doesn’t have anything left in the tank, the power arms of Papelbon, Saito, Ramirez, Delcarmen, and Masterson, paired with Okajima and last night’s loser Lopez as a LOOGY gives me a lot of optimism. Ultimately, I don’t think this Red Sox lineup is good enough to keep pace with the rotation and win the division, but could squeak into the Wild Card…

Unless the economy is really as bad as everyone thinks it is. Several teams - the Mariners, Astros, White Sox, Padres, and Tigers - could hold fire sales in July if they struggle early. Expensive contracts like Miguel Cabrera and Lance Berkman could be available for a song, and with that pitching, the Sox will have the chips to make a play for distressed talent to shore up a lineup that suddenly looks very old.

This is the hardest division to pick out of all of them. I’ve written this three times, and each time I’ve chosen a different team to be left on the outside looking in at the playoffs. All three teams could legitimately win 95 games, and Pecota thinks they’ll all win north of that. In the end, it’s probably half heart, half brain that says New York misses the playoffs. Time Waits For No One, and this team is old and slow, with a crappy bench and limited pitching depth despite the stars at the front end, and Posada, Jeter, Damon, Matsui, and Rivera are living on borrowed time.

The Pick: BOSTON, TAMPA BAY, New York, Baltimore, Toronto

As a fan, I feel torn about the Central. One the one hand, I love a competitive division, where any team has a chance to win it, and last year just 14 games separated first place from last place in the Central. On the other hand, I like watching good teams, and the Central was so competitive because there really weren’t any of them.

Amid this smorgasbord of mediocrity, let’s start with the alleged source and sink to all of America’s problems: Detroit. A recent world series favorite before a disastrous collapse, the Tigers’ pitching fell apart when Verlander went from being the best pitcher in the American League to mediocrity, and Dontrelle Willis forgot how to throw his good stuff for strikes. I think Miguel Cabrera is a legitimate threat to win the triple crown, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Detroit goes in the tank and spins him out at the trade deadline to a contender. As much as I’d love to pick the Tigers to reinvigorate a region decimated both economically and emotionally by the recent economic collapse (and by that whole thing about not producing competitive cars) with an improbable playoff run, I can’t make such a leap of faith with a bullpen that crappy.

There’s so much parity in this division that I’m tempted to pick the Royals to win it. If not now, when? Face it, this division is going to beat itself up, get stomped on by the East, and play the West at maybe a .525, .550 clip. There are no behemoths here, and with a few breaks here and there, Kansas City could squeak it out. Unfortunately, they have maybe two above-average major league hitters. Moreover, I think this is the year that the Gil-ga-Meche contract starts to bite the Royals in the ass. You may recall my declaring his 5-year, $55-million deal “Zito-esque.” He surprised all of us with a solid 2007, before returning to just about league average in 2008. However, his WHIP has started climbing back up, and I would have to guess that at 31, he’s not going to enact a sudden reversal.

Everyone seems to like the Indians. I do not. Between losing CC and Halfner’s shoulder injury, I get the feeling that the window on the old Indians core has passed, and they’re at least two years away from younger guys like Cliff Lee leading them back to the playoffs. There’s a similar youth movement in Minnesota, and while dumping Livian Hernandez can only be a good thing, I can’t say that they did a whole lot to improve a mediocre team.

That’s the thing about this division; everyone is mediocre. We’ve ruled out the first four teams from being able to win a playoff spot, and between Bobby Jenks losing the ability to miss bats, nagging injury concerns surrounding Carlos Quentin, and the horrifying idea of a team relying on either of Bartolo Colon or Jose Contreras to make 25+ starts in 2009, I think you can fairly rule out the White Sox too.

However, I’ve done the math. Running the numbers shows that someone has to win it, even if that team would battle for fourth in the AL East or third in the NL East. I don’t think the ChiSox are a bad pick here, but they were lucky to win it last year and I don’t think they’ll do it again.

Pick: MINNESOTA, Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit.

Wow, it’s been nearly 7 months since I last made a post on here, 11 months since my last knee surgery (still can’t go down stairs), and 30 months since I last played baseball. However, at least, for the first time since October of 2006, I played catch over spring break, and the elbow felt okay. It’s still pretty weak, and it sure as hell won’t impress anybody…

…which brings us to the AL West!

It surprises no one that the AL West is the second crappiest division in baseball, ahead only of the NL West. It’s frankly disgusting that one of these teams is going to be awarded a playoff spot for climbing to the top of this dung heap, while one of the Red Sox, Yankees, and Devil Rays, easily the three best teams in the American League, is going home. It would be almost like a team from the AFC East going 11-5 and not making the playoffs because a division in the West was so thoroughly odious that it could be won by an 8-8 team. Ahem.

What is a dirty secret that no one seems to talk about is that its reigning champion and presumptive favorite, the Angels, were actually a pretty terrible team last year, and EASILY the worst 100 win-team in the history of baseball. I’m not saying that merely because they looked embarassingly overwhelmed against a decent-to-good Red Sox team that limped into the postseason with key injuries to its star DH, 3B, and ace starter. I’m saying it because they scored 765 runs and allowed 697 runs, which if not for an exceptional run of good luck, would typically amount to a 88-74 record, or 7 games over .500. It’s one thing to over-achieve - and there’s some evidence that having a dominant closer like Rodriguez helps teams exceed that Pythagorean projection - but it’s quite another to out-pace your predicted record by *22* games. Let’s be clear: despite playing in a black hole of a division, the Angels could only outscore their opponents by 68 runs last year. If they saw slightly further than average, it was only because they stood on the shoulders of dwarves. To that milquetoast group they added a washed-up Bobby Abreu while subtracting their two best players, Texeira and Rodriguez. Can someone explain to me why they are the dominant favorite?

Here’s a prediction: The Angels won’t win 85 games this year, even in that crap division.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: the Rangers have some exciting young bats, but exactly zero above league-average starting pitchers. Not a good recipe.

That brings us to the A’s, who many have picked to win the putrid bag of baby diapers known as the AL West. I think they’re the obvious choice: they made a huge pickup in Matt Holliday, adding him to a few interesting (if injury-prone) starting pitchers. They even went so far as to unite the fading Nomar with Orlando Cabrera - exchanged for each other in a trade that seems laughably irrelevant compared to when I first heard it on the way home from a Reds doubleheader in July of 2004 - and Jason Giambi.

As an aside, why does Jason Giambi get a free pass for his steroid use? You always hear this nonsense about how “oh, well unlike other guys, he stepped up and acknowledged what he had done, and…” NO.

NO he didn’t. He didn’t acknowledge anything, and he sure as hell didn’t step up. Under PENALTY OF PERJURY he confessed to a grand jury that he had cheated, and then hoped that it wouldn’t be leaked to the public. When it did, he mumbled a few half-hearted apologies without ever even admitting what he had done to require such an apology. If that’s your definition of “standing up and taking it like a man,” well, let’s just say you have some pretty low standards for contrition and responsibility.

For my part, however, I need to take responsibility for picking the Mariners to win the AL West last year. They went on to lose 101 games, only the most glaring of some pretty faulty predictions last year. Sure, I couldn’t have imagined that Bedard would break down, or that they would go 18-30 in one-run games even with Putz holding down closer duties. Or that Richie Sexson would continue to be a $14m black hole, to the point that they would actually cut him during the- wait, I could have predicted that.

Still, I look at that 1-2 of Rodriguez and Bedard, of a passable infield and an outfield of the ageless Ichiro, a potentially rejuvenated Junior Griffey, and stud prospect Wladimir Balentien (I just like saying his name!) and dare to dream. In a division this terrible, anything can happen, and with LA tumbling and Texas and Oakland lacking pitching, I think the Mariners will be one of those teams that surprises everyone by winning a weak division a year or two before they were “ready.”

Mariners, I just can’t quit you.

The Pick: SEATTLE, Los Angeles, Oakland, Texas.

More on this later… here’s the translation of the front page of the Woodchucks’ website from Babelfish.

Many of you likely missed this link to a shot of Kevin Youkilis taking a warmup throw in the eye, leading to a big shiner.

(this link might work as well)

Anyway, that makes me feel better about my own gaffe at first base in Bois Guillaume. To be honest, I always felt a little embarassed when I had to explain that I broke my nose from a bad hop off the infield at BG. Several questions remain:

1) Why was I playing first base even when I told Matt that it was a stupid f***ing idea because I wasn’t used to the position,
2) Since it was an easy double play, with the batter having already stopped running out of the box because he thought the ball had been caught on the fly, why did Pierre throw it as hard as he could?
3) Which is worse, taking a ball thrown at maximum velocity by Pierre or a practice throw in between innings lobbed from Mike Lowell?

I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for you, Youks.

If you haven’t been reading Tony Lewis’ blog about this year’s (signficantly more successful) Woodchucks team, you may have missed this devastating piece of news:

Le Woodsmobile is no more.

Apparently the damage from the (never fully explained on HBWT) crash and subsequent battery on the morning of the PUC game did it in. It was driven for the rest of that year and then shut down, as it could no longer pass the bi-annual French safety certification. I would curse the sniveling bureaucrats for their inflexibility, but after all, it did lack a rearview mirror.

It’s a sad day. Le Woodsmobile is dead. Long live Le Woodsmobile.

No posts for a long time, so I figured I’d give a quick update. As you know, my physical therapy from the ACL reconstruction in October went very poorly, to the point that 29 weeks out, I still couldn’t comfortably descend stairs. (By comparison, 35 weeks after my first ACL surgery on the right knee in 2001, I was already playing baseball with the Reds.) After months of frustrating non-progress, during which we fired my physical therapist for incompetence, my surgeon finally decided to proceed with arthroscopic surgery on Tuesday, May 13th, in an attempt to fix whatever was slowing my rehab down.

I spent the next six days at home *screaming* in pain. The painkillers simply could not keep the pain under control. At one point I was taking twice the recommended dosage of painkillers, and even then, I was still waking up Becky in the middle of the night, screaming in agony. Additionally, I was running a slight fever, so we were worried that the knee might have gotten infected.

I saw my surgeon on Monday (the 19th), and he withdrew some fluid from the knee. There was bleeding in the joint, and that was causing a lot of pressure and causing the excruciating pain and massive swelling. He figured that withdrawing the fluid would fix everything. Instead, the next day the pain was even worse, and my surgeon referred me to the ER. I spent two weeks in the hospital. Two days after being admitted, they got the fluid back from the lab, revealing the presence of bacteria in the joint, meaning that the scope a week before had in fact caused an infection. They scheduled immediate emergency surgery that night to flush the joint and attack the infection.

Friday morning (early morning, some six hours after surgery) constituted three of the worst hours of my life- After the painkillers from the surgery wore off, I blacked out with pain, and don’t remember much. Becky said I was ranting incoherently, saying stuff that just didn’t make ANY sense, and was even speaking in tongues for about three minutes uninterrupted: funny in retrospect, but at the time, really scary. I was running a 103 degree fever and my blood pressure was 179/90, with sweat just pouring off of me in buckets. To make matters worse, someone made a HUGE mistake, and my prescribed painkiller dosage was accidentally decreased by more than 50% post-surgery, when it had barely been sufficient to control the pain before they started monkeying around inside the joint. Becky was BEGGING the physician on call to give me some painkillers, but he kept refusing. It was awful. I literally didn’t open my eyes for 3 hours, the pain was so great, and Becky was so traumatized by it that she was crying about it hours later.

Since that low point, however, things have slowly improved. I spent two weeks in the hospital, including my 29th birthday (at least it wasn’t my 30th.) I’m out of the hospital now, still on crutches and on a lot of painkillers, but I’m slowly putting more and more weight on the left leg. Unfortunately, the systemic infection I suffered required a PICC line, a permanent IV line that allows me to inject IV antibiotics into my arm every eight hours for the next six weeks. This has cancelled my planned summer internship in San Francisco, so instead I’ll spend the summer in Evanston (staying close to my center of care), writing a few cases for professors.

On less of a personal note, I wanted to comment on why baseball is better than basketball. I count myself as a Celtics fan, but I can’t say that I’ve paid my dues with the C’s the way I paid my dues with the Pats and Red Sox. Obviously, with the C’s resurgence, it’s been fun (not to mention a good way to distract myself from the pain while in the hospital) to watch their trip through the playoffs. What’s been incredibly frustrating is watching the officiating, which has been atrocious throughout. I always knew that stars get the calls, that refs get swayed by home fans and give the home team better calls, and that there is a suspicious tendency for big market teams to get calls when it will extend a lucrative series. What I didn’t realize was just how ridiculous it had become.

What’s ironic about these finals is that the league got what it wanted- the two biggest franchises and the greatest rivalry renewed for huge TV ratings- but maybe they should have been careful what they wished for.

Sure, with that Boston/LA rivalry, you get a ton of hype and maybe bring back a lot of fans (like myself) who haven’t paid as much attention to the NBA for a few years. Unfortunately, and I may just be projecting, they’re coming back and remembering why they became disenchanted with the league in the first place- the hilariously one-sided officiating in games 2 and 3, the outrageous protection of stars like Kobe and Bron Bron, the home cooked officiating. With that increased hype comes increased scrutiny, and right in the middle of it drops the turd that is the Donaghy story. Just when the spotlight is brightest, those same fans are getting confirmation that it’s not their imagination; after all, there is an NBA ref who officiated playoff games less than a year ago and is currently facing up to 25 years in federal prison for fixing games. (Not to mention the fact that the FBI informed the NBA that he was under investigation in January and he was STILL selected to referee the finals. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.) To top it all off, immediately before game 3, he makes a statement confirming that precisely such shenanigans occurred in specific games where the officiating was so laughably one-sided that we already expected it.

The best part of all, from a Nixon-fan perspective, is that there are great parallels to Watergate. They didn’t get Nixon for the break-in, or the wiretappings, or the Saturday Night Massacre- they got him for approving the $1 million to get the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation. Here, we have Stern similarly pulling the levers by fining a coach for having the gall to allude to the dirty pool being played!

None of this scrutiny would have happened in a Jazz-Magic series. Be careful what you wish for.

Check it out.

(as I always do), I’m going to run thr0ugh the rest of the NL Newsblast-style.

The central has two good teams- Chicago and Milwaukee. Chicago has better pitching, but not so much better that it’ll make up for the Brewers’ lineup. Before the season, I thought Fukodome was a great signing, but I thought it would take half a season for him to adapt to major league pitching… so much for that. Cincinatti is a year away, the Astros are terrible, and the Cardinals and Pirates aren’t worth talking about.

I want to go with the Phillies - I really do - but the Mets are just too talented. I don’t think Pedro is going to contribute anything, but it’ll be fun to watch him have that one 7-inning 10-K game that reminds us how in 99-00, he was the best there ever was and the best there ever will be. I believe I’ve alluded to it before, but Pedro’s dominance during the absolute height of the steroid era was so many standard deviations above everyone else who had ever tried to throw a baseball with their right hand, it is unfair to compare him to other pitchers. In any case, the one hope for the Phils is that Pedro and El Duque, a combined 75 years old, break down and the Mets can’t patch up the back end of the rotation. This team smacks to me of the 2004 Red Sox- after a disastrous collapse (6-13 down the stretch), they went out and got the best player available. They’re not messing around, and I think they’ll take the division.

Meanwhile, I think the Phils will make a run at the wild card before falling to the Cubs, largely because the Cubs get to play so many crappy teams in the Central. The Braves’ lack of pitching will not make up for an AL-quality middle of the lineup, and the Nationals’ sole highlight will be the presence of Dugout favorites Dmitri Young and Elijah Dukes. As for Florida, any time your opening day starter has a 5.21 ERA, you’re likely looking at a 100-loss season. Knowing the Marlins, however, they’ll probably just reload and make a big splash in 2010 and steal another world series they don’t deserve. You would think that two world series victories in four years would make me less bitter about these fast food McFranchises winning titles before, say, Cleveland or Chicago, but it hasn’t. I hate them.

For the playoffs, we have the following:

NLDS: New York over Chicago, 3-2
San Diego over Milwaukee, 3-1

ALDS: Detroit over New York, 3-1
Boston over Seattle, 3-0

NLCS: New York over San Diego, 4-1

ALCS: Detroit over Boston, 4-2

World Series: Detroit over New York, 4-2

As always, they’re worth what you paid for ‘em…

…plus que c’est la meme chose.

Never thought I’d be reading about someone else having the same experience in France, but here he is. Meet Tony Lewis, current star SS/P for your Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks. Reading through his blog is like a walk down memory lane. I’ve eaten at those very same dinner tables and toiled in those very same dugouts. He even describes Vince’s half-asleep batting stance to a T.

Here’s hoping that Tony guides the Chucks to an N1A championship, that he feasts on French pitching, and that les francaises are kind to him…

For years, the NL West has been the crappiest division in baseball. With the Rockies and D-Backs in the NLCS last year, that appears to have changed. It’s a mystifying division to me, because I can’t figure out if there are three legitimately good teams or if Colorado and Arizona were really just mediocre teams that got incredibly hot at the right time.

Let’s start with San Francisco. Three years too late, they finally cut the ties with Barry. Unfortunately, they’re about three years away from cutting ties with Barry Zito, whose crippling nine-figure deal may well turn out to be the worst pitcher’s contract in baseball. Let’s see, his K/9IP continued to fall despite going to the NL, and for the first time in his career he posted an ERA+ under 100. This is not good, Giants fans. I look to the G-men to finish last.

This brings us to the Rockies. It bears mentioning that they pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks during a pennant race in the history of baseball. However, I can’t help but focus on their performance in the World Series; they didn’t look like they belonged on the same field as the Red Sox. I don’t think they would have won a single game against the Yankees or Indians, either, and they might have stolen one from the Angels, but that’s about it. I don’t say this to taunt what was generally a likable, overachieving team, but rather to bemoan the problems facing baseball. It was all well and good to go on a run through the NL, but the second they faced a high payroll team, it wasn’t even close. I mean, there’s no glory for the Red Sox here- they *should* sweep a team they’re outspending by $90 million or so. As great as the World Series win was, it just reinforced to me how much the league needs a salary cap.

Anyway, I still think that the Rockies’ pitching is an illusion, the bullpen got worse through free agency, and I don’t think they can outscore teams to get back to the playoffs. Many have them as the consensus division winner or wild card behind the D-Backs, but I don’t see it. I see a disappointing fourth-place finish.

Los Angeles is something of a dark horse. I like the idea of signing Jones for just two years, although I’m surprised it took $18 million per, given just how putrid his 2007 season was. Unfortunately, I look at this team and see an aging squad with injury concerns all over the field. Nomar, Kent, and Schmidt all come with red flags. I don’t think that the addition of Joe Torre will overcome the problems of a team halfway between rebuilding and making a run for it right now, and I see them taking third.

The Diamondbacks are an absolute mystery. I see that legitimate ace at the front of the rotation, Dan Haren as a great #2, and the ghost of Randy Johnson as a #3. Come the playoffs- ie, the only time I watch the NL except for interleague or the odd Cubs game- they looked unstoppable until they ran into the white-hot Rockies, which makes you wonder how they hell they got outscored for the season. How is that possible? How can you score 20 fewer runs than you allowed and win 90 games? The weakness of that lineup (Trot Nixon: not the answer at this point) combined with the strength of that pitching staff (and presumably some reversion to a Pythagorean mean) suggests that you could legitimately pick these guys anywhere from first to fourth. I don’t have the courage for either, so I’m picking them second.

That leaves San Diego, who I think will take the division. Call it a gut feel kind of thing, which given how closely I follow the NL West, is about all I have. A weak offense (9th in the league in runs) added only Jim Edmonds and Tad Iguchi, but I feel like Adrian Gonzalez is due for a breakout year and I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Kahlil Greene. The most interesting question about San Diego is whether Prior can be counted on for absolutely anything. As I’ve pointed out, I have a standing bet that he’ll never start 31 games again in the majors, and his inevitable surgery this year could prove critical in shifting him to the bullpen so that I can rest easy.

Pick: SAN DIEGO, Arizona, Los Angeles, Colorado, San Francisco

I’m running out of time on these, so before the season can start, I’m going to throw these out there and explain them later.

NL West:

SAN DIEGO
Arizona
Los Angeles
Colorado
San Francisco

NL Central:

MILWAUKEE
Chicago
St. Louis
Cincinnati
Houston
Pittsburgh

NL East:

I still haven’t made up my mind on the East, which I think is going to be the tightest division in baseball. The Phillies, Mets, and Braves are all going to be pretty good, and even the Marlins and Redskins- I mean, uh, Nationals- aren’t going to be terrible. (well, terrible is a relative term- they are in the NL, after all.) Back to this one later this week.

I used to do the East last, but I guess when the Red Sox have won two world series in four years, it’s a little less important to pit the Red Sox and Yankees as a struggle between good and evil. Make no bones about it, the Yankees are still everything that’s wrong with everything, but for better or for worse, the struggle between the two just isn’t life and death anymore. Maybe that will change if the Yankees win a world series some time soon, but until then, watching a Red Sox season is just a relatively pleasant, relaxed experience, one that no longer inspires paranoia, fanaticism, and self-loathing.

I’d like to say that the Orioles got smart and finally realized it was time to rebuild, but given the Angelos track record, it’s more like they just got less dumb. The O’s are sort of like the Buffalo Bills- once a division rival with fans so likable and recent struggles so frustrating that I actually root for them. Just as Buffalo loves its football, Baltimore is a baseball town, and they deserve better than the parade of horribles they’ve seen since the Jeffrey Maier game. (Incidentally, a small, nasty part of me has always hoped that one day I would find myself in an adult baseball league game against ol’ Jeffy so I could stick one in his ear.)

Make no bones about it- this is a 100-loss team if I’ve ever seen one. In fact, this team might have a shot at 110, which is pretty damn tough to do. It’s just plain hard to lose 2/3 of your games, no matter how you slice it. It helps, however, if you’ve traded away the only reliable starting pitcher from what was already the second-worst staff in the league. On the bright side, it will be interesting to see how many at bats stud Adam Jones (the key to the Bedard trade) gets, and how Markakis continues to develop, while looking towards 2011 or 2012.

Everyone’s high on the Blue Jays, but I see an injury prone team with aging players trying to stay healthy while playing 81 games on turf. As a Sox fan, I’m thrilled that David Eckstein will be facing Boston pitching for 19 games. The big questions are whether Wells returns to form after a lousy 2007, whether Rolen can stay healthy, and whether Ryan will take back the closer role from Accardo. If everything broke right for these guys, I think they still finish a game or two back of the second place Red Sox or Yankees. Instead, I think they finish fourth, because…

Tampa Bay is going to be frisky. They’ve got a young core of fast, talented players, one established slugger in Cliff Floyd, and a legitimate ace in Kazmir. If this was any team other than the Devil Rays, someone would be picking them to win the wild card. I don’t think they’re that good, but I think they’re being overlooked on account of their horrendous history.

And so, down to the final two. Epstein has always been a wheeler-dealer, so this offseason’s inactivity felt more than a little bit unfamiliar. I’ve said all along that I would have packaged both Ellsbury and Lester for Santana, without hesitation. I know it would have proved devastating to the pink hat crowd, but I just hate Ellsbury’s swing. I hate it. I don’t care that he hit .400 in the World Series, or legitimately could have won the MVP of the series. He runs like the wind, sure, but I just don’t see that swing holding up against major league pitching once the league gets a second or third crack at him. As for Lester, he’s a great story, and there’s a lot to be said for winning game 4 of the world series, but the elephant in the room is the fact that he is coming back from cancer. Not a torn ACL, not a strained hammy, but the big C. Call me cynical, but I just don’t think that bodes well for someone whose value stems primarily from the fact that he’s locked up with one team over the long term and who needs to last through a grueling 162-game season. Don’t get me wrong- I think Lester has a chance to be a succesful major league pitcher. I just don’t think his upside is in the same time zone as the downside scenario for Johan Frigging Santana, and that’s ultimately what we’re talking about here- whether they should have shipped him out for Santana. From my perspective, I would have packaged both Ellsbury and Lester and looked for Santana plus a prospect back. Even with the outlandish salary Santana commanded from the Mets, I can’t help feeling like this was a horribly missed opportunity. It was like they had the opportunity to trade for Pedro again, but this time they blinked because Pavano and Armas Jr. were untouchable. Bad, bad, dumb, bad, dumb, stupid, bad idea.

On the other hand, the Sox made a huge upgrade in the bullpen… by letting Eric Gagne walk. (Ba dum!) Basically, it’s the same team as last year, with the exception that Ellsbury is going to take Crisp’s spot and Buchholz will replace Schilling in the rotation. A few thoughts:

1. Count me among those disappointed that Coco Crisp will probably be leaving via trade over the next few weeks. He’s a guy that absolutely could have been the toast of Boston, and instead he’ll probably be considered a disappointment. Those numbers he put up in Cleveland were real, they weren’t even NL numbers. They were legitimate, and as a generally charming guy with a penchant for spectacular defense, he had every chance to be a breakout star upon moving to a major media market. Instead, what happens? He breaks his finger in spring training, rushes back before he’s ready, and loses a full 80 points off his slugging average in 2006 and 2007. It’s just a shame- he could have owned this town, and instead everyone wants to trade him to see what the boy wonder can do. To be honest? I hope this prediction comes back to bite me in the ass- I hope I’m horribly, horribly wrong- but I would be very surprised if Ellsbury has a better 2008 than Crisp (unless the Sox are unable to trade Crisp and he is stuck in the purgatory of platooning as 3rd/4th OF with Ellsbury). Even when you factor in the salaries- which you can’t really do seeing as any trade of Crisp would take that into account and give less than full value back- I think Crisp was the right call here, with Ellsbury shipped out for Santana.

2. Perhaps the one Boston youngster I actually *am* excited about is Buchholz. Simply put, I haven’t looked forward to a Red Sox rookie this much since Paxton Crawford. (Oops.) From the start, Buccholz has just looked right, and generally, tossing a no-hitter in your second start and being linked to the Penthouse Pet of the Year aren’t bad ways to work your way into the hearts of Red Sox Nation. Frankly, I thought Schilling was cooked at the start of last year, and while he proved me wrong, I wasn’t really counting on much from him this year. I’d much rather see Buchholz given a chance.

3. Let me get this straight: Schilling signs a one-year extension and then a few months later decides he needs season (and possibly career) ending surgery? Curious. I’ve always been a Schilling defender, perhaps because it takes a blowhard to know one, but this one smells a little fishy to me.

4. I think JD Drew is going to have a monster year. Of course, I thought that last year, too. I think Pedroia is a likely candidate for the sophomore jinx, and I worry about Lowell finally hitting a wall. However, I think that Dice-K and Beckett will be the best 1-2 punch in the bigs this year. I see great things out of the , and I think that Beckett has fallen to a mysterious rare back ailment seen only when a redneck wants to duck a trip to the land of the rising sun.

5. I think Manny is due for a serious decline, and I’m terrified that Ortiz won’t see anything to hit as a result. That said, it is a contract year, and Manny did hire Boras, so maybe he’s just smart enough to know that now would be a good time to hit, say, 50 bombs.

6. Finally, someone rid us of this troublesome deceased. Someday, I’ll sit my grandkids on my knee and tell them about Dougie’s Diary. I’ll tell them about a guy who probably should have paid roughly 75% of every major league paycheck to the presence of one man on the pitching staff. I’ll tell them the story of a magical year in 2004, where the outrageousness of the Red Sox coming back from a 3-0 deficit against the hated MFYs to win their first world series in 86 years was dwarfed by the outrageous fact that the Varitek/Mirabelli catching tandem very nearly outslugged the quarter-billion man A-Rod (here’s the part where I link to a table I stole from SOSH and hope that it doesn’t run too far off the left column):

I mean, that’s just outrageous. Forget the fact that they were earning about 1/6 of A-Rod’s salary, they were catchers. On the merits of their position alone, they were more valuable, even without mentioning the fact that you could have had them for about $18 million less. Just… wow.

Anyway, those days are, in the words of a recent Boston film, gone, baby gone. Sox fans were so outraged at his sub-60 OPS+ over the last two seasons that… they looked around and realized that for a backup catcher, that’s about middle of the road. (Note to self: up on first son’s birth, force baseball into his left hand, tying his right hand behind his back Chinese footbinding style if necessary to ensure that he becomes a LHP; if the little bastard insists on throwing with the wrong arm, make sure he knows that the reason daddy drinks is because little Johnny hasn’t practiced enough foul popups behind home plate.) Now Kevin Cash is the backup… well, you saw the link, you draw your own conclusions. Suffice it to say that I had never seen a negative OPS+ before. Anyway, it’s all kind of much ado about nothing, seeing as the guy will probably get 150 at-bats, but I’m more concerned at the way he looks trying to catch knuckleballs from Wakefield. Imagine you gave my cousin Sean a 12-pack of Hamms and a left- and right-handed catcher’s mitt, and told him he couldn’t start using the right-handed one until halfway through. I shudder.

7. Okay, obviously I’ve blathered on and on about the Red Sox, and believe me, this was where I planned on cutting it off. However, I had already written this long before this happened, so I’m going to post it anyway:

I heard yesterday that Bartolo Colon was shelled in a Dominican Winter League start and might retire. Apparently he can’t top 91 on the gun; given his weak secondary pitches, that kind of low-grade unleaded is insufficient gas to get guys out even in the Dominican Winter League. Keep in mind, this is a historically formidable AL opponent with Cleveland, Chicago, and LA, a guy that usually pitched well against Boston (except against Manny, who killed him). So in theory, I should be pleased.

Instead, I just feel a vague sense of wistful nostalgia. Looking back, this is the exact kind of guy that you would have thought would be a Red Sox. (I checked- the singular Red Sox, unliked the elusive singular hijink, actually exists.) He has all the characteristics of a guy that I would root for, love, cherish, defend against all critics (i.e. ESPN, Dan Shaughnessy, my Dad), and by whom I would ultimatedly be disappointed.

A) He threw gas,
B) He was portly,
C) Portly is a euphemism for “the guy had so much talent that he could get away with being a fatass and still get guys out,”
D) He kind of had an attitude, and
E) Ultimately, he was kind of disappointing. Like all the other guys with talent to spare and a body built for sumo, he never reached his true potential. Lastly,
F) The dude threw gas.

Now, even when he was on the block a few years back, and Sox fans were clamoring for the front office to acquire him, even then I wasn’t hot on the idea of trading top prospects for a guy who even then was a strong injury risk. Looking back, though, I honestly can’t see where the breakdown was. Given his high ceiling, massive injury risk, and even more massive gut, how is it possible that he never wore a Red Sox uniform? Ah, what might have been.

Swear to God. Then this happened. Well, I guess the world makes sense again, after all.

And, well, the Yankees. Long story short, these guys could go either way. They have like 42 guys in contract years, which is generally a good thing. Those guys are also old, and in the case of Mussina, Giambi, Abreu, and Pettitte, past their prime. If everything goes their way- if Hughes and Kennedy and Chamberlain all perform up to expectations, and if all those contract year guys play like they’re looking for one more big score, and Jeter’s steady decline in range stops, and Girardi has the stones to stop playing the corpse of Johnny Damon in center, and Posada has another career year- well, they could win the East. If not, there’s an outside chance they finish third. Don’t take this as the insane arrogance of a complacent Red Sox fan, because I will be the first to say that the Yankees have waaaaaaaaaay more talent than 2/3 of MLB. I just think that they are once again, an aging team with a lot of question marks, and despite their strong push for the wild card last year, you have to wonder if such an old team can make it through the dog days of August and September. A few last notes on the MFYS:

1) The line about the expectations on Kennedy, Chamberlain, and Hughes above was where I wanted to post a link to the NYYFANS.COM thread where a guy purporting to be a college statistics lecturer kept a straight face while saying that with a 95% confidence interval, the Yankees possessed three pitchers in their minor league system that would have career ERA+ ratings above Pedro Martinez. Let’s just say that such an achievement would be…. statistically unlikely, and leave it at that.

2) I love the firing of Torre for a meathead like Girardi. That’s a guy that could make Lenny from Of Mice and Men look like Connie Mack. The best part about it is that Yankees fans are all geared up, because a) they’re so self-entitled that they overlook Torre’s success from 1996-2000 and instead blame him for the Yankees’ inability to win a ring this century, because it certainly couldn’t be the fact that Jeter hit .200 during the 2004 ALCS, etc., and b) they have been bitching for years that Yankee pitchers don’t retaliate when Yankee hitters get plunked. I think they’re right on the last point, but for the wrong reasons. First off, the Yankee pitching staff has for years been a veteran staff, the kind that doesn’t get wrapped up in these hot-headed brawls. Second, a lot of Yankees- most notably Derek Jeter- hang over the plate as a matter of course, which tends to lead to more HBP. Suddenly, there’s this enthusiasm among MFY fans that it’s “Girardi Time!” (shades of the dreaded “Guliani Time“), implying that now that the Yankees have a certified blockhead as a manager, they’re mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Well, given the recent violence in spring training, I’m comfortable saying that I don’t think this was necessarily a good idea. In fact, I’m thrilled that someone else can take over the responsibility of scrapping with the Rays every few months. Christ, it sucked from our perspective.

3) Lastly, there’s a closer in the league who will turn 39 this year and whose ERA+ fell more than 50% (albeit from an impossibly high level) since 2005. Would you bet on him? No. Neither would I. I bet last year that he was cooked, and he still had a pretty good year. I’m doubling up this year- in fact, I’m tripling, quadrupling up. I think he’s through, finished, done, and he’ll be replaced in late June as the Yankees, in the midst of a pennant race, rush Joba Chamberlain back to the bullpen after a middling stint in the rotation. Thanks for the memories, Mariano.

The Pick: BOSTON, New York, Tampa Bay, Toronto, Bal’more.

There’s one thing I forgot to mention in the AL West predictions, of which Chuck’s comment reminded me: The Mariners are the perfect team to sign Barry Bonds. There’s just absolutely no way they would, but as he pointed out, they are rich in pitching but are going to struggle to score runs, have a salami bat at DH, and are in a less intense West Coast media market where Bonds could hide out a little bit. As a closet Mariners fan (and an outspoken Bonds critic), even I hope it never happens, but they are one of a few teams for which Bonds actually makes sense.

The AL Central is the most intriguing division in baseball. Unfortunately, each year I have to start off any discussion of the division with the most recent stupid contract by the Royals. Last year it was Gil “Ga” Meche, who actually had a great year, even if you do have to wonder if it’s worth paying one guy to pitch well on a 90-loss team. This year, it’s Jose Guillen, who is basically playing the 2007 equivalent of Gary Matthews Jr. in signing a wildly inflated contract just hours before being suspended for HGH use. Oops. Just like the Angels with Matthews, the Royals paying Guillen $12 million a year was a bad idea *before* he was suspended, but apparently the Royals knew a suspension was possible. Why overpay for a guy that’s going to miss 10% off the bat? Is it really that hard to get even moderately talented ballplayers like Guillen to Kansas City? Wait- don’t answer that.

Fortunately for Kansas City, however, there is Chicago, whose 2006-2007 season just demonstrates how painful it can be when a team gets old all at once. I’m not sold on the idea that Contreras has anything left to contribute, and the departure of Garland is going to hurt the rotation outside of Buehrle and Vazquez. I hate the bullpen, with retreads like Dotel and Linebrink. If I were a White Sox fan, I’d be terrified that the first half 2007 Jermaine Dye is a better look at the future than the second half 2007 JD, and despite his monster 2007, I’d be worried about Jim Thome. He’ll turn 38 this season. He’s a heavset power hitter entering his 18th year in the league, and injuries have plagued him in the past. With black holes like Juan Uribe and A.J. Pierzynski (trending downward) on the roster, you’re basically looking for Swisher, Konerko, and Thome to carry the team offensively. Troublesome. I think they finish last, with the Royals coming on in the second half as the young guys like Gordon and DeJesus inspire hope for 2009.

Given his peripherals, I’m expecting a little regression (which, pre-stat head, was called the Sophomore Jinx, even though it’s technically his third year in the biggs) from Carmona, which is trouble for a team that essentially rode their two aces to within one game of the World Series. It’s more of a gut feeling with this team- for all intents and purposes, they should have gone to the World Series last year and then won it. They coughed up a 3-1 lead in the ALCS, and there’s invariably a sort of hangover after that kind of collapse. If “blowing a 3-1 lead” is a skull-rattling hangover, then
“still having Joe Borowski as your closer” is the ashtray taste in your mouth that reminds you about the cheap cigars you smoked. Overall, I just think they haven’t gotten better, while the four other good teams in the AL all have.

I’m unusually bullish on the Twins, and I can’t figure why, when you realize that they just lost the best pitcher in baseball and perennial Gold Glover Torii Hunter. Liriano is coming off Tommy John, but even if he’s half the pitcher he was two years ago… well, that’s still a really, really good pitcher. Morneau and Mauer are reaching their primes, and Delmon Young is both fun to watch and totally insane, sort of like a less religious Carl Everett. I don’t think they have the horses to win the thing, but I think they will take third, whereas a lot of people are picking them fourth or last.

Obviously, everyone has been picking the Tigers, and even as someone who thinks that the D-Train’s 5.17 ERA in Florida will not translate well to facing the tougher AL lineups, I think they are the team to beat in the AL. It’s kind of too bad they play in Comerica now- this is the exact kind of team that was built to play in old Tiger Stadium. With Cabrera, Ordonez, and Sheffield, not to mention Granderson and the surprisingly resilient Rodriguez, they could score 950 runs. Lastly, Verlander is one of the guys that I’ll happily pay to watch on any given day- I saw him shut down the Red Sox last year, and it was something to behold. He was still touching 98 on the gun in the 8th and the Fenway crowd was on its feet applauding. It’s funny that they add the big star in Willis, but at least statistically, he’ll be their #4 or even #5.

There are two red flags: 1) Edgar Renteria, 2) Todd Jones. Detroit may be far enough outside the media microscope that he can duplicate his success last year in Atlanta, but I cringe when I think of his last AL effort in Boston. Of course, he was only brought in to replace Carlos Guillen at short, who will move to 1B because his fielding percentage was a ghastly .955 ( Old E-6 Renteria’s 30 errors with Boston in ‘05 brought him in at .954, but why point that out? He blamed the Fenway infield, and that’s good enough for me). Make no bones about it, this team is going to score runs regardless, but if he puts up the monster 2007 he had in Atlanta, Renteria could put them over the top.

As for Jones… what is it with teams in the Central sticking with crappy closers? He turns *40* in April and gave up 1.4 WHIP while only striking out .54 batters per 9 innings. His trendline- as it is with, you know, most 40-year old closers, is decidedly negative when you put his fantastic 2005 (in the NL) into perspective. Look, this team is good enough that they could probably win the division with Dick Radatz closing out games, but in the playoffs, I see icebergs ahead.

Pick: DETROIT, Minnesota, Cleveland, Kansas City, Chicago.

No, HBWT is not dead! Instead, we’ll talk about a dead division, the AL West!

Well, maybe that’s not fair, but basically, there is one good team in the West, one team I think might be good, and two stinkers. Let’s start with them.

I went the other way last year and picked the As to win the West, and I was horribly, horribly off. This year, it’s pretty clear that with the Swisher and Haren trades, they’re rebuilding in Oakland and don’t even expect to match last year’s 76 wins. Frankly, I can’t blame them- with that core of players, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to try to catch the Angels, who in all likelihood will win the division and the right to a first round exit courtesy of the Tigers, Red Sox, Indians, or Yankees. Instead, they’re punting on 2008 in the hopes of rebuilding a farm system that eroded suspiciously over the past three years. Barring a miracle, the As are 3rd or 4th this year.

As for the Rangers, I’m tempted to give them “ultimate sleeper” consideration, but I just can’t get past that pitching rotation. I can’t get through it, over it, around it, or under it, either- it’s an impenetrable mass of suck. In general, if your “ace” went 10-14 with a 5.16 ERA last year, you don’t actually have an ace, you just have a #4 who matches up against the other team’s ace every five days. I do like Kason Gabbard, however- he could surprise people as a #3/4 guy with frisbee stuff. When the Sox made the trade for Gagne last summer, it seemed like a no-brainer to include Gabbard, whose ceiling on a crowded Boston pitching staff was really just as a swingman or long reliever. Instead, after Gagne set the record for the “most one player has ever done to nearly cost a World Series-winning team its season,” it’s possible that we’ll look back wistfully on that particular heist. Don’t get me wrong, given La Saisonne de Vomir de Gagne, it can already be fairly called a terrible trade. Now, it’s just a question of whether Gabbard will make it one of the top 10 worst trades in Red Sox history (a crowded list).

Everyone is picking LA, and with good reason. When I first heard of the Cabrera-for-Garland trade, my initial reaction was that the Halos had a steal; any time you can trade a 33-year-old light-hitting SS for a guy who you can count on for 200 above-average innings, it’s a no-brainer. Upon closer consideration, I was actually surprised to see that Cabrera’s ‘06-’07 seasons were not as terrible offensively as I thought, finishing 7th out of AL shortstops in OBP (although to be fair, that list includes Julio Lugo and Juan Uribe.) That said, I would still make the trade. The Angels had a few promising youngsters who could probably provide 90% of his offense for 10% of his price (final year of an outrageous 4-year, $32 million deal signed on the heels of his 2004 Red Sox campaign.) Two other things fascinate me about this LA team. First, I’m right so rarely, I feel I should point it out when I get one right. In fairness, seeing Gary Matthews Jr.’s massive $55 million contract (not to mention his subsequent implication in an HGH scandal) as a terrible signing was pretty easy. He was woeful in 2007 coming of a suspicious career year in 2006, and the trend for 33-year outfielders with only one really good year to their name does not inspire confidence. With all that as background, it makes sense that the Angels would look somewhere else for a new, younger, cheaper centerfielder. They did, and came up with… Torii Hunter? A 32-year old guy making $18 million a year? I get the rationale- Anderson is cooked as a DH and Vlad looks like a man trying to run on ice in the outfield, so they shift him to DH and move Matthews to a corner spot. Wouldn’t it have made $18m more sense, though, to salary dump Matthews and give Reggie Willits a chance, while hoping that Guerrero can give you at least a half season in the outfield? Basically, this seems to me like a Red Sox/Yankees move- they have the money, so they can afford to go out and overpay a good player (see Drew, JD) to fill a need- but I wonder if this contract won’t hamstring the Halos going forward.

The second thing is Kelvim Escobar, who has always (at least anecdotally) seemed to kill the Red Sox. He has some of the best stuff in the majors, and yet his home/away splits are ridiculous. He’ll start on the DL, although an MRI on his shoulder was negative. After a great 2007, will he finally put it together, or will injuries plague him for the rest of his career? Fortunately for the Angels, they have a strong enough rotation that they can afford to let him take his time, but if they’re five games back at the end of June to a hot Mariners team, you may seem him rushed back.

Lastly, there are the M’s. If I liked the Garland trade for the Halos, I love the Bedard trade for the M’s, even if the crazies (a term of endearment in the baseball context) at the USS Mariner hated the idea of giving up stud young CF Adam Jones. As the Indians showed last year with Carmona and CC, two studs at the top of a rotation will win a weak division, and Hernandez (who certainly shoved my predictions back in my face with a dominant 2007) and Bedard give Seattle that. Ultimately, I think that the Angels are a better team, because Richie Sexson and Adrian Beltre have been so wildy unpredictable and/or horrible. However, the Big Sexy’s absurd contract expires at the end of the year, and Beltre’s gone in 2009 (potentially back to LA.) If they both have monster years, I think Seattle wins the West. If they both tank, they finish ten games back (but probably still in second.)

Here’s the thing- they both had good years, once upon a time, and Sexson is in a contract year. If you roll two dice, and you hit snake eyes nearly every time, well maybe the dice are loaded. But I have to think there’s still some ability to, say post a batting average over .200 and an SLG over .400 hiding somewhere inside Sexson. I’m taking what is essentially a wild guess, and saying that both Beltre and Sexson will rebound this year in line with their career mean (if not their recent historical trend). Besides, with the Sonics fiasco clouding everything in Seattle, I feel like I have to be at least a little bit optimistic on the M’s. It’s too depressing otherwise.

Pick. SEATTLE, Los Angeles, Texas, Oakland.

Long story short, I was googling something about Rouen, and this picture popped up:

I’ve been there roughly a hundred times, including my first arrival in Rouen when Sylvain picked me up. I’ll always remember it, though, as the backdrop for this picture. It may be my happiest in France.

In other news, knee rehab continues at its typically glacial pace. Onwards and upwards.

I’ve been meaning to post for a while now, but life has a funny way of intervening.

I have torn my ACL. After playing rugby for four weeks, I blew my ACL in ten minute of playing flag football. I was running a stop & go pattern, and I was pissed off that we were down by three scores on account of two interceptions taken back for six. I wanted to score, and I was pretty sure the DB would bite on the stop and I’d be clear for six. Instead, as I planted, my leg slipped a little bit on the wet ground before the cleat caught, and I went down screaming and clutching my knee like Alvin Mack in The Program.

The hallmark of this blog- if there is such a thing- has been honesty, I think. When Savigny canned me, I told you how it felt (awful) and why it happened (because I wasn’t good enough). So I’m not going to lie here; it’s depressing. It’s depressing to feel like your body has betrayed you, to think that in all likelihood, I’ve played my last game of pickup basketball or tackle football. This is my second torn ACL, if you remember, on different legs (blew the right one in 2000 as the tree). I mean, to a certain extent, the party’s over.

I’ll never stop playing baseball. I know that. I would just go insane. But for the rest of my life, some sort of risk/reward calculus is going to come into play, and frankly, that’s a real drag. I’m not good at basketball, I don’t really enjoy it, and it poses a high risk of knee injury, so it’s gone. It’s sad to realize that a part of my life- albeit the tiny one that involved pickup basketball at the gym in order to mix up my warmup routine- is gone. It’s out of my life forever. The tougher decisions come from things like rugby, or tackle football. I *love* playing tackle football. I *love* breaking and making tackles… but the risk is huge. Is it worth it?

I don’t have a good answer at this point. I’ll have surgery, rehab it like hell, and then figure it out. In the meantime, though, I thought that this column from Bob Ryan is worth reading.

Cheers,

Ev

p.s. Suddenly, my elbow feels great!!!!

Many readers (okay, a dozen, tops) have emailed me asking about the recent post regarding the future of baseball in Bois-Guillaume. B-do summarized it succinctly, asking if the mayor’s objections to the club’s existence couldn’t easily be solved with an advanced piece of technology known as a “net.”

Well, the immediate answer is “oui.” The more accurate answer is, as Fermin said to me God knows how many times, “Complicated, Evan; France is complicated.”

So yes. On the surface, the problem is that the three or four houses situated next to the baseball field have complained about the occasional baseballs entering their yards, smashing windows, frightening children, and causing general mayhem. Let’s break this down.

The Woodchucks play a 30 game schedule, and during the season, I would say they practice 1.5 times per week (which might explain last year’s less-than-impressive record.) If the season lasts about 16 solid weeks (subtracting the 2-mont layoff in the middle of the season), that works out to 54 practices, for a total of 84 practices/games. Now, in my experience, each game or practice resulted in fewer than one ball launched into nearby yards, but for the sake of argument, let’s be very, very conservative and say that *two* balls landed in a yard each game. Keep in mind that the only yards affected run from about home plate until the foul pole, along the left field line, with a massive, 30-foot tall fence protecting them the length of the foul line. This means two things: first, that two balls per practice/game is unreasonably high, and second, that screaming line drives are caught by the fence, so only high pop-ups make it into the yard.

Now, if I remember correctly, there are four or five houses that span the left-field line. Obviously, the one closest to home plate probably receives more balls than the one furthest down the line, but again, for the sake of argument, let’s say that each house gets the average number of balls in their yard per game. That’s a total of 84 x 2 = 168 balls per year, plus, let’s say, another 32 balls for the various cadet, minime, and softball games and practices each year, which in practice, rarely if ever hit a ball over the fence. That brings us to 200 balls per year, or 40 per house. Of those 40, I can guarantee you that the *vast* majority never go far enough to reach the houses, which are set back from the fence because the street is on the other side of the houses. As a result, some 80-90% of the balls hit over the fence land in the houses’ backyards. Even guessing conservatively, that means that only 40 balls per year, or 10 per house, ever actually make it to the house.

That’s 10 per year, or one per 36.5 days. Now here’s the kicker:

From what I’m told, the Bois-Guillaume baseball club has existed at its present location for far, far longer than any of the affected houses. This is what’s known in American law as “coming to the nuisance”; that is, even if we determine that having baseballs fly occasionally off the premises of the field is a “public nuisance,” the case for the plaintiff is weakened significantly (although not entirely disregarded) by the fact that the defendant carried on the activity creating the nuisance the plaintiff relocated to an area affected by that nuisance, ostensibly aware that the nuisance existed. An eerily similar case in English law (that all American law students are required to read in Torts class) deals with a similar complaint regarding a cricket pitch. Lord Denning’s famous decision in Jackson v. Miller read as follows:

In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket. But now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket ground. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at week-ends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for more houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much the poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.

Obviously, one thing bleeds through from this holding, and that’s Lord Dennings decision that the social value added by the cricket club outweighed the suffering by the club’s neighbors, particularly seeing as the neighbors knew what they were getting into by moving next to a cricket club. The difference, obviously, is that a French official will likely show less deference to the value the club brings to the Bois-Guillaume community.

Now, nothing has been posted as to an update on the Chucks’ site, and I don’t have any new information. But at the end of the day, it seems that beyond any legalese, what we really need here is… a net.

HBWT was merely resting…

Actually not sure what happened there for a week, but I got things straightened out with my hosting company and all should be well. I have a few posts I need to crank out over the next few weeks… Until then, merely enjoy this…

I was looking on the Woodchucks’ website to get an address (it’s sort of funny to have to list one’s previous employment as “French baseball player” on apartment applications) and saw this recent notice, posted just two weeks ago. I’ll write more on this later this week. Between the sloppy translation from babelfish and the French legalese, it doesn’t read very clearly, but I think the overall gist comes through. It was listed under a headline of “The end of baseball in Bois-Guillaume?”

Obviously, this is terrible, terrible news. I’ll write more later when I’ve had a chance to absorb it and read through it.

At the request of the Mayor Mr. Renard, a meeting took place in town hall the 03/07 with 18h00 Were present: Mr. FOX, mayor of Wood-Guillaume and Mr. CARPENTIER, mayor-assistant in charge of the sports for the Town hall and Mrs. BLAISET relative of player, Mr. COUTU, vice-president and Mr. PATUREL, President to represent the club. Without “beating about the bush” Mr. FOX very quickly indicated that the town hall had decided to stop the baseball activity with BG since 2008 following many complaints of neighbors receiving from the balls struck in their garden or their roof. Mr. FOX indicated to us that the means used would be quite simply the not-setting at disposal with the profit of the club by the Town hall of space of play and match devoted to baseball. A priori no municipal Council Decision is necessary, the creation of the club not having been the object in its time of an agreement of CM. The mayor proposes possibly a fusion with the club of Rouen, which we refuse for the known reasons of different policy and bus that would remove at the same time a club but also a ground of baseball in Normandy. Although the dwellings were built well after the creation of the ground (this argument not being valid with the eyes of the Mayor) we make very precise proposals which would allow, at the same time continue some time on our ground but also would emerge in the short run towards a situation gain-gaining. 1° WE ASK: that the activity of the young people (school of baseball and juniors draw to continue, their activity not being a threat for the vicinity. 2° WE ASK: that the softball activity is maintained for the same reasons of nondanger. 3° WE ASK: a significant number of balls being struck at the time of the drives which the town hall rebuilds us the tunnel of striking that it has DETRUIT in 2004 and still not positioned back. Thus we would limit in an important way the risks of balls struck in the neighbors. 4° WE ASK: in the same state of mind and in order to allow to strike balls in real situation of match at the time of the drives, the equipment by the town hall of a “tortoise of striking”, not authorizing material that the “maid” strike and prohibiting any ball struck behind the striker or the sides. 5° WE ASK: with the town hall the authorization of the practice in N1 competition in 2008 by proposing a limitation of the matches in residence. A certain number of meetings would be played outside with the assistance of our clubs partners likely to accomodate us per annum a few weekends. 6° WE ASK FINALLY: the study and creation for 2009 of a true ground of baseball on BG or a close commune (BIHOREL, ISNEAUVILLE etc.) built to the standards, without danger to the vicinity and which permmettrait us to give up the Park of the Cosmonauts definitively. In conclusion, the club of BOIS-GUILLAUME does not accept the decision of the Town hall even if it includes/understands the reactions of certain neighbors. 22 years the old club cannot imagine only one second the pure and simple stop of its activity. We already contacted the legal services of FFBS which deal with the business and the defense of the club and we asked for the assistance of the FFBS so that a file of creation of ground is open. We ask so that each person concerned, fired with BG or elsewhere or not laid off appear with the prsè club to give there her support either moral or even techniques within the framework of the proposals which we made. The President J L PATUREL

If you didn’t catch it, you should by all means check out this feature on Kerry Wood, the one-time can’t miss flamethrower whose awkward mechanics and unfortunate professional relationship with renowned pitcher destroyers Jim Riggleman and Dusty Baker turned his shoulder into laffy taffy.

A friend from France (Miklos, who deserves some recognition for letting me crash at his place in the Marais when I was doing those insane weekend-long jaunts to Paris) sent the article my way, and it came at a surprisingly poignant time in what can somewhat dubiously be called my “career.” For those not keeping track, that no-no I threw against Bois-Guillaume in my last game in Savigny after being fired that resulted in my hiring by BG also unfortunately resulted in a partially torn UCL, or ulnar collateral ligament. When that ligament tears all the way through, the only recovery is the dreaded Tommy John Surgery. In my case, I managed to dodge the scalpel, but the pain in my elbow left me throwing with an ugly dart-style delivery from second base and allowed me to pitch just one inning for the team that signed me largely based on my pitching.

(Pause to reflect wistfully: One lousy, stinking inning. Sigh.)

Anyway, I’ve been rehabbing the elbow since then, with enough progress that I could play company softball at my summer job just well enough that people joked that I had made up ever playing in France. I could throw overhand, with a normal delivery, and put a little zip on the ball, although there’s still a lot of mental uncertainty about my release point. It’s like I lack true proprioception; I don’t know exactly where my arm is in space. A lot of that is probably just coming from fear of re-injury, to be overcome only with time and practice, but it is nonetheless frustrating. Ever since I was eleven years old, I’ve known more or less intuitively where my arm is supposed to be at each point in the pitching motion, and for the most part I could make it go there, the occasional tape-measure exceptions notwithstanding. Suddenly that’s gone, and part of me wonders whether I’ll ever get it entirely back.

It’s a moot point for this summer anyway. I spent just 8 weeks in Boston at a summer job, and now I’m back in Chicago for another 8 before the school year starts. Neither stint is long enough to find and develop the rapport with a team necessary to justify going out and playing at less than full strength. Besides, the doctors I spoke to made it clear that pitching was basically out for all of 2008, and only in 2009 should I even consider trying to throw off a mound again.

None of that really bothered me, as I could still feel the discomfort in the elbow and had resigned myself to taking the year off. I found other ways to pass the time, like playing golf and ice hockey, both exceptionally badly. It didn’t bother me, until a few weeks ago, when I read that article.
As the baseball season went on, and I read that article on Wood, and I kept receiving evite invitations to my old team’s games in San Francisco, I realized how much I missed the combined intellectual and physical challenge that pitching provided. It allows you to be as clever or as crass as you care to be; you can either get fancy and try to keep hitters off balance, change locations, change speed, or just go heads up and try to overpower them. I started to feel this sense of longing to step back on the mound, and realized with some trepidation that there’s a legitimate possibility that it will never happen again. It only got stronger when my Dad suggested that maybe it was time to close the book on my pitching career and focus exclusively on staying healthy by playing in the infield.

In the end, I know I can’t quite give it up yet. I’ll give the elbow another 10 months or so to recover, and bit by bit, I’ll try to throw 10, then 15, then 20 pitches off a mound to see if I can’t give it a go. I may have to change my whole approach, maybe develop a changeup and stop throwing the slider and yellow hammer, which can be tough on the elbow. I may have to change my arm angle to 3/4, or maybe I’ll have to start throwing exclusively knuckleballs. But I’ll give it a shot, either way.

This is a trailer for a documentary on Satan & Adam, my favorite blues band and in my opinion one of the best live performers I’ve ever seen. I was lucky enough to sneak into the Press Room in Portsmouth, NH with a fake ID when I was 18 years old to catch one of their shows. They were an absolute force of nature. After a long layoff, Satan is playing again, and I’ll hopefully get down to Florida to see one of their shows.

If you don’t own their three CDs, you must absolutely buy them (Living on the River is my favorite), as well as Adam’s memoirs.

(Most of this was written, oh, a month ago. So sue me.)

So… I told you so. It wasn’t rocket science, so to speak. Clemens has never, ever been about anything other than the most cheddar, and as each MFY starter went down, Sias’ willingness to pay went up another few million. There is no less surprising development in the world of baseball than Roger going to New York for his 30 million pieces of silver. I’m just hoping that his five and six inning starts tax a bullpen who has already been doing its best impression of this guy:

Now that Clemens’ first start has been pushed back because of, ahem, a “weary groin,” I’m having a hard time deciding which possible scenario I would most prefer:

1) He starts on Saturday and gets shelled, and continues to get lit up like Times Square for the duration of the season, turning in an ERA of 8.53 with 21 home runs allowed;
2) He’s always a week away from joining the team, but nagging injuries (a tweaked groin here, arm soreness there, maybe a pulled hamstring) turns him into the Yankee version of the US Carpathia (a reference I cannot claim as my own.) Instead, he spendsd the entire summer getting paid a hundred grand a day to do rehab as the Yankees sink further and further out of contention;
3) He leaves every game in the sixth inning with the lead and runners on base, and has to watch as the yankee bullpen of arsonists immediately allows those runners to score, putting him on the hook for the loss; or
4) He is found in an alley in the Bronx, apparently the victim of a gangland execution.

Seriously, it’s hard to decide what would fill me with the most joy.

Now, back to the NL. Seeing as it’s, ahem, June, predictions at this point are fairly worthless, so I’ll just summarize the gut feelings I had going into the regular season.

The East has never been kind to me, largely because I always pick the Phillies and they always suck. I picked them again this year, and once again, they suck. Whodathunkit? To my credit, I picked the Mets for the wild card, and right now they look like the only team that could possibly come out of the NL and win the whole thing.

What’s really frustrating about not getting these predictions out until now is that on the rare occasion that I call a division correctly, it make me look bad to publish them only after they’ve been partially borne out.

Such is the case with the NL Central. Coming into the season, I looked at the Central and though what a milquetoast division it was, unremarkable in every way. Simply put, no one is very good in a division that was the toughest in baseball just three years ago. Even your defending world champion Cardinals look like a team little more than slightly above .500. Oh, wait. That’s what they were last year too.

With the Cardinals vulnerable, the Cubs unimpressive, and the Astros on a steady slide, I thought about the good young pitching the Brewers have, and talked myself into liking Milwaukee for the Central. Besides, it’s a feel good story, what with the Brewers’ 20 years of mediocrity, and I almost ended up working in Milwaukee for the summer (a long story), so I managed to convince myself it was a good sleeper pick.

While they’ve fallen to earth a little bit after having the best record in baseball for a while there, they’re still in first place by 6.5 games, and I look like a bandwagon jumper. Oh well. Basically, I thought Prince Fielder would be a star by 2007, and he’s getting there. The pitching staff is one of the most promising in the game, and the rest of the division is just terrible (that would be your defending world champion cardinals at 24-30). So you’re going to have to take my word for it that I picked the Brewers.

As for the NL West, it’s always been a guessing game for me anyway, and this year was no different. Despite my unabashed loathing of Barry Bonds and all he represents, I basically decided to go with San Francisco solely because Dave Roberts now plays there. (The Giants posters around town even photoshopped Roberts into this picture, which as far as I’m concerned is better than the GI kissing someone in Times Square after VE day.) I even made this pick despite thinking that of all the contracts already suggested as the “worst in history” (GilGaMeche, Gary Mathews Jr., maybe Chan Ho Park and Soriano), the Zito signing has to be among the most bizarre in history. Here’s a guy who has had ONE truly great year, two good ones, and a bunch of slightly above average ones, and he’s being paid $130 million on the basis of a Cy Young award he clearly could not possibly have deserved. He’s also a flyball pitcher who has historicaly struggled mightily (as in an ERA a full run higher) away from the Coliseum, where fly balls go to die. Now, going to the NL will help, and while I won’t ever buy the argument that someone with Zito’s stats is worth $18 million a year, perhaps you could make the case that given the move to the NL and the insane prices paid for pitching this offseason, this deal *could* work out in year one. Maybe even in year two. The problem is, Zito isn’t getting any younger, he isn’t in the Coliseum any more, and his strikeout rates have been declining from a high of 8.61 per nine innings in 2002 to 6.15 in 2006. You would think that going to the NL and facing a pitcher every now and then would help, but so far he’s only up to 5.14… It’s generally accepted that no matter how lucky you are on balls in play, you cannot be effect in the major leagues if you’re below 4.5 K per 9 innings. Put it all together… I hereby absolve the Royals for signing Gil Meche, and the Angels for signing GMJ. THIS is the worst contract in the history of the major leagues.

This is the problem with trying to write your predictions while taking law school classes; you finish them three or four weeks into the season and they lose all value. I promise that I will get to the NL at some point, hopefully over the weekend, although, in all honesty, that’s unlikely given the fact that I have to take two exams in the next two blah blah blah blah blah. No one cares.

Fortunately, the AL East is pretty easy. And despite what other people will tell you, it’s actually the best division in baseball.

It’s easy to start with the Devil rays, because everyone thinks that they’ll finish last. They’re wrong. The Rays will finish fourth. They would actually be a year or two away from contending with the big boys except that they have the worst general management in sports. Fact is, that Zambrano- no, the wrong Zambrano- for Kazmir trade may go down along the lines of Bagwell-for-Anderson. Nice job, Mets. Anyway, it’s the same old story in Tampa Bay. They have a lot of young talent, they’ll lose a ton of games, Kazmir will be great, and no one will show up. Also, they’ll get into an inexplicable brawl with the Red Sox at some point. Hey, whatever it takes to put 6,000 fans in the seats every night.

The fifth place team in the east will actually be the Orioles, and I still think they’ll win 76 games. They’re not good. Let’s come to grips with that. The rotation is lousy, the bullpen is suspect, and the lineup has two aging stars. Awesome. I’d go on but it’s actually more depressing than talking about the Royals. Seriously- the Orioles ought to have won two championships since the opening of the new park, don’t you think? They had sellouts every game, a weak division, and they still couldn’t get it done due largely to owner ineptitude. Ineptitude, by the way, is so under-descriptive here it’s almost criminal. It’s like saying the Grateful Dead were a little too “hippie” for the mainstream. Peter Angelos… ah, words fail me. Let’s move on, for the sake of Boz and all the other good Orioles fans out there.

Toronto? Solid. Good rotation with a lot of backups (hey, there you are, Victor!!! Sorry you didn’t last with the Mets more than… never mind.) Frankly, they could win the division if all turns out right, despite losing a guy like Ted Lilly, who I think was among the best offseason signings of them all. BUT: I look at their lineup and see too many guys named Overbay and Zaun. It’s not a big deal to have a few holes in your lineup in the AL East (see Red Sox, 2007) but having several holes without the requisite offsetting power in other spots will kill you. Not enough bullets in the gun for the Jays this year, methinks.

And then that brings us to the Yankees. You know what? $200 million buys you a lot of talent, and for the first time since I can remember- possibly ever- I picked them to win the East before the season. I first wrote those words three weeks ago, before their rotation became Pettite, Wang, and three guys named Mo and their bullpen came to resemble the 918th at the beginning of 12 O’clock High. Now it’s late April, and the pitching situation is SO dire that I have to reconsider. It’s funny: if you could tell me I had the choice between hearing a) allied forces have captured Osama Bin-Laden, or b) Mike Mussina and Chien Ming Wang have come down with injuries so gruesome they belong in Saw IV, I would think long and hard and choose b. Every time. And… actually, I wouldn’t think that long. Or that hard.

Anyway, the lineup is stacked as usual, almost frustratingly so with guys like Robinson Cano. Here’s the thing: the MFY’s have had a tradition of buying the best player every year, and that’s fine, that’s how they roll. But karmically, when their top-dollar imports go down with injuries, they don’t deserve to have their AAA callups step in and play above replacement level. That’s just not fair. It’s also not fair that A-Rod hit roughly 35 home runs in two weeks in April, and his team is still in last place. Don’t get me wrong; I hate A-Rod. He’s a phony, a terrible teammate, a faker. He’s also the most talented player in baseball, and he can’t seem to catch a break. He really is a fascinating guy in that way. He’s got one of the most overrated players in the game playing his position, not as well as he does, and yet he gets booed when he hits a home run up or down by three runs. He’ll hit a walkoff one night and then get booed when he pops up to end the game the next day. Obviously, I take glee in his struggles, but there’s a part of me that sympathizes. How does it feel to be among the best in the game and work for a fan base so demanding that it’s never enough? Interestingly, I think the upshot of his hot spring will be that he bolts after the season if the Yankees don’t win the world series, and at this point it looks like they might not even make the playoffs. Most people have him going to LA or Anaheim, but I think he’d match up in Houston. He coulud hit 60 jacks a year in that short porch, feasting off crappy NL pitching, playing in a relatively low-pressure environment. We’ll see.

So the lineup is stacked, but the rotation is pretty old and has some holes. The departure of the Big Unit- a delightfully disastrous appearance in pinstripes- has forced Chien Ming Wang to step up and pitch like an ace. The guys at Hardball Times make a pretty compelling argument that Wang will suffer a huge dropoff in 2007, and I’m willing (and eager) to believe it. If you don’t strike out enough guys, basically, you’re hosed.

I think Wang is hosed, despite that great sinker.

The other fascinating story through April is the purported demise of Mariano Rivera. At this point his ERA is over 12, and he would have to throw 38.1 scoreless innings to match his 2006 ERA of 1.80. Everyone goes through bad stretches, but last night the dregs of the Sox lineup (Pedroia, Varitek, Crisp) were taking monstrous hacks off him. They hung a crooked number on him and he didn’t even make it through the inning. He’s had a few slow starts before, but it was always a dinker here, a hung cutter there. Right now, he’s just getting shelled. Part of it is a problem of consistent work; this team’s offense is so insane, they’ll blow the doors off a lot of #4 and #5 starters and he won’t have a save opportunity for a few days. Many people have said that it’s sad, like watching Willie Mays stumble around centerfield for the Mets at the end of a great career. I couldn’t agree less. Rivera forever cemented his reputation as a classy, self-deprecating kind of guy when he jokingly acknowledged the standing ovation at Fenway at 2005’s opening day. Great. But until he stops wearing pinstripes, I hope his every appearance on an MLB mound is an agony of bases on balls, crushed mistake pitches, and Yankee fans booing. Nice guy? Sure. Less loathsome than most other Yankees? Absolutely. That changes nothing. I can hope for nothing more than that this is not merely a slump but rather the beginning of the end, so that I may fiddle and dance as his career burns.

So what’s the upshot of all that? With a disastrous bullpen and an injury-riddled rotation, the Roger Clemens watch becomes that much more interesting. They may sign him for $30 million pro-rated when all is said and done, because they’ll be so desperate they’ll be willing to give him the moon. Meanwhile, the bullpen is so decimated that Scott Proctor is on pace for 158 appearances this season, and Clemens has said that he wants to go somewhere with a bullpen that will protect leads. As the Yanks become more desperate, in theory, Clemens becomes more hesitant to sign there. My guess? He’ll sign there. I’ve been down this road before. What Roger says is never as important as what Roger does, and what Roger does is sign for the absolute maximum number of greenbacks, every time, without fail. New York will give them to him, so he’ll be a Yankee by June. (I also pointed out in my AL West preview that I think there’s a chance that Ichiro will be in pinstripes by the deadline as well, if the Mariners are well out of it and Steinbrenner starts going wacky and forcing ridiculous trades.)

The 2007 Red Sox are an interesting team the same way Richard Nixon was an interesting person: fascinating, complex, and deeply flawed.

On the one hand, you have a lineup that can only be described as bloated: with talent (Ortiz, Ramirez, Drew, even Youkilis) and with misplaced dollars (Crisp, Varitek, Lowell). The Crisp situation is fascinating. If baseball were steel, business school students would read case studies in years hence about how the Red Sox correctly determined that going into the stretch run with a gimpy (but fan favorite) Nomar should be traded for Orlando Cabrera and other assorted spare parts, how they correctly decided that they shouldn’t pay O-Cab’s asking price, how they incorrectly decided that Renteria was the right answer at shortstop for 2005, how after 2005, they (maybe) correctly decided to ship Renteria out of town, how they ingeniously flipped him for Marte, how they inconceivably traded Marte, then a sure-fire 3B power-hitting stud, for Coco Crisp, settling for the aesthetically beautiful Alex Gonzalez era at short, then decided to overpay for Julio Lugo to start 2007. Truly; Shakespeare himself could not compose a more ridiculous flip-flopping of names and jerseys, especially seeing as Rents was the man who made the last out in the 2004 season for the Cardinals.

Despite his recent struggles, I remain optimistic that Crisp will turn it around in 2007 and start to hit like he did in Cleveland. I am not, however, optimistic for Jason Varitek. My God, the rumors coming out of spring training were true. He swings like he’s standing neck deep in oatmeal. Of course, there were those of us (myself included) who cautioned against signing a 30+ year old catcher to a big money 4-year contract, but… I guess we’re not the guys pulling the strings. Basically, at this point, Sox fans are hoping desperately for a league-average year out of Tek, and next year we’ll settle for a season like Gus Sinski’s in For the Love of the Game.

On the other hand, though, you had, at least until late March, the most interesting rotation in baseball. Schilling coming off an injury, Beckett hopefully adjusting to AL hitters, Papelbon in the five spot, and good ol’ Timmy Wake holding down #4. Oh. Then there’s some asian pitcher in the #3 spot. Never heard of him… (more on this later).

Before moving on, I have to point out one thing. On principal, I have ignored Dan Shaughnessy’s missives on the Red Sox since 1997: the year I went to college, and, incidentally, the year my red sox fandom went from casual to fanatic. His tired vitriol, his unrelenting nattering-nabob-of-negativism-ishness, and above all, his ceaseless flogging of his “Curse” book made me want to stab him in the face. Repeatedly. With a tire iron.

But this… Well, I hesitate to even link to it in the fear that doing so might drive one or two additional readers his way. Suffice it to say that I have never in my fifteen years of reading the Globe and other papers seen anything so unprofessional, so intentionally confrontational, so deliberately violative of the one, the only true rule of journalism: don’t make yourself the story. Congratulations, Dan, I guess, because at this point you’re just a tired caricature of yourself. You’re an embarassment, and I guess in perpetuating the CHB persona, you’ve earned yourself another few hits on boston.com. Congrats. p.s. I hope you cough blood.

Where was I? Oh, right. Daisuke. Man… it’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about a new addition the Red Sox, and that probably goes back to ‘97 with Pedro. I’ve said all along that I think he’ll come through the AL and just dominate for one or two trips around the league, and then hitters will figure him out and he’ll settle down to have a respectable season. So far, it hasn’t happened. He’s been good, but not great, and while he could have started 3-0 with decent run support (you can’t, for example, blame him for losing this gem by King Felix) he’s been touched for 10 ER in 13 innings in two starts against the Yankees, winning only because the lineup bailed him out. Obviously, the guy is so talented he’ll be successful at the MLB level, but I just hope that Sox fans won’t turn on him when he doesn’t turn out to be Pedro part II, because here’s the thing; there is no Pedro part II. There could not possibly be such a thing. At his prime, say ‘99-’00, Pedro Martinez was so much better than anyone else who had ever tried or ever will try to throw a baseball with his or her right hand that it transcends baseball. From a statistical standpoint, he was so many standard deviations above everyone else, you can’t even meaningfully compare Pedro’s ‘99-’00 to years from other pitchers. You need to compare it to Einstein’s 1911-1912 (gravitational redshift, general covariance & the use of tensors, theory of relativity), or Napoleon’s 1804-1805 (crushes Russia and Austria at Austerlitz, defeats Prussia, steamrolls through Poland to whup the Russians again, places puppet rulers on the thrones of German states). He was just so much better than everyone else that he can only be compared meaningfully to people outside his genre.

Dice-K, as great as he is, will never do that. No one will ever do that again, and I hope Red Sox fans will understand that.

The bullpen is a question mark, although Papelbon solidifies it at the back end. Timlin, love him though we might, is past his prime and all signs point to a continuing rapid decline. Brendan Donnelly has been falling off as well, as 35 year old power pitchers tend to do. The bright spot so far has been Okajima, who came in for a nutsy save last Friday in the comeback against the MFYs. At this point, they look reasonably stable, but it’s an old pen, and over the course of a six-month season, it’ll be interesting to see how they hold up.

Lastly, I have to say I was really disappointed about the Papelbon to the bullpen situation. It’s tough to complain about a team that’s 15-7 and has the best record in baseball, but coming as it did, late in spring training, it smacked of desperation. Obviously, having a guy who throws that kind of gas pitch 180 innings is preferable to having him throw 60 innings, even if those 60 innings are higher leverage and higher quality. Frankly, if it was an organizational priority to have Paps in the rotation, they should have prevented such a situation by targeting a closer so as to allow him to stay there instead of pull a panic move at the last minute and slide him back into the pen. While I wasn’t crazy about the rumored options (Washington wanted an insane boatload of young talent for a guy with mediocre stuff in Cordero, and Brad Lidge is either a guy who just needs a change of scenery or one who needs a new career), they should have had better alternatives than a 74-year old Mike Timlin and Joel Piniero to step into the closer spot. So far, Tavarez has pitched as well as one can expect in the #5 slot, and his antics, particularly as they relate to Dice-K (his oft-replayed gesticulations showing that Dice should pitch A-Rod inside, because he’ll get scared, for example), have been hilarious. I worry about handing him the ball 30 times in a season, though, and I certainly hope that Lester will recover and progress to the point that he can be called up, forcing Tavarez back into a long man role.

So where does that leave us? Well, pre-season I had to pick the Yankees. Right now, it’s obviously tempting to go with the team with the 6.5 game lead in the standings. That Sox bullpen still scares me, however, and it’s inevitable that the Yankees will right the ship somehow, given their bottomless pockets and willingness to acquire anyone at any price at any time. But what if Hughes doesn’t pitch up to expectations coming out of AA? What if they can’t sign Roger, or if they do and he isn’t effective? What if Torre continues to abuse that pen, to the point of bringing in Andy Pettite on off days? What if Rivera really is cooked, and Professor Farnsworth has to step into the closer role (which would be accompanied by me and most other Red Sox fans assuming the facial expression typically associated with Wile E. Coyote as he plots to capture the road runner)? Frankly, that Yankees team is SO one dimensional, and their pitching is SO flawed, that there’s a chance they could be out of it by July.

Nope, I can’t risk jinxing it. I’m picking the Yankees. They’ll win the division by 8 games…

p.s. I have a $100 bet with HBWT reader Colin, a Cubs fan who roots for the Indianapolis Colts (ugh), that Mark Prior will never again start 31 games in a season. Had we been intelligent, we should have built some sort of inflation adjuster to the bet, but hey, we didn’t. Anyway, I asked Cubs fans before the season what they thought, and to a man, they all encouraged me to double down. Then this happened, and then this happened, and I think the window has closed. Oh well.

Not a bad start for the Dice Man.

Obviously, that’s great news for any Red Sox fan, but I take special satisfaction in seeing him come in and pitch well in his debut. It can be kind of stressful to fly across the world and get shelled in your first start. Ahem.

Anyway, he throws seven pitches! SEVEN pitches! That reminds me of a young Evan Meagher…

Oh, wait. He throws seven pitches well. For strikes.

As Nirvana would say, Nevermind…

(I’ll get the AL East prediction up this weekend)

It’s always nice when, immediately after posting one’s skepticism about Felix Hernandez, he drops 12 K’s on the Athletics. However, one performance is not enough to shake my predictions, as my continued pessimism regarding Gil Meche (below) will demonstrate.

The AL Central is by far the hardest division for me to pick, and I don’t think I’ve gotten it right once in the four or so years I’ve done these predictions. You could make a case that it will be the toughest division in baseball (although I think that will go to the AL East), and that four teams have a legitimate shot at winning it.

I’m going with the Tigers, and before I say why, I just want to note that the departure of Gary Sheffield from the MFYs was more than a little bittersweet from my perspective. I always applaud players that I despise going to the Yankees, but it’s rare that any player singlehandedly encapsulates everything I hate about the Yankees, injustice, crime, bland food, and skin rashes. Gary Sheffield was that player.

It’s hard to imagine a more loathsome character, from his me-first attitude to his involvement in the steroid scandal to his proclivity for taking swings at fans in the stands. He’s even friends with Barry Bonds! In fact, it’s pretty clear that he’s the only guy in baseball who can give Barry a run for his money on sheer assholery. So I’ll miss you in pinstripes, Gary. Go with God.

Anyway, I’ll go with the Tigers just because I believe in the rotation and they added the big bat they needed. While I’m skeptical that Bonderman, Verlander, and Zumaya (let alone Kenny Rogers, about whom I’ve been making smoke & mirror jokes for roughly a decade) will all duplicate their 2006 performances, I think they’ll be the second best rotation in the league behind the Red Sox, and if their pythagorean evens out, they’ll be stronger than they were last year.

Frankly, my gut tells me the Indians, but it did that last year as well, and as the saying goes, sometimes my guts have s*** for brains. The addition of Trot Nixon makes it even more difficult to pick against them, but unfortunately, Trot, I believe that ship has sailed. Trot has maybe 2-3 good years left, so it’s not like the guy is dead, but the Trot Nixon era was an emotionTal one in Boston. For years- YEARS- everyone talked about this stud centerfielder they had in AA that was going to make everyone forget about Fred Lynn. The excitement, even as the Patriots were returning to respectability, was palpable. The CHB, who I will discuss in length for his recent shank job on Schilling that may have been the single least professional hatchet job by a columnist I’ve ever read, to his credit once had a great line about the excitement Nixon’s impending arrival in Boston was causing. In mentioning that guys like Lee Tinsley and Darren Bragg were manning the once proud Fenway Outfield, CHB referred to “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.” Then he hurt his back, and again, and it seemed like he would never make it. I once asked my Dad about Nixon, and he could only respond “He’s done. Back injuries. They never get better. They only get worse.”

Well, ol’ Trot made it to Fenway after all, and along the way, he managed to get a couple of big hits. My heart hopes he rebounds and hits 25 dingers, but my head thinks he’ll play fewer than 60 games. What a drag it is getting old.

Anyway, back to the Indians. Not sold on the bullpen, don’t think Marte is ready, don’t think they’ll stay healthy. Second place it is.

The enigmatic White Sox are third. I never know what to make of these guys. I do know that Ozzie Guillen is saying that they’re going back to smallball, which, if true, is code for “I don’t really know what I’m talking about.” Uh, Ozzie: didn’t you guys hit like 200 dingers in the year you won the World Series? Yeah, I thought so. Now you’re makingguys like Jim Thome practicing hitting the ball the other way to score a guy from third with fewer than two outs? Good luck with that. The irony was that I thought the 2005 club just caught lightning in a bottle and wasn’t really all that good, but then they actually got better in the offseason but couldn’t win out in a brutally tough central. I can’t help but think that Buehrle is cooked, that two of Thome and Dye and Konerko will spend significant time on the DL, and lineup won’t be as strong as last year. Fortunately, DARRIN ERSTAD IS HERE TO SAVE THE DAY! Oh-PS+ of 60, wait.

The Twins. No Liriano? No chance. Fun team to watch on any given day, but trotting out Ramon Ortiz and Sidney Ponson (who at this point in his career may have eaten Ramon Ortiz) every five days is, uh, not a good idea. It wasn’t a good idea in 2004, and it certainly isn’t in 2007.

And… Kansas City.

It’s sad that a once proud franchise with a decent ballpark just has absolutely no chance every year. I mean, the big excitement this year is over rookie 3B Alex Gordon, who from the one game I’ve saw, looks like he could be a hall of famer the same way Saw IV could be a surprise best picture nod. The only good thing to talk about is the Gil Meche signing, or as I like to call it, Baseball Galipoli.

Here’s the thing about the Royals: last year they had a very promising 62-100 season. Moreover, they scored 757 runs while allowing 971 runs, which means that over the course of the entire season, their pitching staff allowed four fewer runs than the Yankees score in 1927. Shrewdly, however, they recognized that that run differential projects to a Pythagorean W-L record of just 63-99, so given slightly better luck, all the pieces were in place should they decide to break the bank and overpay the one player that would bring them to the promised land: Gil Meche.

Despite Gil “Ga” Meche owning the Red Sox on opening day, it is worth pointing out that this is quite possibly the worst signing of all time. I know everyone has already killed KC for this one, but this article at the Hardball Times is worth a read. The bottom line is that Gil Meche, for all his early promise, is a guy who a) has not had an above average season in the major leagues since Bill Clinton was president, b) it was only a half season where he started 15 games, c) since then he’s lost between 5 and 10 mph on his heater, according to various reports, and, oh by the way d) tore his labrum and missed nearly two full seasons.

So sure. There is a good chance that Gil Meche will not be a terrible pitcher this year, but he’ll be making $11 million (it’s less than that, but I’m counting AAV). The odds of the next few years being terrible increase each year due to his injury history and the fact that the Royals will be counting on him to lead the staff, and at the end of the day, paying $11 million for the upside of mediocrity isn’t exactly the missing piece to the championship puzzle for the Royals.

Man, it must be depressing to be a Kansas City fan. But then, I say that every year.

This comes from my buddy Joel, famous primarily for playing a mean trombone and having the cutest child I have ever seen. He knows a lot more about the Mariners than I do, so I thought including his opinions would be worthwhile. That said, a 96 ERA+ is a 96 ERA+…

Ev,

I enjoyed the preview. The general consensus by everyone with a pulse is that the M’s will find themselves dead last once again, and it’s hard to disagree. Unless there’s a spectacular confluence of over-perfomers, the likes of which we last saw in 2001, they’ll be lucky to sniff the playoffs.

That said, I do have two bones to pick:

1. I don’t think you give KF enough credit. For a kid everyone expected to be the next Doc Gooden, his 4.52 ERA was admittedly dismal and his 12 wins decidedly pedestrian. Even his ERA+ of 96 confirms that he was basically a league-average pitcher. It’s important to note, though, that El Rey was the victim of some bad luck in 2006. A lot more of his fly balls jumped for home runs ( 18.4% HR/F vs 13.9% in 2005, plus 1.09 HR/G from 0.58 in 2005). That, and his BA on balls in play spiked a lot. The kid got some rough breaks while pitching below his potential; I think it’s reasonable to expect that he has better luck in 2007. It’s worth mentioning that his 176 Ks and 8.3 Ks/9 were promising, and his LOB% was roughly equal to 2005. Does this mean he was good in 2006? Not really, but I don’t think he was the disappointment everyone paints him to be.

Perhaps more importantly, the kid decided he doesn’t want to go through life wearing a Bartolo Colon suit and busted his ass in the off-season to lose weight and get in shape. Felix is basically taking the anti-Freddy Garcia approach to pitching: rather than seeing lounging and partying as the birthright of a professional athlete, he’s working his ass off. It might even be that his struggles last year lit a fire under him and made him realize he needs to learn to pitch, not just throw. To an M’s fan desperate for good news, that’s awfully promising.

Does that guarantee he wins the string of Cy Young’s we all expected a year ago? No, of course not. But I’m optimistic.

2. I don’t see a hidden method to Bavasi’s madness, particularly as it relates to Ichiro. You mention it, but you can’t underestimate the AIS factor Ichiro brings to the club. You’re absolutely right that he’s the only Mariner now that has it, and that’s a huge deal. Half of the M’s attendance comes from outside of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties; a quarter of the weekend crowd is out-of-state. Take away the team’s single gate attraction, and you’re not going to get people from Olympia driving two hours to watch a sub-.500 team or Japanese tourists trekking to Seattle just to watch Kenji behind the plate.

The Mariners have been a very successful business for the last 10 years, and it’s because they’ve been able to market the team well. They’ve had bunches of marquee likeable dudes (Edgar, Buhner, Griff, pre-soulless A-Rod, etc.) they can parade in a beautiful ballpark in a town that loves bandwagons. There is no bandwagon now, the park is 8 years old, and Ichiro is the last marquee likeable dude. Closed door discussions or not, Bavasi has not established much proficiency in the art of the smart baseball decision - I can’t imagine they’re planning to let Ichiro go.

As for this offseason, I think Bavasi planned to spend a boatload of cash on big name free agents - primarily an ace starter and a big bat. When the players he wanted went elsewhere, he stuck to his guns and spent the money. His job is on the line this year. What’s more, Ichiro’s decision hinges entirely on the M’s 2007 performance. Going for broke was the only chance he had - when he missed his targets, he felt like had to make gambles. I don’t think anyone is happy with what he landed. That said, I will applaud him for not getting tied up multi-year deals that will hamstring the franchise for years to come. (There’s a great ussm rundown here that highlights my favorite non-Gil-Meche off-season signing: http://ussmariner.com/2006/11/22/more-insanity/.) My major disappointment is that he hemmoraged young talent - in particular, Rafael Soriano and Chris Snelling (who is tearing the cover off the ball in meaningless Florida games) - to do it.

Hmm…probably time for me to do some actual work now. I look forward to the rest…

Joel

Just a quick note to point out my friend Chuck (originator, ironically, of the plan to go to Europe to play professional baseball) and his new project. Seattle Untimely is a very funny parody of local news in Seattle, and this clip even includes a segment where Portland, Oregon gets called out.

He’s a Mariners fan, so relieve his pain by clicking here.

It’s that time of year again, and rather than email them out, I’m going to post my MLB predictions here. Last year… let’s not talk about last year’s predictions. I think I guessed 3 out of 8 playoff teams and certainly didn’t predict that an 83-win Cardinals squad would win it all. Oops.

I’m going one division at a time, and I’m starting with the AL West. In looking at the AL West, one thing jumps out at you: man, this is a division with a bunch of crappy teams in it. I think it’s the second weakest in baseball after the NL Central, and I think the division winner could come in around 85 wins.

Everyone seems to be picking the Angels, but outside of Vlad Guerrero, I don’t see how they’re going to score any runs. The Gary Matthews Jr. signing might have been the worst signing of all time if not for the Gil Meche fiasco, and that was *before* he got popped for HGH. I see him hitting around .260 with ten or twelve dingers. I know what they were thinking; they had a solid pitching rotation, good bullpen, and wanted to make a big move in free agency, but they passed on Soriano and missed out on Aramis Ramirez when he re-signed in Chicago. Unfortunately, that does not justify dropping $50 mil on a guy who has had exactly one above average year in the majors. Bottom line, good rotation, craptacular lineup, and I think they will stumble terribly down the stretch.

I find myself tempted to pick Texas, just as I am tempted to pick them every year, because of that great infield and impressive bullpen. But I have a few rules. 1) Never pick a team with a 39-year old Kenny Lofton to win their division, and 2) Never pick a team who has anointed Eric Gagne the closer position after he’s pitched about as many innings over the last two years as Manny Ramirez has played at shortstop. The one thing I can predict for sure about this team is that their infield will hit close to 100 home runs and that trading Otsuka would be absolutely asinine. Unfortunately, I’m not sold on the 3-4-5 in their rotation and I just don’t think that merely replacing Buck Showalter is enough to turn around the team’s fortunes. However, I do think they’ll threaten the top two in the division a little bit, and I’ll pick them to finish second as the Angels fade.

Anyone familiar with the AL West realizes that this means I’m picking the A’s to win the division, which is something of a departure for me. Even when I thought the A’s were the favorite to win the West, I’ve always managed to convince myself otherwise, largely because my trips to the McAfee Coliseum made it clear that aside from a proud minority, there are no A’s fans, there are just Raiders fans who come for the drinking and the violence. While you’ll never convince me that the A’s kept the right lefty given the contracts that both were expecting, they’ve got a good staff, a lineup made slightly more interesting by the addition of Piazza trying to pull a rejuvenation effort along the lines of Frank Thomas c. 2006, and a bullpen with Alan Embree in it! How could I pick anyone else (particularly in a division as lousy as this one)?

More importantly, they’re moving to Fremont, give them the division at least, right?

And, Seattle. Um…

Right.

Where to begin?

How about by quoting the boys at the Hardball Times, who wrote that the 2007 Mariners roster “apparently was built by throwing darts at a board. While intoxicated. And blindfolded.”

No, that’s not fair. Let’s start again.

Um… Felix Hernandez is good. In fact, he’s probably the most promising pitcher in the AL with a 4.52 ERA last year.

(beat)

You know, that wasn’t fair either. Let’s skip their lineup because it includes black holes like the Joses Vidro and Guillen, and the rotation because it is staking its success on King Felix, who was only slightly less of a disappointment last year to the Mariners than Josh Beckett was to the Red Sox and yours truly was to the Lions. Let’s focus on the one intriguing thing about their by all accounts disastrous offseason, which is to say their allocation of greenbacks.

Now, the obvious move would have been to re-sign Ichiro, their former MVP (although granted, that was highway robbery against Giambi), their only consistent offensive threat, and the only guy who, even after the Sexson/Beltre signings, still has that AIS potential. (If you’re unaware of AIS potential, then you clearly missed out on the heyday of Astros Connection, one of the great baseball websites of all time, which referred to Danny Darwin as Dr. Death, and spoke in hushed tones about “opening a can of Orange Whup Ass.” Anyway, AIS means “asses in seats,” and Ichiro is the only guy aside from King 4.52 ERA who is going to put them there in Seattle if the team sucks as bad over the next two years as any reasonable human being would expect them to, even in such a wack division. )

They did not do that. Instead, they signed… Jose Guillen. Hmm. Oh, right. Chris Reitsma too. Um… Miguel Batista and Jeff Weaver for almost $35 million. Uh…

So here’s the thing. Contrary to anything you might read on the USS Mariner, Bavasi can’t really be that stupid. He can’t possibly have thought that those ducats were better spent on guys coming off career-killing injury-plagued years and on Jeff Weaver. (P.S. Thanks again, Jeff. Your implosion in pinstripes was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever watched as a Red Sox fan. Moreover, I’d like to thank you for the best game you ever pitched as a Yankee, a game where you left leading by 3-0 in the seventh and yielded the game to the immortal Chris Hammond. Before your A was I the S, the score was 4-3 Red Sox and you were wondering what the hell happened to your career. Brilliant.)

But back to the M’s. Here’s my theory: They had to know that the cripple crew they brought into SafeCo this year was in no way a more justifiable expenditure of dollars- from both a business and a baseball perspective- than extending Ichiro. I mean, they had to. I am going to hazard the guess that they approached Ichiro and he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he would not be re-signing in Seattle. So unless the entire AL West collapses faster than the Tacoma Narrows and the M’s find themselves in contention near the trading deadline, I have to assume the Mariners are smart enough to flip Ichiro for whatever they can get. Now if only there was a big-market team that would be interested in a big-name right fielder, a team that has an unlimited payroll and likes to make flashy moves at the trading deadline and considers the world series their god-given right year after year….

Well…

Hope I’m wrong.

On to the AL Central later in the week!

Before:

After:

Scheduled today. I have to fill out a quick NCAA bracket and then I’ll head over to surgery. By this time to night I’ll look like Jack Nicholson from Chinatown.

The second one is a little blurry, but you get the picture. Name and number! Thanks Sage, Babs, and Elisha!

Also, a quick announcement that instead of sending them out as I usually do via email, my much-maligned (and last year, woefully inaccurate) MLB predictions division by division over the next two weeks. Hope to get to the NL West this weekend, because as always, it’s my shortest paragraph!

Pitchers and Catchers, my friends.

Pitchers and Catchers.

From last week’s post on great noses:

“It is probably unfair to put anyone up against Don Mossi, the only human ever designed by a committee, a very mean spirited committee. However, I submit for your consideration these three beauties, of whom I am particularly fond of Warren Spahn, both for breathtaking latitude and meridian like curvature. However, the way the Osteen beak perfectly continues the line of his prow like buzz cut is something that does not happen by chance. Finally, Mr. Newcombe’s nose was never quite captured in a still photo. It often seemed to have a life of its own when he was pitching, most notably to members of the Yankees, whom he quite properly hated and tried to hit.”

“I hope the nose is well and hope moreso that you suggest a Matsuzaka, in an demonstration of fandom and an effort toward narrowing anthropological chasms.”

Several private comments have been too good not to share. While it certainly makes sense to me to replace this scimitar-shaped nose with one that, you know, resembles my old nose, a few readers have suggested that I at least take a glance at the menu. As such, it makes sense to review an oft-overlooked topic…

GREAT…

BASEBALL!!!!!

First up is Ernie Lombardi, hall of fame catcher for the Cincinatti Reds. Nicknamed “Schnozz,” he is as famous for his enormous nose as he is for his prodigious hitting talent and his breathtaking lack of footspeed.

Next is Don Mossi, nicknamed “the Sphinx,” of whom Bill James had the best line: “Don Mossi was the complete five-tool ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields. He could ugly behind the runner as well as anybody, and you talk about pressure … man, you never saw a player who was uglier in the clutch.” The only problem with Mossi is that his impressive honker is overshadowed by his brobdingnagian ears.

Andy Etchebarren is really more of just an “all-ugly” team guy than a truly remarkable honker, but I thought he deserved mention, if only because in 1966 he finished in the top ten in the AL in strikeouts, walks, and hit by pitch.

Now we’re talking. NO-MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! Man, I miss that dude and his incredible schnozzle. I wanted to get him in a Red Sox jersey, but I thought the hat was a nice touch. I think if I had to choose one ballplayer’s nose to replace my own, I would go with Nomar’s, provided that it came with some of his talent and none of his durability.

Wow… Not only is Honus Wagner proof that massive nostril boxes are common among great shortstops (too many bad hops?), he’s also proof that early baseball card manufacturers attempted to shield consumers from the ghastly images of their less attractive baseball heroes. Seriously, comparing the card on the left with the actual picture on the right convinces me that artists renditions in the early 1900s were the equivalent of soft lighting and lens blur.

I’m not sure if we can evaluate Daryl Strawberry’s nose on a level playing field against players in pre-cocaine eras. It’s just not fair.

You can’t discuss great baseball noses without wrapping up with Joe Torre, the most-picked nose on FOX over the past ten years. And yes, that’s from the 2004 ALCS, or at least I’m going to do what I do with every Joe Torre picture and pretend that it is. Always puts a little hop in my step.

As always, reader suggestions are welcome!

Closing the book on this HBWT experience has taken a lot longer than I thought it would. With all the hoopla around school and exams, I haven’t exactly been prolific as a blogger lately. However, here’s one tidbit: After nearly eight months, two dozen doctor visits, and scores of nose bleeds, my physician here in Chicago finally decided to pursue surgery to fix the breathing irregularities caused by my broken nose. That’s right: rhinoplasty, a nose job. Now, a layman might think that this was a sort of obvious, inevitable conclusion, seeing as a) I smashed my nose into roughly 500 crooked little pieces this summer and b) all of the symptoms of difficulty breathing, bloody noses, and, ahem, mucus irregularities, all began almost immediately after that shattering. However, the American medical community likes to take its time, and not jump to any radical conclusions, like “maybe the devastating nose crushing this fool suffered has caused of all this weird, disgusting stuff to happen to his, you know, nose.” Before doing so, they needed to run myriad tests on me, including a cat scan of my head, x-rays of my chest, and a blood draw to rule out what the doctor called “longshot, odd-ball kind of stuff.”

“What kind of odd-ball stuff?” I asked.

“Well, tuberculosis, for one. Tay-Sachs disease. Syphilis.”

“Syph? Hey-O!”

I was almost disappointed when they all came back negative. Well, not really, but had it come back positive, at least I could have gotten t-shirts printed up that said “I PLAYED BASEBALL IN FRANCE FOR SEVEN MONTHS AND ALL I GOT OUT OF IT WAS THIS T-SHIRT… AND SYPHILIS.”

Anyway, surgery should be scheduled sometime over the next few weeks, and I’ll hopefully get to wear a brace that makes me look like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.

The Quiet Storm got jobbed out of the NFL offensive rookie of the year award, finishing tied for second behind Vince Young.

I’ll be picketing NFL offices in New York all weekend.

The stress of exams has kept me from posting, but I saw this and figured it was worth putting up here. He might be able to play for a few teams in France; they do love the bunt.

As someone mentioned in a reply to last week’s post, the Gil Meche contract has truly set the bar for ill-advised spending by a general manager. How you could justify $11 million a year for a pitcher who

a) has never been healthy enough to pitch 200 innings in a year,
b) has never thrown over 100 innings at above league-average ERA+, and
c) got demoted to AAA as recently as 2004, and
d) has had a shoulder surgery?

Oh, wait. Make that two shoulder surgeries.

If Gil Meche, the definition of mediocrity, is worth $55 million over 5 years, then the value of a, you know, good pitcher is enough to get a mid-cap listing on the Nasdaq.

The mind reels.

In ascending order of ridiculousness…

$70 million for JD Drew?

$36 million for Julio Lugo?

$136 million for Alfonso Soriano?

$50 million for Gary Matthews Jr.?

$44 million for king outmaker Juan Pierre?

I could go on.

If this kind of inflation hit French baseball last year, I might have been making $450, maybe $500 a month!

In the years to come, I expect that my time in France will continue to affect me long after my final flight home in mid-October. I made friends that I will keep in touch with for the rest of my life, I gained fluency (or near-fluency) in a difficult language, and I learned that it’s ok to have a glass of wine with lunch. Those are the types of long-term things that I’ll take away from my seven-month French odyssey.

In the short term, however, my career in France has one altogether undesirable effect… on my grades. See, flying from Chicago to Paris on Friday night and back on Monday morning not only required me to miss six consecutive Mondays worth of class (roughly 20% of class time in three of my courses), it also left me consistently jet-lagged for most of the first two months of my law school career. I had to rely on Ambien to reset my internal clock four or five days a week, I wandered around in a daze for most of the fall, and often forgot what day it was. Interestingly, this course of action is not strongly encouraged in the “Welcome to Law School” handbook that is distributed among incoming 1Ls. The picture below does a good job of capturing this bewildermen, as I wait half-asleep at Charles De Gaule for yet another international flight:

As a result, the last bills from my irrational pursuit of this dream are at last coming due. Exams start on Monday, and my chronic absences and general disorientation during my first exposure to law school will probably put me at a significant disadvantage in several classes.

In a way, HBWT was about sacrifices, about, as BB King would say, “paying the cost to be the boss.” I sacrificed a well-paying job, a year of my life, and the comfort of a steady paycheck in a familiar culture in order to make the dream happen. Those bills have already been paid, and now the spectre of suffering through exams while underprepared is the final payment remaining.

So looking back, I guess the obvious question is “was it all worth it?” Knowing what I know now, knowing how things would turn out with Savigny, how we would toil through a difficult year in Bois-Guillaume, with all the stresses of a team wracked by internal turmoil, and how my first semester of grad school would become essentially a write-off, all because I just wanted to get paid to play baseball… would I do it again?

You’re goddamn right I would.

Apparently you can go through an awkward re-entry into the U.S., get wrapped up in grad school classes and Thanksgiving, then look up one day and realize that you haven’t posted anything in a month. Oops. I’ll give a wrap-up of the playoffs some time this week, but in the meantime, I wanted to let you all know that the Woodchucks are looking for a new coach/pitcher for next year to captain the team now that Matt and I have ridden off into our respective sunsets. Ideally, they’re looking for a pitcher with college experience who can throw 6-9 innings every week, play a position on the side, and help make the team better with weekly practices. They’d prefer someone with at least functional knowledge of French, and most importantly, someone who understands that the point of the game is to have fun.

The money isn’t great, but it comes with a car and an apartment and a whole lot of good people. Obviously, I can fill anyone in on the details and answer any questions. I can only say that you won’t find a better group of guys out there, and the one condition for your employment as far as I’m concerned is that you have to be willing to play over-the-hill team alums with elbow problems when they fly in for a game or two on vacation.

Shoot me an email if you’re interested.

Woodchucks for life,

-Ev

This is not the last post on HBWT. There is still a fair amount of storytelling to be done, a number of little vignettes that I’d like to pass on. However, the fact is, it’s November. The season- and my shortlived career as a professional athlete- is over, and now I have to move on to my dubious future as a grad student.

In the meantime, though, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails about the end of the season: what happened and how, whether we beat La Guerche, and most of all, whether the Woodchucks earned the right to stay in the Elite Division. Now, I could write 10,000 words on the topic, on the flurry of emotions I felt in that last week, how it felt getting on that last plane flight, how it felt to return to the US’ gravitational pull and reflect on how I had spent the past year of my life. But instead, I think it best to give you the deal on the last weekend straight from the source, from Eric, the Canadian former club president who became one of the best friends I’ve ever made in the game of baseball. Of course, it’s all in French, so I’ve run it through Babelfish first.

It is perhaps illustrative to point out that we entered the fourth weekend of the playoffs with a 3-3 record, needing, in all likelihood, to win two more games in order to earn the right to remain in the elite division. That fourth weekend against La Guerche was my final weekend in France, as I had already booked my tickets when the Tres Lettres changed the schedule due to a regular season rainout. In one of the most exciting, improbable, satisfying wins of my lifetime spent mucking around baseball diamonds on two continents, we knocked the great Anthoni Piquet out of the box in the sixth inning of the second game, Matt closed them out, and we won my final game in France 9-6. That set the stage for the final weekend, where the Chucks needed to win at least one game in my absence in order to earn the right to remain. The rest, as they say, is history…

—–Original Message—–
From: Eric
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:45 AM
To: meagher@gmail.com
Subject: RE: Ce Weekend

Bonjouur Evan, sorry not to have answered you but I earlier believed that you had had Aldo on MSN or qqun of other. We divided against Compiegne. 1st match: Vincent vs Cuban 47 years who still launches very well. We manage to make 18 hits and we carried out 15-4 but of the last manche(8ème), I came to assistance of Vince to stop the haemorrhage but as they had already marked 3 points, we did one 9 2nd handle. Final result: 15-7 for BG. On their side, I do not know how this match was scoré, but they made 16 hits! Environment was dreadful with the unfavourable players and especially their Cuban who yelled all the time, disputed all the time, aims at the head of the players (Aldo and me) and seeks the provocation. In spite of the victory, the moral one was not terrible because it was not really an amusing match. For the second match, we had kept Matthew and Quentin and for Compiegne, a left-handed person who never launched a fast ball. We have evil to strike it but we carried out 4-0, then 4-3, then 6-3, then 6-6, then 9-6 at the end of the 9th handle. Arbitration of shit… The referee does not see the interiors of Matthew and he is irritated. One K of wasted, a 2nd, a 3rd. With a runner on base, HBP which causes the exit of the cuban coach which sinks on the monticule towards Matthew which goes down from the monticule and does not go further. The Cuban enters on the ground and it is the referee and 3 players of Compiegne which retains it and that hard 10 minutes… Drive Line field centers, I make back with the ball, turns over me (1st withdrawal) Pop between the field centers and the 2nd goal, I advance (2nd withdrawal) and youjours 9-6. Thereafter, catastrophe! PB, errors (x2) and 2 points mark 9-8 with a runner in 3rd base. Struck ball left field in Texas, Seb moves back, Pierre advances and me too. Nobody calls and thus, I have a chance, I call, I divine, I catch the ball but in contact with the siol, the ball arises! 9-9. Extra inning Matthew must left its place because 9 launched sleeves and Quentin will come. One marks a point in 10th, them too. 10-10 11th handle: Nothing 12th handle, one marks 3 points. 13-10 for BG Compiegne shout, howl, bad environment and our young players crack. Quentin gives BB, HBP, hits and bases full with 13-11. Vincent returns on the monticule with 1 withdrawal. Me, I do not have any more an arm! Ball struck Quentin in 3rd base, play with the marble (2nd withdrawal) and always 13-11 but Matthieu, which catché 20 handles, launches in 1st for the double game but the ball goes to the right field and 2 points mark (13-13) Tabarnak! A runner in 2nd base. Ball struck with the field centers, I C gold die, lance what remains me with the marble, precis, a jump 3 meters in front of the marble, Matthieu does not control the ball, escapes it from the contact and victory from Compiegne 14-13. Which disappointment but in spite of our card of 5-5, we deserved our maintenance in Elite. Thank you Evan and in soon Eric

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

This being my last weekend in French baseball, I figured I needed something to get me fired up, to rekindle the excitement of that first day flying from San Francisco to France. I needed something of an edge, too, something that would put me over the top.

That’s right.

The moustache is back.

The hats, at long last, have arrived. Here’s one below, and if you want to be able to claim “Woodchucks 4 Life,” as I do, shoot me an email. Comes in around $20 plus shipping, which is totalling $25 in the US. They’re Flex-Fits, so you have to choose S/M or M/L, and I’m a 7 3/8, which is just on the M/L side of things. Word.

Incidentally, the French do much better subway advertisements than do the Americans.

In about 18 hours I’ll hop on my last flight to France for my last two games with the Woodchucks. There’s a nice symmetry to it all, as my last games in France will be against Antoni Piquet and La Guerche, the same guys I first saw with the Lions on Opening Day way back in late March. Needless to say, there are a flood of emotions that come to mind: sadness and nostalgia, certainly, but also relief, joy, and satisfaction. At the end of the day, Have Bat Will Travel was about making something happen, about overcoming the inertia the world puts on us and on our often unrealistic dreams.

And it happened. Above all, it happened, the real and the surreal blending for seven unforgettable months that were at times frustrating, often challenging, always interesting. Come Monday, as I hop on that last flight home from CDG, it will be time to turn out the lights. The party’s over.

In terms of this blog, I’ll keep posting for at least a few weeks afterwards. There are a lot of stories I haven’t had the opportunity to tell on here, stories that I want to get around to telling. The past few weeks in particular have had more than their share of the ridiculous, the bizarre, and the silly, and it would be a shame not to share them.

One bit I can share, however, is that apparently some of the fellas at Rouen took issue with my post about the organization’s tendency to hoard ballplayers. I was told that the team’s forum erupted in a frenzied backlash of counter-allegations, criticisms, and ad hominem personal attacks. Now, I haven’t read it- I learned long ago that there’s no sense in getting my Irish up over something so trivial- but I was told that the arguments focused on two main lines of reasoning.

First, it was argued that I had somehow been “brain-washed” by the people at Bois-Guillaume. Now, this would be hilarious but instead is the only one that bothers me. Funny, because regardless of my ability to hit a slider or turn a double play, I would like to think that after two degrees from Stanford- one in organizational behavior- and my enrollment in a JD/MBA program, my ability to think critically (particularly about, for example, how organizations behave) is fairly well established at this point. Bothersome, however, because it means that someone found a way to make “me telling my friends back home my take on what I’ve seen while abroad” somehow reflect poorly on the great friends I’ve made in France. Simply put, that’s bullshit. Whatever my opinion of the player aggregation trend in French baseball- and for my part, I’d argue that you’d have to be in a particularly acute form of denial to argue otherwise- it’s my opinion, and that’s all it ever will be.

The second line of reasoning was apparently a more visceral reaction centering on my abilities (or lack thereof) as a ballplayer, the argument being that unless you throw in the mid 90s, your opinion on trends within French baseball lacks relevance. First off, anyone who thinks that a few critical posts on a bulletin board from some French ballplayers with their panties in a twist would hurt my feelings clearly hasn’t been reading very this blog very closely. The toughest critic of my baseball playing ability has always been the guy writing this blog, and after over 20 years of playing ball, I’m pretty comfortable with where that puts me. In the elite level in France, ain’t none of us goin’ to no Big Leagues, so once you get past that, it’s just about playing the game right and having a good time, and I’m comfortable that I’ve done both. However, I’m more interested in the logic that leads to a minimum talent level required for expressing the most obvious observations about the league and what happens within it. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you don’t need Roger Bresnahan to know which way the wind blows…

So enough of that silliness. Like everything on this blog, it doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, provided there isn’t a group of French ballplayers in ski masks waiting for me when I get off the train in Rouen on Saturday. Failing that, I guess I’ll just reiterate that I liked almost everyone I met from Rouen- indeed, in France- I just disagreed with some of the things Rouen did at an organizational level, and leave it at that.

So on to the weekend, then. As I said, this blog will continue for a few weeks, I think, wrap up a few stories. While I won’t be able to crank out all the little tidbits and sidelights I wanted to, I’m optimistic that I’ll somehow get to circulate them all at some point, in one format or another. Hugs and Handpounds,

-ev

Thanks, Changer!

It is snowing in Chicago right now.

SNOWING.

This meteorological aggression cannot stand.

More later today.

The wind was blowing in during warmups, a soft breeze that became stronger throughout the day. I felt good in BP: good, but a little slow. It’s hard to ascribe a decade of aging to six months, but I’m unquestionably slower- both hands and legs- than when I started the season. I’m not turning on fastballs as well, and I’m a half step slower to first base, and down the path to second. It’s sad to think that all my hard work with Velocity has slowly started to fritter away, but I guess it’s no surprise. Part of it is being seven months removed from that physical peak, with three months of vacation and law school in between; part of it is (gasp) just getting old. One of the guys even commented on it, as I ran back to the dugout after grounding out to the left side to lead off the bottom half of the first. Hey, thanks.

We fell behind 2-0 when Quentin struggled with his command, but quickly knocked their starter out of the game in the third to take a 3-2 lead. Q had asked to start the first game; it was nice to see that kind of confidence out of him. Any coach, at any level, always loves to have a guy asking for the ball. Probably just another sign of him growing a little older during the season too, albeit at a point in his life where unlike me, his best days in baseball are still to come.

In the fourth, we tacked on a few more in a rally where I pulled a ground ball past a diving shortstop, swiped second, and scored on a single to center. I led off the sixth against their reliever just as the sun started to poke through the Normandy clouds, and I finally- FINALLY – got into one. It was the hitter’s dream, the proverbial cup-high fastball on the sweet spot of the bat (Pugno Ergo Sum, a gift from my buddy Chuck.) The ball took off like a rocket over the centerfielder’s head, one-hopping the fence. The centerfielder was just picking it up as I rounded second, and I coasted into third with a standup triple. It was easily one of my hardest hit balls in France, along with the rocket I hit off Pierrick in the Savigny intrasquad. In retrospect, that’s indicative of a disappointing power outage on my part this season, but there’s not much I can do about it at this point.

We batted around in the sixth, extending our lead to 11-2, tantalizingly close to the ten-run rule that has victimized us so often this year. Put it this way; if France’s ten-run slaughter rule were child molestation charges, the Woodchucks would be Michael Jackson. We’ve run afoul of that particular rule so many times that I don’t even like to think about it. And then, for once, we were just inches away from being on the right side of it.

When you’ve had the run of luck we’ve had, you don’t mess around when victory is in sight. Matt put himself in the game to replace Quentin, who had thrown over 100 pitches, and he ruthlessly mowed down the Meds hitters, striking out the side on just ten more. It really showed the difference between the elite division and the N1A division in France. Simply put, they weren’t even on his level. They might as well have been facing Randy Johnson.

I again led off the seventh, knowing full well that we needed but one run to close out the game. Now, I’ve seen more interviews than I can count with a hitter who has hit a walkoff home run where he’s claimed that he was just trying to make contact, to put a good swing on it, and often it’s patently false. I recall one time in particular when Orlando Cabrera hit a walkoff jack during his brief but glorious tenure with the Red Sox, when he claimed in his thick Venezuelan accent “I was joos try-eeng to poot eet een play,” which was hilarious because he nearly came out of his shoes on the swing before his walkoff. So in that spirit, I will admit honestly that I was trying to crank one out of the park to lead off the seventh.

I flew out to left center. Maybe I just shood haf tried to poot eet een play.

Fortunately, Seb walked behind me, and Matthieu doubled into the right center gap to score him, and Woodchucks were victorious for the second straight game. Cynics might be tempted to point out that it was our longest win streak of the year. I might be tempted to stuff said critics in the garbage can.

Tomorrow: The Woodchucks’ Kryptonite: Extra Innings!

Today is October 3, 2006.

It was seven months ago yesterday that I left for France.

It was six months ago yesterday that I no-hit the Woodchucks in my final game as a Lion, earning my current gig as a Woodchuck in the process.

Time flies, huh?

Another 9-hour flight on Friday afternoon. I had to leave early from school, missing a lecture for my class by a Supreme Court Justice. The implicit message: “Hey, Justice Scalia. Buzz off. I got two games with the Woodchucks that are far more important than you.” Disrespect noted, I imagine he’d say.

The joke was really on me, though, because when I finally got to Rouen through my now familiar fool’s march through French public transit (plane to CDG, shuttle bus to train station, train to metro 4, metro 4 to metro 12, metro 12 to train station, train to Rouen metro, metro to a dingy studio apartment) I came to find that no one knew if Marseilles was actually coming. They forfeited both matches against La Guerche just last week, simply because La Guerche is so far out in the sticks that you can’t even reasonably get there by train. As we say in Boston, you just can’t get they-ah from hee-yah.

The prevailing opinion was that Marseilles might not even show, and even if they did, the forecasted rain might wash both games out. In that case, I would have flown to Paris for a combined 150 hours over three weekends for a total of two, count’em two baseball games. Needless to say, I found the news slightly worrisome, but could only do what I’d been doing all year: Hope for the best. That, and load up on scotch, which is sooooooo much cheaper in France.

In a nod to my new “other life,” I actually hit the books Saturday night, crashing at Seb’s place so that the INSEP boys (Quentin and Matthieu) could crash with Matt with a little bit more room. Last week, I slept on the couch while the three of them piled into one bed, which was a bit much even for three guys whose combined age is less than 60.

In the morning, Quentin used his combined cell phone/mp3 player to play us his new favorite song – Ridin’ Dirty by Chamillionaire – roughly 4,200 times. Now if you haven’t heard this particular melodic masterpiece – and I count at least my parents among those readers who have not – it’s important to note that this may well be the worst rap song to attain even a modicum of popularity. Its inane lyrics, which deal with operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, in possession of narcotics or firearms, or under any other circumstance that would warrant one’s arrest, were therefore stuck in my head for the rest of the day, along with Quentin’s barely intelligible efforts to sing along. It went something like this:

“Zey see me row-leen… Zey Haiti…. (mumbles a few words in French) cash me rye undurree!!!”

Painful. Just painful.

I grabbed a croissant and a pain au chocolat for breakfast, reasoning that I’m running out of opportunities to do so given the relative mediocrity of Chicago patisseries. As we drove up the hill to Bois-Guillaume, I realized that I will only do so one more time in my life: in two weeks when I play my last games in France.

Marseilles did finally show up, and proceeded to take a 45-minute batting practice, although it was more due to general disorganization than a desire to big-league the home team. When we exchanged the lineups at the beginning of the game, I asked what their nickname, the “Meds” meant.

“It’s an abbreviation of the Mediterraneans, because we’re next to the sea.” Their coach responded.

“Ah, like the Metropolitans of New York,” I replied as he nodded. “Ah, that’s clever. I like it.” I think I was just happy I had finally understood a French joke.

Continued Tomorrow!

BOIS-GUILLAUME SPLITS WITH ROUEN’S SECOND TEAM; WOODCHUCK NATION REJOICES

I’m probably getting ahead of myself, but I thought I’d lead with the juiciest stuff.

I got in on Saturday morning around 11, after a delay in Chicago due to tornado warning. While waiting for my bag at the carousel, I noticed someone’s suitcase had opened up in transit and its contents were spilling out for anyone to see, revealing a set of blue padded handles. Could it be? Yes. A Thigh Master.

That’s gotta be embarrassing.

Quentin and Matthieu stayed with Matt and me on Saturday night, having taken the long train ride up from Toulouse, where the Tres Lettres has relocated after the French government told them they were no longer welcome at INSEP on account of baseball losing its Olympic Sport status. As they watched a movie in the other room, I tried to piece together a paper on willful misconduct for my legal composition class, poring over cases in a dingy French apartment that no longer has working lights. Incidentally, I think that’s how Pete Rose used to prepare for games as well.

As I’ve explained before, these ridiculous back-and-forth weekend jaunts are for the playoffs, in which the Woodchucks will attempt to avoid demotion to the N1A division. There are two pools of six teams, made up of teams from the bottom half finishers of the Elite division and the top half finishers of the N1A division, who will be trying to ascend to the Elite level. This weekend’s opponent was Rouen’s second team.

We started Vince in the first game, and unfortunately, he looked rusty from the long layoff. He was leaving balls up in the zone, and Rouen has enough good players that even the second team is going to punish that. All summer, I’ve had an exceptionally slow hook with our starters, only because I had no choice; when you’ve only got 3-4 pitchers to get through 18 innings, you can’t afford to pull a guy after one just because he doesn’t look sharp that day. The outs have to come from somewhere.

The playoffs are a different story, however. You have to play more aggressively, so with six runs in and only two outs in the first, I had to walk to the mound and take the ball out of his hands, and for the umpteenth time we had to call on Eric to stop the bleeding. He pitched his heart out, but when we’re forced to yank Vince in the first, and have Eric throw a few more innings than we have any right to do, well, we haven’t got a frog’s chance in a blender. It got a little heated later in the game, when Rouen’s excitable shortstop stole second up by nine runs. In the U.S., that would raise a few eyebrows, to say the least, but it’s likely that none of the fielders would say anything, and a few innings later, no one would say anything when the guy who had stolen with a big lead took a fastball in the ribs. It’s sort of an unspoken rule. Apparently, it’s a little different in Australia.

“Why the FUCK are you running up by nine runs?” Matt had moved to shortstop to allow Seb to take the mound, and he had no problem telling this 20-year old French kid exactly what he thought about such a strategy. The kid looked at me, somewhat bewildered, stammering out an answer in broken English, before I translated.

“He says they just want to get the game over with as quick as possible, and the slaughter rule is ten runs,” I told Matt. I could have softened the translation a little bit, but I didn’t. Matt was pitching game two, and in my experience, he pitches a little bit better when he’s pissed off.

We had a rally aborted later in the game, when a peculiar umpire’s call cost us at least a run. With Seb on second and Matthieu on first, Matt hit a ground ball a step to the shortstop’s right. Seb took off for third, and on the way did what any good baserunner would do: hesitate to screen the fielder, dancing to avoid the ball if necessary, and then taking off again for third. The shortstop- the same kid who had stolen second- fielded it cleanly, and flipped to second to start the double play, but the pivot man threw the ball into the dugout, scoring Seb and putting Matt on second with two outs. Suddenly, the shortstop started loudly appealing to the umpires that the runner didn’t have the right to stop in front of a fielder to distract him. After a brief conference, the Scottish home plate ump ruled that Seb was out on interference on account of his attempted distraction, and that therefore the inning was over and the run did not score.

“Sir- he didn’t touch the ball,” I said, jogging in from my third base coach position. “There can be no interference if he doesn’t touch the ball. The runner can do whatever he wants so long as he doesn’t touch the ball or a fielder.”

“No, I- I- I- I have made this call once before, in an international-“ he began.

“THAT CALL IS FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!!!” Matt screamed, on a dead sprint from second base. He was pointing his finger at the umpire, and for a second, I thought he might jab it through his chest. “HE CAN DO WHATEVER HE WANTS! HE NEVER TOUCHED THE BALL!!!”

“No, I- I have made this-“

“HORSESHIT!” Matt exclaimed again.

For my part, I was sort of torn. It was a terrible, terrible call, but I didn’t want to have Matt get tossed and lose him for the second game as well, so I did my best to calm him down and get him to the dugout before he got the heave-ho.

“COME ON BRAVEHEART! MAKE A CALL ON YOUR OWN SOME TIME!!!” Matt shouted when he finally got to the dugout.

We later determined that it might have actually been the right call, because for all the noise the French make about the fact that they play “MLB rules,” they don’t. They use so-called “international rules,” which place limitations on the number of foreigners allowed on the field at one time, the number of innings they can pitch, and the number of players that can change teams during the year, not to mention the legality of composite bats, the bigger-seamed ball, and peculiar interference calls like this one. The proud fallacy of using MLB rules is an oft-repeated mantra in France, but calls like this prove that it’s mostly bunk.

However, that call paled in comparison to a call on me in the seventh. The pitcher left a 1-2 curveball low and inside, and I pulled my stride (left) foot up in the air to avoid it, but it bounced and hit me in the right foot. I flicked the bat to the dugout, and took two steps toward first before hearing “BALL! BALL!” I stopped, and looked back quizzically at the umpire.

“You did not make an effort to get out of the way of the ball, it’s a ball, you will not go to first.”

By way of illustration, stand up some time and pretend you’re about to take a swing. Lift your stride step, put it down, and then pick it back up again as if trying to avoid a ball. Now jump off your rear leg. Notice anything? It’s impossible. Your rear leg is planted. It has almost 100% of your weight on it. In twenty years of playing baseball, I have never seen a more bizarre call.

We lost 17-6, and the mood was decidedly foul. In game two, we were going to start Matt, but Quentin claimed he felt good, that he wanted to throw. He’s a shy kid, and hadn’t done anything like that before, so I decided to let him start with a very short leash. He gave up two in the first and I nearly yanked him there, but he worked out of it and got to the third before turning it over to Matt, who let the two inherited runners score. We were down 4-0, but we started chipping away with a run in the third and two in the fifth.

In the midst of all this, I went 0-3 on the day. Usually you get more than three at-bats in 16 innings of play, but I walked three times and got hit three times, and if it weren’t for that bizarre call, it would have been four times: once in the back, once on the knee, and once on the shoulder. As a leadoff hitter, that’s getting the job done, but I guess I’m in the “Rickey Henderson with the Red Sox” phase of my career: good for a walk or stolen base and solid defense, and not much else.

I lead off the sixth, down 4-3. Matt was making Swiss cheese of the Rouen hitters, running sliders off the plate at the knees and throwing heaters past them at the letters. Recognizing that they would have to protect the lead, Rouen brought in their Canadian (yes, they have two foreigners playing on their second team) pitcher to close it out. As I stepped in the box, I had a feeling of urgency that I remember from some tight games I played in with the Reds. As I tapped the plate with the bat, I just knew that I was going to get on base and score, by any means necessary. Didn’t matter if I had to drop a bunt down, take a fastball in the ribs, swing at a wild pitch for strike three and take first, or smash a ground ball off someone’s glove. I just had to get on.

I ran the count to 3-2 and fouled off a few pitches before he missed inside, the pitch actually grazing my knuckles as I checked my swing. I stole second on the first pitch, and had to hold up at third on Aldo’s hard line drive base hit to left. Aldo stole second without a throw, and we had men on second and third with nobody out when Seb hit a slow chopper to third base. I had a decent jump and was off on contact, but as I barreled down the third base line, I anticipated a play at the plate. I figured the third baseman- another Canadian from the first team that had showed up late - would make the scoop and come home with it, and I would be a step late, and I would have to try to splatter the catcher all over the backstop. Two steps from home plate, though, already in “Rodney Harrison 45-degree-angle-to-the-ground bone crushing mode,” I noticed that the catcher- a big boy, maybe 6 foot, 200 pounds- was still holding his mask in one hand. There was no play. Apparently the Canadian at third had rushed up from Rouen’s field when someone called him to tell him the game was close and they needed him, but he hadn’t had time to put on his spikes. Because Bois-Guillaume has that crazy grass cutout infield, he slipped taking a step to the right, and the ball rolled into left, allowing me to score easily and Aldo behind me. About time we got a little home cooking from that infield.

Suddenly up 5-4, we suddenly put together what I had been waiting all year to see: a Woodchucks Bat Explosion. After Matthieu struck out, Matt was intentionally walked for the second time in the game (he had gone yard in the first, so he was the only hitter they were really afraid of) and Quentin made them pay with a base hit into right to score another run. Eric grounded out, but with two down and the bases loaded, I found myself muttering “come on, Vince, just stick the bat out and stick one in the gap.”

From my lips to God’s ears. Vince blasted a high fly ball into the left field gap, scoring two more. We batted around in the five-run sixth, and added another one in the seventh to make it 9-4. It was great for two reasons. First, it allowed us to relax a little and have some fun, something we haven’t been able to do all year. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it really, really pissed off the Rouennais. They started badgering the umpires and throwing equipment, and one guy who had pitched earlier in the game even got tossed for arguing balls and strikes. The idea of Rouen losing to Bois-Guillaume- even Rouen’s second team- was such an anathema to them, that they just totally lost their composure.

Now, I don’t like to hold grudges (oh wait; I do), and I am not the type to rejoice when the mighty have fallen (oh wait; I am), but there was something about watching Rouen start to bicker among themselves and with the umpires that just made me feel good to be alive. I must preface all this with the fact that I like almost all of the guys I’ve met from Rouen, from the two Americans on the first team to the two Quebecois, and even the guy who was stealing up by nine runs. Hell, they even dropped me off at my apartment on the way back down the hill in the huge “Rouen Huskies 76” van that I can only hope/expect is known as “Le Huskymobile.” They’re not bad guys. But the bottom line is that for years, Rouen has been the big bad bullies in Normandy, the vastly superior team just ten minutes down the road with a “piss off, you wanker” attitude towards Bois-Guillaume and an irritating tendency to hoard 30 of the best 100 players in France in a sport where the last time I checked, you’re only allowed to use nine at a time. While individually, they’re a great bunch of guys, as an institution they represent much of what is wrong with French baseball: the increasing tendency to concentrate all of the 40 or 50 best players on the best three teams, and to hell with the rest of you. As those later innings progressed, and it became clear that the Australian import was going to keep throwing up goose eggs, and there was nothing they could do about it despite the fact that he was wearing a hat that had the letters (gasp!) “BG” embroidered on it… well, it was a thing of beauty.

Now you might point out that splitting with a team from the second division shouldn’t necessarily be something to brag about. However, this was a good ball club, with a few players from the elite team sent down to play with them, and besides, Rouen hoards so many good players that they have the depth to field a very strong second team. Besides, who cares? When you’ve had as tough a season as we have, you take what you can get.

After the game, we took some team photographs that I’ll try to get up on this site some time. I couldn’t stick around to enjoy the joviality, however, because I had a train to catch, and after the Rouen guys dropped me off, I showered hastily and jogged to the station to head back to Paris. Incidentally, I think every man reaches a point in his life where he finds himself on an express train from Rouen to Paris, having flown 4,218 miles in order to play in two baseball games, and he realizes, as he tries to get his reading done for Contracts class, that he’s still so wired up from the victory that as he reads Neri v. Retail Marine Corporation, that he’s unconsciously translating the case into French as he reads it. It’s at this point, I think, that every man says to himself,

“Well, it’s a strange life you’ve chosen for yourself, Ev.”

Maybe it’s just me.

I left France on Monday, August 28th, after two frustrating losses against PUC in Paris. I stayed with my friend Miklos at his apartment in the Marais, and caught a nonstop to Chicago at noon, getting in at 2:30pm Chicago time.

The weeks since have been a maelstrom of orientation events and classes that leave me more than a little bit overwhelmed. It’s like the first weeks of college all over again. People are meeting their new roommates, making friends, joining campus groups, making poor decisions on who to sleep with, having too much to drink at the weekly happy hour cheekily called “Bar Review.” Everyone here is thrilled to be here, proud to have been admitted, eager to show what they’re capable of doing. The future, as they say, is wide open, and after a week of orientation events designed primarily, it appears, to tell us all the impressive things we’ll accomplish in the law, we began immersing ourselves in the standard first year courses. Contracts. Criminal Law. Civil Procedure. Property. Legal Writing.

And yet through it all, why can’t I concentrate? Why do I feel this sense of guilty reservation, of “Yes, but…” How could I even express this hesitation, this reserve to my classmates? This idea that sure, I’m very excited about it all, but really, there’s this matter of the Woodchucks?

How could I explain that rather than fully commit myself to this life-changing experience, my thoughts are still with a hard luck baseball team in a small suburb outside a small city in the corner of France?

In the end, I guess it’s just a subconscious recognition of the story nearing its end, the window closing. It was almost exactly a year ago this week that I quit my job as an investment banker, dropped out of society, and begain training full time to play professional baseball. But now, turning from my desk, I look out the window and see downtown Chicago and the law school, instead of a batting cage. My backpack is full of weighty red casebooks instead of track shoes and protein shakes, and all this serves as a reminder that at some point, the party has to end. The gravitational pull of “real life” sucks you back in, and you realize you can’t earn 300€ a month and drive around in the Woodsmobile for the rest of your life. At some point, you need to move on.

And frankly, that’s a damn shame.

Today is Friday, and as such I will be getting on a 6pm flight out of O’Hare to Paris. I know this because I did it last weekend, and I will do it every weekend for the next month, flying back on Mondays. The Woodchucks didn’t play last weekend, as the playoffs were delayed a week due to rainouts, but the way I had booked my tickets required me to fly to Paris on Friday so as not to miss the opening leg of a new itinerary coming back on Monday. (Allow me to spare you the trouble of pointing out that while flying to France for 48 hours just for two baseball games exhibits a questionable grip on reality, flying to France for two baseball games that don’t even happen is beyond preposterous.)

We got a tough draw in the first weekend, playing Rouen’s “second” team. I use the term loosely, because Rouen’s ravenous desire to poach all the good players from other teams in the region (they have a handful of players from last year’s Woodchucks squad) and stockpile them has led to them being triple-booked at every position. It’s an embarassment of riches when viewed from the perspective of a Bois-Guillaume team that struggles to field nine players every weekend. As such, for the playoffs, Rouen will certainly send players from the first team down to the second team, and we will be lucky to split the two games.

In fact, Rouen will likely try to pour it on, as there is a significant financial incentive to the Rouen club to seeing that Bois-Guillaume gets demoted. Both clubs are in the same region, which means that they share funding from the same governmental agency. Perhaps not surprisingly, Rouen wants all that funding for itself, and knows that if Bois-Guillaume descends to the second division, they will no longer qualify for some of that largesse.

So off I go. Before class, I’m headed to my first physical therapy appointment for my elbow. A doctor here at Northwestern confirmed my self-diagnosis of a strained UCL (ulnar collateral ligament, which if torn requires Tommy John surgery) and I’ll be working to rehab the forearm muscles for next season. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to pitch during the playoffs.

Reports of HBWT’s demise have been greatly exaggerated; it’s not dead, it’s just resting. The first few weeks of law school have been a bit hectic, so I’ll have an update later tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to three entirely awesome things.

1) A reference to my sister’s emails about her time in Japan. Not only does this blogger refer to HBWT as “nifty,” he changes his travel plans on account of my sister’s less than glowing reviews of her hostel in Tokyo.

2) At a happy hour atKellogg, I met another Stanford alum who had been working at a software company in the Bay Area. He said that he and his friends had read the posts about getting my 40m time down, and didn’t believe that I had run a 4.81. Apparently the entire company went out to the track at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, and timed themselves. The fastest guy only ran a 4.98.

“On a hand timer?”

“Yep.”

Somehow, the image of a small software company trotting out to a high school track and seeing how fast they could run on account of a HBWT post put a huge hop in my step.

3) Lastly, don’t look now, but the Quiet Storm has quietly emerged as the Saints #2 receiver, with eight catches for 107 yards and two touchdowns. He’s already been declared “the steal of the 2006 draft” by some overexcited New Orleans reporters.

Full update later tonight or tomorrow.

Cheers,

ev

“Goodbye’s too good a word, babe
So I’ll just say fare thee well…”

-Bob Dylan, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

Friday afternoon in Rouen. In fact, my last. Come Monday I’ll be just another first-year law student weasel, trying to settle in to my new apartment in Chicago and complaining about things like “Torts” and “Contracts.” Yikes.

France has been my home for nearly half a year. While most- in fact, all- of the HBWT story has been whimsical and humorous and I’ve treated my time here as such, I can’t help but feel saddened knowing that my six-month romance with the country is drawing rapidly to a close. After Monday, it’ll be a series of one-offs, 48-hour trysts the likes of which cannot possibly maintain a long-distance relationship.

I will miss France, almost as much as I will miss the great friends I have made here. I will miss the bread, to be sure, the wine, the pastries, and the kebabs. Most of all, I’ll miss the generous, welcoming people in Bois-Guillaume who made me feel at home while some 6,000 miles from it. Never let anyone tell you that the French are rude or aloof or anti-American; as with any group, there are those among them, but for the most part they are a wonderful people with a better-than-average handle on the way life ought to be lived.

That said, something happened yesterday that made it clear to me that it was time to go. Ironically, during my month in Savigny, I never got around to hopping on the RER C line for the 45-minute ride to visit Versailles, the monument to French 17th and 18th century opulence. Instead, after picking up the newly refurbished Woodmobile from the garage on Tuesday, I drove the 117 kilometers along Autoroute A13 to make the pilgrimage, to knock off my last “must-see” in France. Just as an aside, it is truly everything it’s cracked up to be. The perfectly maintained gardens, the elaborately painted ceilings, and the gilt hallways are truly breathtaking. I guess I’m just sort of surprised that the French people put up with such garish flaunting of wealth while most of them lacked sufficient bread to survive. If ever there was such a disparity of wealth in the U.S., I’m sure heads would roll.*

On the return trip, I found myself eschewing the usual SkyRock or Europe 4 French radio stations for something called “Le Jukebox,” because they were playing a modern country marathon. Now, aside from the odd funky bluegrass track or Johnny Cash single, I hate country music, especially modern country. Along with the Marilyn Mansons and Nine Inch Nails’ of the world, it’s maybe the only genre of music I can’t relate to in any way, shape or form. But I found myself tapping along with it for over an hour… because it was in English.

There are a few French words that I’ve come to consider overwhelmingly superior to their English translation. (“Feu d’artifice,” for example, is far more elegant and descriptive than “fireworks.”) The one that applies here is “mal du pays,” which literally replaces “homesick” with “pain of the country.” Simply put, I miss America. For all its crappy bread and weak coffee, I miss it terribly. I want to be able to watch the Red Sox at night. I want a night out talking with friends to resemble leisure hours instead of my 125th consecutive Conversational French oral final exam. I want my grunts and gestures and body language while ordering a meal to actually convey something to the person receiving them, and I want to do so without feeling like I might have to apologize for being a foreigner. I want to take a taxicab without worrying that the driver is taking advantage of me on account of my accent. I want to drink American beers, eat hamburgers, and watch movies without subtitles. I want to be able to casually read the paper, watch the news, or strike up a conversation without getting stressed out about proper verb conjugation.

With all apologies to France, I want to go home.

Living abroad is an exercise in context, which is to say, everything is out of it. Almost every social norm to which you’ve become accustomed during your life is out the window, and suddenly you’re thrust into a world where the only clear thing is that you are very much an outsider, the “other.” It was hard enough for me, and I arrived speaking functional (if heavily accented) French and leave more or less fluent (if still heavily accented.) I can only imagine what it must be like for Matt, or for the two Americans playing for Rouen, who speak nary a word of French. Even speaking a little French as I did, I can identify with the inclination to retreat within your own world, erect an invisible barrier between “you” and “them,” an isolated zone of normalcy where you roll neither your “r’s” nor your own cigarettes, you don’t sit down to shower, and you don’t eat cheese for desert.

The only way to really enjoy yourself, I think, is to throw yourself headlong into the culture, to do as the Romans do and savor the foreign-ness of the experience. I did my best, and while I never did manage to get the hang of the sit-down shower, I feel like I’ve come to appreciate the many things the French culture has to offer, like potent cheese, calvados, and the occasional outburst of historical revisionism. In fact, when it comes to experiencing France, I think I did it the best way possible. Between the euro/dollar exchange rate, the cost of hotels in Paris, the difficulty of hiring a car to really see the country, and the big-city resentment of tourists in general, the typical trip to France seems to me far too harried and abrupt to be worth your while. Far better, in my opinion, to come for six months or a year, find a job that will pay you in Euros, and take advantage of the leisurely pace of life. Living there will make you a little bit less of an outsider, you’ll make French friends who will show you things that aren’t in the tour books, and you’ll learn to appreciate their unique perspective on the world, on America, and on Lance Armstrong. That’s the way to do it. It’s ironic, given my upcoming schedule of punctuated round-trips, but six months here has taught me that France is a great place to live… but I wouldn’t want to visit there.

So goodbye, France. When we meet again, I’ll no longer be a resident of La Patrie, but just another Yank tourist on his way to and from Charles De Gaulle. I guess I’ll rely again on a more apropos French translation, avoiding the all-too final “goodbye” for your equivalent, “To the re-seeing.”

Au Revoir.

* I couldn’t realistically be expected to make it six months in France without at least one terrible French Revolution joke.

Editor’s Note: Feast or famine, it seems. After weeks with nothing, you get this Kaczynski-style rant… oh well. I thought about breaking it in two, but it seemed better to just get it down on paper while it was fresh. Hugs and handpounds,

Ev

Seeing as how I tend to run off at the lip from time to time- or, in fact, almost all the time- it should come as no surprise when I say that there’s so much to say and so little time in which to say it. I’ve got anywhere between 10 and 15 posts that I’ve started but not finished, finished but not edited, and edited but not posted, and the list keeps growing as some of these topics become increasingly irrelevant with the passage of time. There were two posts on the World Cup, one on French radio, a few other language hijinks, and the wrap-ups for the games at Rouen and La Guerche. I had several posts prepared during my weeks off, just a few goofy stories that happened while I was traveling around, and another on the state of French baseball. I’d like to think that these will eventually see the light of day.

In the meantime, however, here’s an honest snapshot of Have Bat, Will Travel- and by extension, my life- on August 21, 2006, and where it’s going over the next two months. But first, let’s backtrack a bit.

If you remember, the idea all along was that I wanted to play professional baseball in Europe, to settle a bet or give a joke a punchline, however you want to look at it. Well, check. I quit a lucrative but miserable job as an investment banker, trained for six months, and flew off to France to join the Savigny Lions, who promptly fired me on April Fool’s Day, a scant four weeks after my arrival in the country. On my last day in a Lions uniform, I no-hit the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks over five innings, and they acquired my contract from the Lions for a little bit more than the average tank of gas in France. Battling serious elbow pain that stemmed from my over-extending myself during what I believed to be my last game in France, I managed to hit and field well enough during my recovery to avoid getting fired, coaching the team through a difficult season along with our other foreigner, an Australian pitcher. I even managed to break my nose playing out of position at first. Still with me? Good.

Here is where it gets complicated.

When I was on the phone with the Woodchucks in early April, agreeing to come to Normandy, they asked me how long I would be in France. “Until the end of the season,” I replied. “Jusqu’au but.”

At this point, it was easy to make such a promise. On account of my woefully unimpressive résumé and hall-of-fame GPA (in that 1-out-of-3 will get you into the hall of fame), I had successfully been rejected or waitlisted by every school to which I had applied. For any future MBA applicants that are reading, might I suggest you avoid the “I quit a career in a go-getter industry so I could earn 300 Euros a month playing French baseball” angle to your application essays. Harvard and Stanford (my alma mater, I say with only the slightest tinge of bitterness) had told me to go pound sand, and Northwestern’s JD/MBA program had put me on the waitlist for a program with only 25 spots: not exactly the catbird’s seat. It seemed pretty likely that I wouldn’t be going to grad school in the fall after all, and therefore I could commit myself freely to a team until the season ended in mid-October. I knew they’d want someone until the end of the season, and I was all too eager to get picked up.

In a simple twist of fate, the day after talking to the Woodchucks, I was accepted at MIT, the only other school to which I had applied. Suddenly, the future was a little bit brighter, if more complicated. Two months later still, Northwestern came through with an offer off the waitlist, and after weeks of churning over it for all the wrong reasons (“Sure, the program at NU is probably better for me in the long run, but it’s a hell of a lot farther from Fenway,” for example) I found myself convinced by the suggestions of all my trusted friends and some very good Napa Valley wine. Sweet Home Chicago, here I come.

So there’s the rub. Northwestern’s first-year law students (the JD/MBA’s begin their first year at the law school in Chicago) arrive at orientation on August 25th, or as those of us in the industry call it, Friday. Even before a rainout against Montpelier dictated that we play two makeup games on September 10th, I knew that the Woodchucks would have games on the 27th of August and on the 3rd of September. More importantly, however, there is the matter of the playoffs, or as they call it in France, the “playdown.”

French baseball is like most European sports in that the top team in the second division gets to advance to the first division, while the bottom team from the top division gets relegated to the second division. It’s so prevalent that the French were astonished to hear me explain that if the Yankees finish last, they don’t get relegated to Triple-A. If that were the case, the Royals would currently be fielding a schedule against the Nashua Pride and the Toledo Mud Hens Alumni Club.

In the case of the 9-team (more on that later) Elite Division in French baseball, this means that the top four teams according to W-L records will play for the championship. (This will almost certainly be Toulouse, Rouen, Savigny, and one of La Guerche, Senart, or Montpelier). The bottom five will run some sort of tournament to determine who gets relegated, which may or may not involve some participation by the teams in the second division (called N1A). Now, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but seeing as almost every week this summer, I posted about us dropping a heartbreaking two games, we’re a whole lot closer to the bottom than we are to the top. In fact, we’re currently tied with PUC for last place, and even then only on account of four forfeit wins from the first games of the year.

Earlier in the summer, rumor had it that the bottom five teams in Elite would play a ten-game (five weekends) tournament against the top seven teams in N1A to determine the six teams that would remain in an expanded ten-team elite division. It’s still unclear- no one seems to know what the Tres Lettres has decided at any one time- but it seems now that the expansion to ten teams has been cancelled, and instead the elite division will constrict back to eight teams for the purposes of scheduling. Going off on a small tangent, you may wonder why the league would ever consist of an awkward number like nine teams. The reason is that last year, Bois-Guillaume and PUC were once again tied for last place, and relegation was at stake during the last weekend’s doubleheader, when the two clashed at PUC’s home field at INSEP in the woods east of Paris. Bois-Guillaume miraculously pulled out both games, avoiding demotion and sending PUC down to the second division… until, of course, the Tres Lettres intervened, reasoning that PUC, the only club in Paris and one of the oldest and once wealthiest, couldn’t possibly be demoted to N1A regardless of the outcome on the field. Unhappy with the results of pure competition, they decided instead to expand to eight teams to keep PUC in the ballgame. It would sort of be like Fox Sports looking at last year’s World Series matchup and saying “wait a minute, White Sox/Astros? Screw that- Yankees/Dodgers is better for ratings!” In any case, you can be damned sure that if Bois-Guillaume is on the short end of the stick this year, no paternal Federation is going to swoop in and save them from demotion. To put it mildly, everyone expects Bois-Guillaume to go down, and frankly, a lot of people *want* Bois-Guillaume to go down.

You can see where they’re coming from, I suppose. Savigny just couf’d on us twice, 20-0, 20-0, and we never came close to beating Rouen in four tries. We lost preposterously (26-0, I believe) to Senart in the game where I broke my nose in the first inning, and 20-0 to La Guerche. On the other hand, with a break here or there, we could have eight additional wins. We lost 7-6 to Savigny, 4-3 to Toulouse in eleven innings, 5-4 to St. Lo in 10, and 7-6 to PUC in 10. We dropped two games to Montpelier by a combined three runs, lost 3-2 to Senart in the first game before the subsequent blowout, and should have beaten PUC in both of our games. Naturally, there’s a sentiment that this is only on account of the Australian’s pitching, expressed to me as recently as Sunday by of all people one of the umpires. He mentioned something about how we were having a tough season, and while not at all defensive, I told him it was tough without all your players, and how with a few breaks we could have won a whole lot more games. “Sure, but those were just the games started by, what was his name, Blackmore? The Australian?” Swallowing my temper, I calmly pointed out that the Senart, St. Lo, and one of the PUC matches were started by Vincent, and the Toulouse close call by Quentin, but he replied only with a disinterested “Ah bon?”, which in this case was the French way of saying “I’m not really listening, but I get the distinct impression that whatever you’re saying is probably horse shit.” Keep in mind, this assumption that B-G has been annihilated in every game not started by an expensive import was being voiced to me by an umpire who was actually at a lot of the games in question. I’ll leave it at that, because the rest of that rant goes into a separate post I’ve been working on entitled “Why Bois-Guillaume Always Gets Treated Like the 110-Pound Man In Prison.”*

Anyway, they’re entitled to their opinions. Hell, maybe they’re even right. Maybe Bois-Guillaume “should” go down to the second division. The point is, it’s not my job to determine who “should” go down. That’s not why I’m here. It’s my job to fight like hell every weekend to see that we don’t. Unfortunately, I don’t have strings I can pull in the Federation offices should it come to that, and I don’t have people I can call to get us that extra bat or that extra arm we need to put us a leg up. All I’ve gotten is an elbow that’s slowly on the mend, a few wood bats I haven’t broken yet, and some legs that still have a little spring despite existing in a body that’s far closer to an MBA than it ever was to the MLB.

And maybe it won’t be enough. But I’ll be damned if we just roll over and enjoy it. If we go down, it’ll be down in flames, hair on fire, fighting tooth and nail to the end. And if we start to get a few bounces, and the bats come out of their summer-long swoon, and a certain 27-year old elbow makes a miracle recovery, and if, and if, and if…

There I go again. Sounding like a Red Sox fan.

Which leaves you where, you might ask, for grad school? Cutting to the chase, it’s obvious that the smart thing to do would be to bow out gracefully, thank everyone for the opportunity, hop on a plane back to Chicago and get on with the rest of my life. Hang up the spikes, join a rec league, admit that the whole crazy “play French baseball for a year” idea was fun while it lasted, and return to the real world where there are bills to pay and classes to attend and a future to build.

Obviously, that would be the smart thing to do, the rational thing. It’s equally obvious to me that if I were the type of person who always did the “rational thing,” I wouldn’t be tapping out this message in a dingy Rouen apartment, looking proudly across the room at a dirt- and blood-stained Woodchucks jersey with my name on the back. (I’d probably be back in investment banking, looking at a promotion, a six-figure salary and an expense account, while figuring out how to best slash my wrists in the nearest bathtub.) I’d much rather consider myself the type of person about whom the worst that could be said was that when he made a promise to a team that took a chance on him, stuck with him when he wasn’t at full health, and did everything they could to make him comfortable in a strange land, he didn’t turn around and drop his end of the bargain simply because it became inconvenient. At the end of the day, the Woodchucks stuck by me when I needed them; I won’t turn around and bail when they need a good ballplayer, even if I’ll have to do in a pinch.

While you can’t have your cake and eat it too, I think you can try to begin a three-year, dual-degree program while doing everything you can to help a baseball team keep it’s head above water in a country that couldn’t care less about the sport, in a league that couldn’t care less about the club. And so it’s with some sadness that this is my last week living in France. After Sunday’s games, conveniently in Paris against PUC, I’ll be staying at a friend’s place (thanks Sierra and Miklos!) before catching an early morning flight to Chicago to begin at Northwestern… for a few weeks. From mid-September until mid-October, I will be commuting back-and-forth from Chicago to Paris for five weekends of playoff games, leaving Friday night and returning Monday morning. There were air miles and a good travel agent and some personal savings involved, but I got it done.

When I first started the HBWT website, I got a few messages saying “You’re nuts” or “This is a big mistake.” They might have been right, but what those people didn’t understand was that I was never doing any of this for a job, or for a career, for money or for fame. I was doing it for me, because I thought it would be fun, and because I thought it would make a good story to tell some day ages and ages hence, be it in a watering hole with other has-beens or, as my friend Jools put it, at a dinner table to a misbehaving toddler (“Shut up. Your gramps got paid to play baseball once. Eat your greens.”)

I like to think that even now, with the mission accomplished, the nose broken, and the jersey and t-shirt safely acquired, that the same spirit is still at work. “Flying back and forth from grad school in Chicago to Paris to try and help a French baseball team avoid demotion to the second division? How incredibly cocky to think you could make a difference. It’s absurd, it’s silly, it’s crazy, and it’s impossible.”

Perhaps. Perhaps it is.

But that’s how I roll.

* I want to make it clear that I don’t think that there’s any sort of conspiracy against Bois-Guillaume in this respect; we get the same calls, good and bad, that every other team gets around the league. I mention this incident only because it’s entirely representative of the overwhelming disrespect that BG gets not only from teams around the league but also from umpires and officers of the league itself.

If I ever get back to stay,
It’s gonna be another brand new day…

-Jesse Fuller, San Francisco Bay Blues

There’s something about a pitcher’s mound.

So far as I know, it’s the only ground on any field in any sport that is raised so as to accentuate the singular control over the outcome of the game possessed by the sole player who inhabits it. The goalie, the point guard, even the egomaniacal quarterback must stoop to the same altitude as their less glorified compatriots.

Not so the pitcher. He exists, quite literally, on a different plane than all the other players on the field. He floats above them, the captain at the ship’s helm, each delivery deciding the fate of those around him the way Zeus’ thunderbolts or Thor’s hammers did in legends of old. No other player is so similarly exalted with exclusive access to the field’s high ground, situated, somewhat paradoxically, on the throne in the middle of a diamond.

Of course, the saga of my summer in France has centered, by and large, on my physical inability to return to that place of stature. There was a time in April and early May when throwing caused such explosive pain in the elbow and forearm that the possibility of requiring season-ending Tommy John surgery seemed very real, calling very much into question whether I would ever get back there again. Forget France; I was worried I wouldn’t ever pitch a baseball again.

On Sunday afternoon, some four months, eighteen days, two hours and forty minutes after last stepping off the mound in Savigny against my (now) very own Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks, I climbed back up the hill and let it loose. It wasn’t spectacular… but it was worth the wait.

We were at the tail end of a pair of whupping as the hands of St. Lo de Bretagne, a team we should have beaten at their place back in May. (We lost in ten innings). We were down 8-2, and had already squeezed four innings of relief out of Eric, the former president of the team. Some day I’ll get to write at length about Eric, but suffice it to say that he’s a gamer. He’s pushing 35, has two kids and a house he’s trying to renovate, but he still manages to come out every weekend and sacrifice himself whenever we need someone to come in and, as I awkwardly translated to him, “arreter la hemmorhagie” (“stop the bleeding.”)

Asking four innings out of him was borderline criminal, but I didn’t really have any options, just like we haven’t had any options out of the ‘pen all summer. What’s that old line about being a general? You must love the army while being willing to sacrifice it? In any case, after he closed out the eighth inning, he said he was ready to handle the ninth, but I decided to give it a go. If not now, then when?

I warmed up cautiously, uncannily aware of the slightest tension or twinge in my arm. Doing my best impression of a Russian nuclear engineer firing up the uranium tubes the day after Chernobyl, I ran an exceptionally tentative systems check. Fastball? Ok, about 60%, maybe, but it doesn’t hurt. Slider? Can’t quite snap it off, but it’ll run a little bit. Curveball? I could turn it over but I was afraid to really snap the wrist and throw it hard. On the other hand, I tend to overthrow my curve anyway, so I made a note that it was probably going to be my best pitch and save it for when I needed it. Splitter? Surprisingly painless, moved OK. Couldn’t drop the yellow hammer, but I’d have to make due without it.

It’s worth pointing out that this was new territory for me. I have always been proud of my stuff, and with the Reds, I got by more on guts and decent stuff then on finesse. Suddenly, I found myself weaponless, bereft of velocity or my snapping 12-6 curveball, Popeye without his spinach.

Our half of the eighth passed, aided by one of the most horrible at-bats I’ve ever had, a strikeout on three pitches that I’d like to attribute to distraction on account of my fear of impending re-injury. After the third out, I hopped over the baseline and strode to the mound, trying to display a confidence I lacked. I’m not a particularly religious man, so it must have been all the impressive churches I had visited on my three weeks of vacation that made me look up to the Big Fella for a little bit of help.

I was a little bit high during my warmup tosses, which tends to happen when you haven’t pitched for a while (say, 140 days or so). I didn’t do my traditional backstop salute, a full steam fastball that ricochets off the backstop on the fly, only because I didn’t have the arm strength; it would have gotten there on a lob, which produces more hilarity than the intended intimidation. As the catcher fired the ball down to second and the batter entered the box, I turned away from him, pretending to adjust my jersey while in fact giving my elbow a good talking to.

“Come on, you (expletive) (really foul expletive.) Do what the (expletive) you’re supposed to do, just throw the little white ball into the imaginary square, don’t (expletive) (expletive) about it, and let me get through the next three outs without a whole lot of drama. (Gratuitous and unfathomably foul expletive).”

Apparently, it didn’t listen. I walked the first hitter on five pitches, and subsequently realized that I was facing the heart of their order, which had gone something like 31-for-40 against Woodchuck pitchers in a lot better shape than I. Aiming the fastball, I managed to induce a pop-up out of their #2 hitter, and then ran a sneaky little slider across to their #3 hitter. It wasn’t much, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had blasted it in the right-center gap, but instead he rolled over on it and grounded it hard to me on one hop. I couldn’t field it cleanly, so we only got the one out at second, but suddenly things were looking up. Feeling nervy, I started the next hitter with a curveball that broke more than either of us expected, and he waved at it feebly. I followed it up with a splitter away, which didn’t run in but sank, and he chunked it off the end of the bat, a can of corn popup into right field. Our right fielder and second baseman ran for ages but couldn’t quite get there, and I was faced with first and third with two outs.

The next hitter smacked a slider on the ground directly to Seb at shortstop, and I thought that miracle of miracles, I was out of the inning without any damage, but sadly, Seb accidentally blocked his glove hand’s descent to pick it up with his knee, which tends to happen when you’re tired from 18 innings in the sun. The ball squirted into left, scoring a run, but I got the next guy to ground out, and I walked off the field appreciative.

Overall, I was not particularly good. My fastball wasn’t on a lob, but just barely, and my slider was very flat. However, I was there, and that has to count for something. Most importantly, there was no pain, and even today it feels reasonably good after a long run, some ice, and some advil. I won’t really know until Wednesday, when I try to throw again, but for now, I’m cautiously optimistic.

There is so much, so much more that I have written, that I have yet to write, that I haven’t even gotten around to thinking about. Some day, I promise that I’ll get it all out there. This week, possibly tomorrow, I hope to put up a sort of “state of the blog address” type thing, both because I like using incredibly pretentious phrases like that, and because this blog will likely be very, very different going forward. There are things afoot, silly things, terrifying things, difficult things, and wonderful things, and it is going to be a hell of a ride. In the meantime, I’m going to go ice my arm and start to enjoy my last week in France. (My weak attempt at a cliffhanger…)

‘till Tomorrow,

-Ev

Sorry for the lack of updates. I am in the middle of another four weeks off before our game on the 21st at home against La Guerche. There is actually a lot to report in the HBWT world, but it will have to wait until another day as I have not had the opportunity to get online and throw up a few posts. So consider this a general apology, and know that there will be both a wrap of the games at La Guerche as well as a State of the Blog address coming up soon in the next three weeks or so.

Cheers,

Ev

I was helping one of the guys on the team with his house yesterday, and I was complimenting him on reusing the turn-of-the-century exposed wood beams. Like Eric, he’s remodeling what was once a decrepit, hundred-year-old Normandy barn, and he’s kept the same wood, which gives a very homely, comfortable look.

In trying to ask him how he would protect the wood, I found myself searching for the French word for “preservative.” I didn’t know the word for “lacquer,” it wasn’t “paint,” and I didn’t really even want “varnish,” but rather, the word for a wood-sealer like polyeurathane. Using an approach that works maybe half of the time, I decided to just frenchify the word “preservative” and hope for the best.

“So… after you’ve finished, are you going to put a preservatif on the wood?”

His by now familiar look of confusion and revulsion made it clear that I had not guessed correctly, which was doubly frustrating as I knew that preservatif was actually a word, one that I had heard before. I decided to try again.

“A preservatif, non? That which one puts on the wood in order to protect it?”

“Oh, oui, le varni, OK,” he replied laughing, using the word for varnish that I had intentionally avoided. Dammit. “Preservatif, that’s something totally different.”

It took me a few moments before I realized my mistake.

Whoops.

I guess we’ll put off checking the “fluent” box for a few more weeks.

p.s. Don’t miss today’s other post!

Hey, two posts in one week! By my recent standards, that’s an almost Shakespearean rate of output!

We play Sunday at La Guerche, a field that will always hold a fond spot in my heart as the site of my first official game in France. As always, we’re short on players, but this persistent problem has been exacerbated this week due to all the players on vacation, Aldo’s work schedule, and Vincent’s recent ankle injury while playing soccer. The Vince injury really kills us, because it not only costs us a body (and right now, we’re at 8 for the weekend) but robs us of his 6-8 innings on the mound as well. The last time we were without him was at Toulouse, and after a heroic effort in the first game, we got fairly whupped in the second because we just didn’t have any pitchers left. It gets to the point after we’ve thrown Quentin and Matt where you look around and wonder how we’re going to get through another six or seven innings.

Of course, there is one pitcher whose arm injury has kept us waiting a while for his triumphant return, namely me. The big news for the week was that I was going to try to throw normally on Wednesday, and after taking the bus up the hill from our new apartment in Rouen (surely deserving of its own post, perhaps next week), I warmed up and got ready to let ‘er rip.

There’s a famous line about pitchers from George Plimpton. “The pitcher is happiest with his arm idle. He prefers to dawdle in the present, knowing that as soon as he gets on the mound and starts his windup, he delivers himself to the uncertainty of the future.” With all due respect to George, I’ve never felt that way. If I’ve thrown well, I can’t wait to get out there and knock a few more guys down, and if I’ve gotten shelled, I can’t wait to get back on the mound and get the earwax taste out of my mouth. In my entire life, though, I have never been as eager to get back on the mound as I am right now. I’ve been playing well, hitting in the high three hundreds, I’d guess, stealing my share of bases and playing competently in the field, but I know that this team needs me on the mound, and it is no exaggeration to say that every day I haven’t been able to pitch this summer has been significantly more painful than the explosions of agony in my elbow that have prevented me from doings so. So with great excitement and a little trepidation, I pulled Aldo aside and started to throw. He set up about 70 feet from me and threw me a pretty good heater, one with a little zip on it.

“Whoa, buddy, a little closer, huh?” I wasn’t quite ready to air it out right away.

I palmed the ball a little bit in my glove, and thought about what I had to do. No dart throws, I thought- just pick it up and let it go and hope to hell that it doesn’t hurt. I turned sideways, pulled it back, and lobbed it back to Aldo.

Not bad, I thought. No pain, although it hadn’t been a perfectly normal movement. I didn’t throw it dart-style, but it wasn’t a full-extension throw, either. Receiving it from Aldo, I let it go again, and again, and again, my confidence growing each time from the lack of pain in my elbow and the surprisingly normal feeling in my body. It felt like a homecoming of sorts, like tasting Mom’s pork chops after six months of living on Big Macs.

So that’s the good news. I threw, I threw normally, with enough power to throw it on a line from third to first, if need be. I threw without pain, and while I didn’t ever throw it at absolutely 100% velocity, it would be enough. In the days following, I’ve iced it up and applied my joint balm, and while it still feels tender, it doesn’t feel like I’ve re-injured it.

The bad news is that the brain’s fear of re-injury hasn’t entirely been conquered, and as a result I had absolutely no idea of where my release point was on any given throw. Baseball requires the highest degree of proprioception (knowledge of one’s body’s position in space) of any sport I know, and the difference between a called third strike on the outside corner and a hung slider that slides only off the upper deck can be three inches’ difference in release point or arm angle, due only to a microseconds’ lapse in focus. Because my brain is still preoccupied with the possibility of re-injury, I can’t find any sort of consistent release point, and as a result have no idea where the ball is going to end up: a problem for an infielder, a death sentence for a pitcher.

Moreover, I still can’t make the ball cut or run. I threw the most gentle cut fastball in the world, a slider minus the wrist snap, and immediately upon release, I got the clear and persistent message from the elbow: “Hey buddy; don’t even f’ing think about doing that again.” I threw two curveballs, and while the message wasn’t quite as direct, there was definitely some resistance. With that persistent tenderness in the elbow, I didn’t even bother trying to throw a yellow hammer or a splitter, because those are the toughest of my breaking pitches on the elbow.

Where that leaves us is pretty good. I won’t be pitching this weekend, but I can at least zing the throw across the infield as necessary. After this La Guerche game, we’ll have another four weeks off, during which one can only hope that my (insert vulgarity in language of your choice here) elbow will finally allow me to step back on the mound and get a pitching line as a Woodchuck. One critical component of my recovery was unfortunately thwarted today, as I had made an appointment with Dr. Auguste, the same doctor I saw about a month ago. He wanted to do three mesotherapy sessions (cortisone shots without the cortisone) before I pitched again, and so I headed to his office this afternoon for my 3:15 appointment.

Now, who in the hell gets stood up by a doctor? How is it possible to show up 15 minutes early for your appointment and find the place closed down like a ghost town? What kind of doctor stands up his patients?

My kind of doctor, I realized, that’s who. After I got past the frustration, I realized that I hope Dr. Auguste is on the 14th hole by now, having decided to blow off the working stiffs and people complaining about shin splints and hit the links with a few cold ones in tow. God bless you brother; I like your style.

Sorry for the long layoff, folks. I’ve been traveling in our four weeks off, during which I managed to see Cork, Galway, the Aran Islands, Belfast, Dublin, London, Leominster Spa, Glasgow, Barcelona, Pamplona, and Bayonne. Which one of these is not like the others?

In Pamplona, I managed to run with the bulls without being gored, which all in all, puts me ahead of the game, I think. I’m going to try to get around to posting a few of my more interesting adventures, but I am running out of time at this internet cafe and I’ve got to scoot.

Back to baseball: the particularities of the French baseball schedule had us taking four weeks off from 6/25 to 7/23, when we play a single doubleheader at La Guerche, and then take another four weeks off before the end of the season and tournament. Unorthodox, to say the least. In any case, the big news is that tomorrow at practice, I’m going to actually try to throw normally for the first time since, uh, April 2nd. If my elbow doesn’t feel like it’s been placed under Goldfinger’s Laser, then I might try to let ‘er rip on Sunday against the Hawks. If it does, well, looks like some more awkward dart-throwing for me.

Hugs and handpounds,

ev

No time for a real post here, but since I popped into an internet cafe, I figured I should at least take the opportunity to show you what most of my HBWT administrative matters boil down to. Basically, this blog has nearly 200 posts, but it’s already attracted over 10,000 comments. You’ll notice that only about 300 of the comments currently appear on the blog, however, because the other 9,700 come from spam programs that try to sell you the typical array of phentermine, penis enlargement pills, and bestiality porn. (At this point, it remains unclear how they got such a precise demographic study of my readers.) They tend to show up in bunches, by which I mean all of a sudden, I’ll get 45 comments within 3 minutes on a post that I wrote in March, all of which are more or less along the lines of this:

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Edit | View Post | Delete just this comment | Bulk action: Approve Spam Delete Defer until later

In any case, know that I spend up to an hour every week deleting these comments so that you never see them. Just one of the many things I do for you, the reader, in lieu of actually posting.

On the subject of just that (i.e. my failure to post), I will tell you that I’ve got several posts waiting to go on the World Cup, and also that I’m currently in Dublin, about to head out for a pint in the Temple Bar district. I’ll also tell you that on a curious turn of luck, I managed to find myself today with a single-admission ticket for both Gaelic Football and Hurling. I’ve halfway written a post about the day, but I’ll give you the blurb version now, which is to say that both kick terrifying ass. Gaelic Football is everything that soccer should be- frequent scoring opportunities, scores in the twenties, occasional massive collisions and the ability to use your hands. (Oops.)

Hurling is another story altogether. My friend Chuck once posited that the origin of Valhalla, the Viking conception of nirvana- where warriors were rewarded for virtuous existences with an afterlife in which they literally a) spend all day fighting and then b) spent all night drinking before strapping the pads on again in the morning to return to part a- was really just the result of typical Viking bragging after overindulgence of mead. He insists that well into the wee hours of the night, when all the Vikings were arguing about how badass they were on account of the extent of their love for fighting and drinking, one basically threw down the gauntlet, claiming that spiritual paradise, to him, would be a sleepless existence in which he were able to do only one or the other until the end of time. Cowed, the rest of the Vikings had to agree, and so an afterlife myth was born, which may sound silly, but frankly it beats the St. Peter and harps bit that I’ve heard elsewhere.

Anyway, the point is, hurling is such an impossibly violent sport that I can’t help but imagine that a few lacrosse players were once sitting around, trying to impress eachother with their love of carnage.

“You know, I love Lacrosse, but I just wish that our sticks were blunter and more lethal, and we could be more indiscriminate in hitting our opponents with them.”

“Totally right. Lax is great but I hate that you goalies actually wear helmets and there are restrictions on tackling, cross-checking, slashing, and tripping.”

“If only we could invent a sport to circumvent such rules!”

Basically, hurling is that sport, and I will go out on a limb right now and say that it’s absolutely fucking awesome. If you love the grace of the floor routine or the pageantry of equestrian, do not come to a hurling match. If you like watching players smack each other with wooden hurlies (sticks) so hard that the clacking of hurlies, wrist bones, and teeth can be heard across the soccer field-sized pitch, believe me when I say that you will not go home disappointed.

The league is sponsored by Guinness, which leads to two great scoreboard-watching moments. The first is that the competition was the finals of the Guinness Hurling Championship. I point this out only that longtime readers of the blog (which is to say, my roommates) remember a different Guinness Hurling Championships from my freshman year in college, a championship in which I was unanimously declared not merely champion but also “Emperor For Life.” Second, the sponsorship motto is “Immortality Beckons.” It’s quite impressive, with the ads that they run with a man leaping across a gaping ravine with a hurley at the ready, reaching for the championship trophy, but I can’t help but think that a more accurate reading would be “Immortality Beckons; Mortality Looms.”

Look who was quoted (albeit anonymously) by Gordon Edes in his baseball notes column this week!

P.S. that is to say, me.

Now you know how I felt about some of those calls in the games against PUC.

A short drive from the Formula 1 took us to the Toulouse baseball field. It’s a very respectable field, no goofy cutout infields or concrete mounds or anything. The team is actually just called Stade Toulousain, with interlocking ST on their caps, because they’re affiliated with the Stade Toulousain rugby team, one of the biggest, most successful rugby teams in France. The club athletic system in France has these sort of affiliations all the time, sort of like if the New England Patriots had an associated baseball team as well.

We rolled in at around 9:30 for the first of two games, and quickly found ourselves enveloped in a swarm of “moucherons,” or flies. Now, there are but a few things that moucherons love in the world, and it starts with eyes, ears, and noses. Most of all, however, they love exposed cuts; it’s like they can’t get enough of them. Sadly, all of these attractions were readily available on my face, and so I spent the rest of the day doubling as a sort of dipteran Disneyland. Even in warmups, sprinting back and forth in the outfield, I swallowed about three or four of the little buggers, and they seemed to have a nasty tendency to swarm around the batter’s box as well.

With only nine ballplayers under a 35-degree sun (I’m not sure the conversion to Fahrenheit, but I think it’s roughly 240 degrees), no one expected we would put up much of a fight against Toulouse, at 17-3 just one game behind Rouen for the league lead, particularly against their ace (and French national team pitcher) Samuel Meurant. However, we did just that, and took them to 11 innings before falling 4-3. Meurant was tough, but we managed to squeak 3 off him in the third, with me scoring the first run after being plunked off the elbow. Quentin gave us his best game of the year, going 5 strong with only one earned run, and he handed it over to Matt with a 3-2 lead to start the bottom of the sixth. Matt ran into trouble in the seventh with a walk, sac bunt, and double to tie it at three, and we went to extras.

Meurant was tough, with a good fastball, big looping curve, and a decent changeup. I had a good at-bat with a disappointing result to lead off the game, fouling off three or four pitches on 3-2 before swinging through a fastball that was probably a little bit up. After the HBP, I had another good third at-bat, again fouling off a few pitches on 0-2, working it to 2-2 before hitting a one-hop smash right back at him. Sadly, he snared it and threw me out easily, which was a real drag because even if he just got a piece of it I think it would have squirted into no-man’s land between short and second and I could have squeaked out a base hit. I hit another ground ball up the middle in the seventh, but the second baseman ranged to his right to get me by half a step. Frustrating all around.

By the ninth, I decided it was time to get a base hit no matter what, so I dropped a drag bunt down the third base line and it was a beauty. I had it beat, but just as I was barreling across the bag, the first baseman lept for an errant throw that had brought him across the bag and up the line. It was too late for me to do anything to avoid him, and I plowed through him, albeit entirely accidentally. He was tall and skinny and stretched out like a wide receiver reaching for a Joey Harrington special, but fortunately he was okay after the resutling collision spun him like a top. I took second as the ball rolled out of play, but was left there after Seb flew out to right and Mathieu popped out to second to end the inning.

My only regret on the day is that I should have tried to steal third. I was getting a good lead, as they weren’t paying too much attention to me, but I held off because I didn’t want to take the bat out of our #2 and #3 hitters’ hands. Instead, we didn’t score, and we lost it in the 11th on a base hit, a sac bunt, and a deep fly to right field that fell in down the line.

In the second game, we had absolutely no one to throw. Just no one. We had thrown Quentin and Matt in the first game, and Vincent had to miss the game on account of his high school graduation exams (known as the “BAC” in France”) the next day. We went with Seb, and while he settled down after a first inning in which he walked the first three hitters on 13 pitches, we found ourselves down 4-2 and never got any closer than that. We lost 13-2 in 7 innings, and headed back on the long drive home.

The second game notwithstanding, it was really our best effort of the year. We took Toulouse, arguably the best team in the league, to 11 innings with their ace on the mound. After he went nine, they had to bring in their #2, also on the national team, to close it out, which again, was probably not expected by anyone in the league. In fact, we should have scored in either the ninth or the tenth, and it was our failure to execute those offensive opportunities that cost us the game. Our #8 and 9 hitters went a combined 1-16 with 12 K’s… which just isn’t going to get the job done at any level of baseball. So be it.

That makes seven, count’em, seven games that we’ve lost by one run, and three in extra innings. I feel like you hesitate to say that it’s a “hard-luck” team, but at a certain point you have to call a spade a spade. On the one hand, it’s taken our best baseball to be in those games, and at the end of the day, it just wasn’t good enough, but one extra bounce here or there and instead of being 5-17 and one game out of last place, we are 12-10 and shocking the league in the last playoff slot. What can you do?

At a certain point you start wondering exactly what you can do to turn around a team with buzzard luck. I remember a class in college that I took at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, years before they swatted my application into the 17th row and called me a “sucka,” which I thought was a bit excessive- a mere “no thank you” would have sufficed- but I digress. It was called Managing Strategic Change, and in one session, we watched Twelve O’Clock High, where Brigadier General Frank Savage tried to turn around a similar “hard luck” bomber unit. It may explain my mediocre performance in the class- not to mention subsequent admissions decision years later- but I’m not sure I can identify the incisive leadership decision that made the difference. If I remember correctly, ol’ Frank just kept sending the boys off to die over Normandy. Hmmm…

Fortunately, the Woodchucks’ morale is significantly better than the 8th Air Force’s was, and we’re all looking forward to our vacation, which came early with today’s rainout against Montpelier. Most of the teams across France got rained out, so we’ll probably be making the game up on the reserve date of September 10th, when, incidentally, I’ll be in my second week as a 1L in Chicago. Hooah!

There’s a lot more to post, but unfortunately it’s going to have to wait. I’ll be dribbling it out over the next few weeks, determined largely by my limited internet access. We have four weeks off until our only game in July at La Guerche, and then another four weeks off before our final three games of the regular season starting in late August and then five weeks of playoffs, which I will be discussing in a later, and far more serious post. In the meantime, I’m headed to Ireland to get my mind off baseball a bit. Slainte,

Ev

Saturday found us road-tripping south to Toulouse. The team wanted to avoid a debacle similar to that which surrounded our travel to Montpelier- a last minute increase in our train tickets nearly doubled the team’s cash outlay- so we traveled in the ultimate budget option, a minibus. Now, I can hear what you’re saying. “Ev, there’s no way that’s going to be cheaper to move a baseball team down to Toulouse, you can only fit eight or nine guys in one of those things.”

That would reveal an inherent flaw in your logic, because even after enlisting the aid of a player called up from Bois-Guillaume’s regional team (the fourth-highest level of baseball in France, after Elite, N1A, and N1B), we left Normandy with only eight players, with Quentin planning to stay at his nearby home on Saturday night and meet us in the morning. That’s right, nine ballplayers for a doubleheader against arguably the best team in the league under a hot Mediterranean sun. Welcome to French baseball, huh? “Good luck, boys!”

Toulouse is in the very southeast of France, just about 250 km northwest of the intersection between the bottom left and bottom sides of the country’s hexagon shape. It’s roughly 800 km (500m) from Rouen, which sits in the upper left corner near England, which makes for an approximately 6.5 hour trip. It’s the equivalent of driving from San Francisco to San Diego, with the exception that the speed limit is typically 110km/hour, which works out to approximately 69 miles per hour. While I’ve been told that police are more vigilant on speed traps in France, everyone seems to exceed the speed limit as a matter of course. 120 km/hour is standard, and 150 km/hour doesn’t seem to be at all out of the question.

We left around 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, with Eric driving the first two or three hours out of Rouen, Aldo taking the wheel second, and me handling the graveyard shift into Toulouse. Popular opinion dictated a dinner at the dreaded MacDo’s, though I narrowly avoided my second MacDisaster by grabbing an overpriced ham-and-cheese sandwich at a gas station/rest stop earlier.

My recent- and as expected, entirely satisfying- stop at In’N’Out Burger had only heightened my disdain for the Golden Arches. To me, eating MacDonald’s in France is like ordering Bud Light at Octoberfest, or signing up for Match.Com as the starting quarterback at FSU; an ill-advised and unnecessarily expensive option given the plethora of vastly superior options available if you’re only willing to look a little harder. It’s like drafting Sam Bowie over Jordan, Olajuwon, Bird, Russell, Chamberlain, the Colossus of Rhodes, and Jesus Christ. (It was a hell of a draft.) While you can order a beer at MacDo’s in France, a clear point in its favor even if it is only 1664 (or French Rolling Rock, as I like to think of it), you can also apparently smoke, judging by the four ostensibly health-conscious teenagers who polished off their low-fat salads and promptly fired up a few Marlboros. Overall, it’s just a place you want to stay the hell out of.

When we finally arrived in Toulouse, we were lucky to spot the dilapidated (and surprisingly well-concealed) sign directing us to our hotel, the Formule 1. The Formule 1 is something of an institution in French baseball. Most of the teams that traveled to Normandy for the Challenge De France stayed at a nearby F1, and my road trips to La Guerche with Savigny and Montpelier with Bois-Guillaume both featured stays behind their now familiar yellow and red-loged entryways.

The thing about the F1s, are, well, they’re really tiny and really cheap, hence their popularity among chronically under-funded French ballclubs. Imagine a French Econolodge, for example. They cram three guys into a room that’s about the size of the average pitcher’s mound, and they do it with a double bed and a lofted bunkbed on top. You can see Matt’s and my stuff strewn around one of them below:

Two other items of note give the F1 its unique “European backpacker”-style feel. First, the toilets and bathrooms are shared in the hallways with every other guest of the hotel, and their woefully inadequate number often leads to lines of perfect strangers in their hallways during morning rush hour, waiting in their towels and bath robes for the next one to open. Interestingly, these small cubbies have an auto-clean function that scrubs the recently-abandoned vessel with boiling water, noxious gas, and spinning blades whenever you leave. I may have made that part up, but I still get nervous anytime I’ve been in one of them a while that the auto-clean might start with me still inside.

Second, the hotel provides a free breakfast every morning, or as the French call it, the least important meal of the day. While I have gone on at great length of the joys of French cuisine, they still haven’t gotten the upper hand on the great big American lumberjack breakfasts of eggs, home fries, toast, bacon, corn beef hash, and sausages. Instead, the F1 hooks you up with bread, butter, and coffee, which I’m pretty sure was the daily rations at the Chateau D’If during the Monte Cristo days. Like the bathrooms, this is a communal meal, which means that you’ve got a French baseball team trooping down to the lobby to share this bread and butter feast with the same stunned denizens it just rubbed shoulders with outside the bathrooms and showers. You can see a perfectly good example of this in the horrified look on this poor woman’s face below:

Tomorrow: the games in Toulouse!

I have a post prepared that will run later on French Hip Hop, but in driving home from the Fete de la Musique (more on that later as well), I heard on the radio a local hip hop group trying to garner street cred in a late night SkyRock (more on that later as well, come to think of it) interview. In doing so, their frontman was heard to utter the following roughly translated line:

“What I’m saying is, we took something from every big hip hop city. New York is in there (random guy in background: “New York is definitely in there.”) Cincinnati is in there. All the big names are in there.”

Congratulations, Cincinnati, you have displaced LA, Chicago, San Francisco, and previous main rival for hip hop credibility Worcester in terms of reputation among French rappers! Kudos and Huzzah!

After an all-too brief nap on Friday, we met up with Sylvain, who took us to see our new apartments. He prepped us by explaining that they were “very small,” and they lived up to his billing. Unfortunately, it appears that I left my camera at my old roommates’ house in San Francisco, making it difficult for me to post a picture, because while I’ll do my best to describe them, seeing is believing.

If you imagine my old Savigny apartment, and then divide it roughly in half, that would pretty much give you the size of this current place. Using my old trick of measuring with baseball bats, I used my new Barnstable Bats’ 271B (a present from Chuckles during my time in SF last week) and laid it out side to side. Including the personal bathroom, shower, and closet, the entire place measures 7’ x 13′, or approximately 91 square feet.

Just for comparison’s sake, I did a little web research. While back in San Francisco, my good friend from my investment banker weasel days TB (Or Beetle Bailey, as I like to call him) lent me his car. No mere point-A-to-point-B sedan is this, however. Upon his arrival in San Francisco, TB went out and found himself a 1975 Cadillac El Dorado Convertible, a car so massive and so eye-catching that in my few fortunate times driving it I’ve been solicited for its sale, honked at, and nodded at more times than I can count. We once sat six people in it coming back from a Big Brothers Big Sisters’ fundraising event, five of them big, athletic guys, and no one’s leg even brushed up against their neighbor’s. This cherry red behemoth measures in at 18.7’ x 6.7’, making it approximately 35% larger than my current apartment, more if you count the fins.*

Needless to say, I couldn’t be happier. Aldo has been a great host, but it’s not fair to keep imposing ourselves on him and I’m very happy to get off his floor. It’s 10 minutes by bus to either the baseball field or downtown Rouen, and it’s quiet and clean. Matt’s got his own upstairs.

Naturally, that couldn’t be the end of it, as we have these for only 15 days. We’re looking at a T2 (a 1BR with a living room, like the apartment in Neufchâtel) in Rouen for the end of the month, at which point we’ll both move in and I’ll take off for a few weeks of travel. The apartment saga continues. After next weekend’s games against Montpelier, we don’t play for four weeks, and I’ll be doing my best to stay in shape while seeing a little bit of the mother country (Ireland), Scotland, Spain, and Belgium.

There’s a single bed, a small desk, and a minifridge as well, and students are to use the communal kitchen down the hall. This kitchen proved something of a disappointment, as it features just two hot plates and a microwave, but the short-term nature of the accommodations makes it more than tolerable.

*Interestingly, later in the weekend I borrowed my good friend Hilly Rubes’ car, a hunter green Mazda Miata. Having driven only Le Woodmobile for a period of three months, it is hard to imagine two possibly more different automobiles than the Miata and the El Dorado caddy, from suspension, steering, bells and whistles, gas mileage, and horsepower perspectives.

Editor’s Note: I’m a little bit behind in posting, so I’m actually going to backtrack a bit and chronicle the end of last week. As I promised in my last post, I’m trying to increase the frequency of posting, and I’m aiming for five posts this week.

Check out this itinerary:

Wednesday, 11:00 PM Pacific Time- leave San Francisco International Airport on Alaska Airlines flight 6092, arrive JFK 7:24 AM on Thursday. I sprung for the extra $25 and purchased access to the business lounge, where I could catch a few z’s in silence, make a few phone calls, and have a few complimentary Sam Adams’. As the business crowd started filing in around 2pm and the lounge swelled with their pinstriped ranks, I looked around and guessed that I was probably the only one there with a broken nose from playing French baseball. Just a hunch.

Thursday, 5:05 PM Eastern Time- board Air France flight 23 to Paris CDG. My travel planner*- whose performance in this matter is worthy not only of firing but also keelhauling- somehow neglected to procure an aisle seat on this 8-hour transatlantic flight. As a result, I spent it wedged between an Italian man who peered intently at my personal TV screen while I watched Brokeback Mountain but refused to watch it on his own and an older Greek woman who draped herself across most of my legs, lap, and left arm. I found this latter situation distressingly common upon my arrival in France, as the European’s conception of personal space is sort of akin to the American affinity for cheese for desert; that is to say, it doesn’t really exist. This goes for perfect strangers as well as team members and friends, and I frequently find myself slowly giving ground during conversations to maintain at least twelve inches between our faces. The result is a ridiculous half-waltz, where my increasingly uncomfortable retreats in the face of unrelenting advances mean that conversations can be measured not in minutes but in meters. During my time in France, I’ve tried to adapt to pretty much everything out of my desire to avoid being the “ugly American,” but in this case, it’s something I still struggle to do as the Romans do. As far as I’m concerned, I just flew 9,000 miles to see the only person I want six inches from my face, and I only flew back because there was baseball to be played. In any case, this Greek woman, otherwise perfectly friendly and amiable, spent roughly two-thirds of the flight draped across me like a blanket.

Friday, 5:55 AM, Paris Time: Arrive at Charles de Gaulle and once again breeze through customs. I was slowed only by the long line at the passport check line, and when I say “line,” I use the term loosely. When you arrive at 6 AM on a Friday at CDG, you find yourself surrounded by denizens of nearly every nation across the globe: many French, to be sure, but also Chinese, Americans, Japanese, Australians, Italians, Russians, and in my case, a boisterous crew of Mexican soccer fans planning to take the train to Germany for the World Cup whose impromptu cheers during my second consecutive redeye flight had added to my jet lag and overall disorientation. In this harmonious melting pot of world cultures, one quickly finds that many of said cultures do not believe in lines. Rather than an orderly, one-at-a-time file towards the passport windows, the pressing mob soon more closely resembles the old USC Trojans’ Student Body Left play, where they’d send everybody but the waterboy to a designated spot on the left side of the field and hand off to Marcus Allen or OJ Simpson in the hopes that they would slash their way through the sea of red and gold jerseys to the goal line. I make like Jim Taylor and run to daylight, baby**.

7:00 AM: Having once again slipped unchecked through customs, I decided to try something new and hop an Air France bus direct to the Arc de Triomphe. It cost a bit more (12€ versus about 7€) than the standard train to Gare du Nord, but I felt that the risk of falling asleep on the train and missing my stop merited the extravagance.

7:28 AM: The Air France bus finally leaves CDG after stopping at every terminal as I begin to revisit my decision to take this more expensive option.

7:55 AM: I arrive at the Arc and walk a block to the nearby Metro stop, waiting about 5 minutes for a cramped #1 Line train.

8:12 AM: I switch to the #13 line towards St. Denis Universite, which takes me direct to Gare St. Lazare.

8:31 AM: I purchase my train ticket to Rouen.

9:15 AM: Train boards.

10:42 AM: I arrive in downtown Rouen. Realizing that Matt will likely still be asleep and without a functioning cell phone, limiting his ability to pick me up at the train station, I try to decipher the local bus routes and find a way to get back to Aldo’s place.

10:48 AM: High school calculus wasn’t this hard. Matter of fact, high school chemistry wasn’t this hard for me, and that, my friends, is saying something.

11:02 AM: I hop on the #13 bus towards Mont St. Aignan and hope the fact that it looks like the #13 and the #40 lines cross on the map means that they actually do, you know, cross. You think I’m joking, but then, you’ve never spent a night at Hotel Austerlitz.

11:18 AM: I overshoot my bus stop, because the buses only stop in France if someone is waiting there or if someone requests a stop in advance. Sadly, requesting a stop requires knowing where the next stop is and whether it is desirable, an area of knowledge in which I am completely deficient. By the time I could scrutinize the roadside map indicating that the #40 line stopped there as well, we were well on our way to the next one.

11:20 AM: I walk back the 200 yards or so to the right stop and patiently await the next bus, hoping that my transfer card will remain valid.

11:31 AM: Victory is mine! Not only is my card accepted, but the bus takes me (almost) directly to Aldo’s house, with the caveat that I once again overshoot the stop and have to hike about 300 yards up the hill with my baggage.

11:40 AM: Some six hours after arriving in France, I reach my final destination. To get from San Francisco to Bihorel, I have taken one car ride, two airplanes, three buses, two metro lines, and one high-speed train. I ring the doorbell at Aldo’s place, and he and Matt are happy to see me, or at least the Skoal that I had agreed to bring back from the United States. If French baseball were prison- which fortunately, it is not- Skoal would replace cigarettes as the de facto jailyard currency in about 2.3 seconds.

11:42 AM: I sleep the sleep of kings.

*i.e., me.

**My favorite story about the old Packers tailback was that it was said that “Jim Brown would give you the knee and then take it away. Jim Taylor would give you the knee and then try to drive it through your spine.” A straight-ahead, north-south running back from the old school.

p.s. Thanks to my buddy Coops, I’ve recently discovered The Dugout, an occasionally hilarious parody site proclaiming its status as the “official chatroom of Major League Baseball.” It’s hit or miss, but I found these two entries particularly entertaining.

As I write this, I find myself entering the seventh hour of a marathon ten-hour layover at JFK. I flew through Amsterdam last Wednesday to San Francisco, where I spent the week seeing friends, smoothing things over with my girlfriend, and eating burritos. Lots of them. An average of more than one per day. In fact, sitting here in the JFK business lounge, I just polished off the last one of the week, a pork supreme burrito from my favorite burrito joint in California, Tacos Grullense. In between the epic span of burrito consumption, I managed to fit in meals at all of the SF greasy spoons I had missed so much, such as In-n-Out Burger, Brother in Law’s BBQ (recently rechristened Lilly’s BBQ with a corresponding price hike, but still delicious), and Pizza Orgasmica. I managed to see most of my friends, catch a devastating Sox loss to the Twins at the best Sox bar in SF, and even decide the future of my life.

As it turns out, one problem with having a lot of things you want to do in life is that some of them are mutually exclusive. Going home to Boston and MIT in the fall became one such thing when I came off the waitlist at Northwestern’s JD/MBA program, and after a lot of reflection, I’ve decided it’s too good an opportunity to pass up, so I’ll be calling the Windy City home for the next three years.

Overall, it was great to see San Francisco one last time, but it was definitely a visit tinged with sadness. When I left in March, the fact that I was leaving a great city was overshadowed by the uncertainty of what awaited me in France. At this point, while I’m fired up to get back for this weekend’s games against Toulouse, I sort of know what to expect. I’m settled and comfortable in France, and so it’s not as much of a distraction from how much I’ll miss San Francisco.

I’m about to run out of this airport lounge to catch my flight back to France, but I wanted to leave one last message in this very utilitarian update post. Consider it a State of the Blog address, which is to say that in my humple opinion, it just hasn’t been very good lately. Fact is, I’ve been distracted, first by the CFA exam, then by the hassles of trying to find an apartment, and finally by a shattered nose and impromptu trip back to San Francisco. It’s turned, more recently, into a joyless regurgitation of each weekend’s games, and that’s not what it’s supposed to be about. So consider this a promise to readers that posting frequency and quality will be increasing over the next few weeks. We’ll then have a four week layoff without games, during which I’ll still be posting, before our games on July 23rd, followed by another three weeks off before the regular season ends and the playoffs begin. More on all that later.

Cheers,

Ev

As some of you may remember, the Woodchucks’ opponent this weekend is Savigny, my former team. Obviously, the teams are having two very different seasons. Savigny is battling Rouen and Toulouse for the league title, while the Woodchucks are battling to stay in the elite division. In fact, the only thing the two teams have in common is… me. It’s a game I’ve had circled on my calendar ever since that strange string of events in early April sent me from Savigny to Bois-Guillaume.

And it’s a game that will be played without me, as I find myself back in the Bay Area this weekend, Stateside for a few more days before I return to France on Thursday. This quick trip back to the World was very last minute, as it came up just this past weekend. Without getting into details, sometimes you make mistakes, and sometimes you do things unintentionally, things that hurt other people you care about, and sometimes to make it up to those people, there’s no solution other than hopping on a plane and flying 9,000 miles to apologize in person, complete with stitches and a broken nose. This was one such time. Put differently, I suppose you could say that I had to go see about a girl.

In any case, I’ll miss out on this weekend’s games- not that big a deal as the doctors told me not to play anyway- but I’ll be back in time for next weekend’s games in Toulouse. While I’ve said before- and meant it- that I have no hard feelings towards anyone there, of course it would be nice to play well against my former team, not out of vengeance, but out of pride. However, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I could go 4-4 with three crackerjacks, or I could go 0-4 with four ugly K’s, and it wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t change their opinion of me as a ballplayer, it wouldn’t change my opinion of Savigny, and it wouldn’t change what happened. Maybe it’s for the best.

In other news, I’m told we’ve also secured the keys to twin studios in Mont St. Aignan, student appartments with a shared kitchen. They sound tiny, and they’re outside of Rouen, but at this point I couldn’t care less, I just want to get off of Aldo’s floor, for his sake as much as for mine.

On Tuesday, we visited the D-Day beaches on the 62nd anniversary of the landing. I haven’t really had the chance to process it all, as the very next day I was on a flight through Amsterdam to San Francisco. One thing I will say is that it’s a place every American should visit before they die. Walking out on that beach, then turning and seeing the long sprint up the sand to the steep cliffs where the Germans lay waiting, gives you this incredible sense of good fortune. In my case, I felt overwhelmed with good luck to have been born in a time and a place such that my visit to Normandy involved baseball and not bombardment. The only foreigners I need to worry about are the occasional Venezuelan lefthanders, not German luftwaffe, and my elbow injury resulted from too many sliders, not schrapnel. It’s a different Normandy experience.

Cheers,

Ev

*Editor’s Note: To those who said I couldn’t start four straight posts with references to Biggie Smalls lyrics, you are clearly wrong.

So… This one’s going to take some explaining.

I couldn’t sleep at all on Friday night. Not a wink. Just 7 hours of staring at the roof of my tiny hotel room. I’m not even sure that I blinked. It was a combination some personal/family stuff back home, and it left me absolutely exhausted come exam time on Saturday morning. I powered through the morning essay section, feeling pretty good. I knew I couldn’t eat a really heavy lunch or I’d just collapse during the afternoon session, so I had a wrap at a nearby Lebanese place. Needing to remain coherent, I ordered a coffee after lunch, which is standard in France but rare for me. The shopkeeper asked me if I wanted a regular coffee (which, by the way, is high-test espresso in France, none of this decaf shit) or his Lebanese coffee, explaining “It’s very strong.” I opted for the Beirut Bombshell, and as advertised, it was like drinking space shuttle fuel. I blasted through the first half of the multiple choice afternoon session but soon found myself running out of steam. I was gassed, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t keep my focus on anything, and wrapped up early, less than optimistic that my strong morning session could make up for my afternoon meltdown.

I took the train back to Rouen, where Matt picked me up and explained that we had not in fact moved on Friday as planned. Once again, the apartment we were to move into fell through, and we were going to go look at a place on Tuesday. Will wonders never cease. He also declared that I’d be playing first base on Sunday, because he had decided that my weak arm had to be moved from second despite the strong throw I had made going to my right in the Challenge. I tried explaining to him that doing so would downgrade two positions defensively, as my replacement at second lacked range and sure hands, while I had never played first base in my life, but I was too tired to argue it. Fine, I thought. Whatever. First base. What’s the worst that could happen?

I awoke on Sunday to find myself in a mood completely foreign to me. Nothing has ever given me as much joy as playing baseball, but I was just out of it, unable to muster my usual enthusiasm. Even putting on the uniform, while giving the usual jolt of adrenaline to the system, failed to pull me out of my doldrums, and for the first time in my life, playing seemed like work to me. I don’t know how to explain it; I just couldn’t focus, and my play showed it. I busted a stick (Sic Itur Ad Astra, you gave me a good 20 or so hits in the French leagues, you’ve earned your retirement) on an inside fastball in the first, then fought another ball off the hands in the third for a fielder’s choice. Had it not been a maple bat, it probably would have broken too. About the only good thing I did all day was steal second immediately after, but I was left stranded on third with two outs for about the tenth or twelfth time this season. I struck out swinging on a fastball up and in for my third at-bat, and then took a called strike three a little off the plate in the 8th. To put this in perspective, I had struck out twice all season before Sunday, and never against a French pitcher. Moreover, it was the third time in my life that I’ve struck out twice in a game: once a few years back with the Reds against a hard-throwing young black kid with a tough tailing fastball, and once when I was eight years old.

I was a disaster. I feel like I’ve always made the most of my limited physical tools with above average mental preparation, but it was nowhere to be found during that first game on Sunday. It was doubly disappointing, because in addition to wanting to do well for myself, I feel like the Woodchucks deserve better, that they’re paying for better. It’s not that the effort wasn’t there- I was still running at 100%, busting my tail as always- but that for the first time I can remember in my life, the head just wasn’t there. The lights were on, but nobody was home.

We lost 3-2 against Senart in a heartbreaker. Vince pitched a hell of a game, going 7.1, settling down after a 2-run jack in the first to give up just one unearned run. We got on the board in the fifth and added another in the sixth, but couldn’t get the offense going. You can pin it pretty squarely on me. When your leadoff hitter goes 0-4 (my first 0-4 in France) with two K’s, you’re not going to win a whole lot of games.

One of the other player’s fathers saw that I hadn’t brought anything to eat, and hooked me up with a quintessentially French lunch of ham, bread, and salad. I started to collect myself a little bit, and as the second game started, I felt that I was getting it together, starting to get my head in the game. We’ll never really know about the former, because I did the latter almost immediately in a fashion that won’t be gracing highlight reels anytime soon.

With one out and me holding a runner at first, the batter hit a seed at Pierre, our new second baseman. He was already playing close to the bag, and so he snared it on one hop, came across the bag, and turned to throw. Strangely, the hitter hadn’t moved out of the box, apparently thinking it had been caught on the fly, so Pierre just had to toss it softly to first for the inning-ending double play. Instead, he threw it absolutely as hard as he could, a laser beam that skipped about six feet in front of the bag at first.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life as a shortstop or third baseman, silently cursing out first basemen that don’t stay down on throws in the dirt to make a scoop. Any time they would simply wave at a ball, or refuse to bend at the waist in an effort to dig a ball out, has always driven me crazy. Having already made a nice scoop on a low throw from third base in the first game, I did what I had always heard coaches shout at first baseman on balls in the dirt: stay down on it.

However, the field at Bois-Guillaume is a treacherous one, especially in the soft dirt where runners take their lead off first. The ball skipped up on me, over my glove, crashing into my nose with a sickening crunch. The world went silent.

Rivers of blood. Fountains of blood. Torrents of blood, spewing forth from my nose before the ball even fell to the ground in front of me. Think Chinatown. Think that scene from Silence of the Lambs where Lecter eats the security guard’s face. It might give you some small semblance of the carnage that appeared suddenly on the Woodchuck’s infield. Forget “drops” of blood, because there were no drops; it was like turning on a garden hose halfway and then holding your finger over the nozzle to increase the volume. I saw the shortstop’s face contort in a mixture of horror and dismay as I wandered over to pick up the ball. As the world suddenly switched back from silent film to dolby surround, I heard the catcher screaming “UNE! UNE!” I wheeled and flipped to the pitcher, covering at first. As I turned, his jaw dropped, and I immediately knew that this looked every bit as bad as it felt. At the very least, I finished the play, just your routine, run-of-the-mill 4-3-broken nose-1 double play.

I staggered off the field as the president called the paramedics. First base looked like a murder scene, and as I collected my things to get in the back of the ambulance (a little bit over the top if you ask me), I’m pretty sure I saw our left fielder using a push broom to sweep the blood off the basepath, like you would sweep a porch after heavy, heavy rain.

If you ever want to get some funny looks, walk into a hospital in Rouen, wearing the uniform of a sport no one understands, with metal cleats, looking like Carrie on prom night. After some confusion as to my insurance status (all ballplayers at the elite level are insured by the Tres Lettres), they took a quick X-ray, the doctor proudly declaring that according to his diagnosis, my nose was, as Mick Jagger might say, shattered. (Shadoobie). It was sort of like the overdose scene in Boogie Nights- “oh, you think so, doctor?”

You learn something new every day, and on this particular Sunday in French baseball, I learned not only that I’m not J.T. Snow, but also that the French don’t really believe in local anesthesia, even while putting in stitches for a massive cut on the bridge of the nose that make you look like Frankenstein’s monster. Not wanting to disgrace Americans (and ballplayers) everywhere, I sat there and took it, as the old blues song goes, “laughing just to keep from crying.” I now have three gruesome stitches on my horrifically swollen nose, and my twin black eyes have me sporting a Rocky Racoon kind of look. To put it mildly, I am not a handsome man right now. That said, it’s not that big a deal. Who wants to die without scars, or for that matter, with a nose in a straight line?

Two team supporters picked me up at the hospital and took me back to the field, where I discovered that we had lost the second game- drumroll please- 26-0. I’d like to think that I could have made a difference, but even in my long-past prime, I was never worth more than 22, maybe 23 runs in a game. I took an exceptionally ginger shower, and headed out to find the “Pharmacie de Garde,” which is to say a pharmacy that stays open on Sundays and holidays (of which, of course, today is one.) Apparently it’s like bathroom cleaning duty in college dorms- this responsibility rotates between pharmacies every week, and you have to call a hotline to figure out which one happens to be the one on duty that particular week. After much driving around and several calls to the hotline, I found the on-duty pharmacy. With my luck this weekend, I will give you two guesses as to whether or not it was actually open, and the first one doesn’t count. Their storefront proudly declared that they would be on duty Monday, in direct conflict with the hotline’s assertion that they were on call Sunday as well. As such, my painkiller for the evening was not the prescribed Ixprim-325, but the lesser prescribed Laguvulin-16, with a self-prescribed dosage of four fingers… for each hand. It’s an oft-overlooked sedative, but it gets the job done, goes down smooth, and is remarkably cheap on this side of the pond.

I stopped by a Kebab shop to get dinner for Matt and me, and snagged an extra one of the honey-almond cakes that I’ve grown to love so. Much of my experience in French baseball has operated on so-called “Summer Camp Rules”- first kid to camp gets the top bunk, no pissing in the shower, and so forth. In this case, Summer Camp Rules applied as well, which is to say that if you break your nose during afternoon activities, you get extra dessert.

All in all, I think it might be a stretch to call it the worst weekend of my life, but I’ve certainly had better, like the time I ruptured my kidney playing football, or the time I nearly impaled myself on a fountain during an ill-advised early-morning scooter ride. In any case, I’m off to Caen tomorrow for the June 6th D-day ceremonies, secure at the very least in the knowledge that things will get better, if only because they could hardly get worse.

Editor’s Note: Cheers to Danny and Becky Kramer, whose wedding I missed in San Francisco this past weekend. As I said in my exceedingly corny (but heartfelt) testimony, recorded in Bihorel and sent by mp3 via the wonders of the interweb, I love you guys from the bottom of my heart, and I’m so happy that you’ll be spending your lives together.

May be boring to many, but this Economist Article does a pretty good job of describing the risk aversion of French society.

(Note: This title works better if you remember that the French pronounce their capital city as “Pa-ree.”)

Matt dropped me off at the train station this morning after a night of review. I caught the 9:57 from Rouen to Paris, and then walked over to the Opera to catch the #8 train to the southwest corner of the city, where I’ll be taking the CFA tomorrow morning. On the way, I had to stop in at an H&M (think Urban Outfitters but significantly more Eurotrash) to pick up a clean t-shirt, as my persistent “just about to move” status over the past two weeks has led to a noticeable dropoff in laundry cleaning.

Upon my arrival at INSEP, I immediately regretted my choice of t-shirt, which happened to be the cheapest one I could find. It was a dirt cheap knockoff of a French national team soccer jersey, with “FRANCE” emblazoned across the blue front and goofy looking red-and-white stripes around the armpits. As I sat in the waiting room, overhearing, if I understood correctly, that one of my neighbors had medalled (silver, I think) in the past Olympics, I realized that I looked like an absolute clown. Here I was in the medical wing of the National French Athletic Institute, the only American on the entire campus, wearing a crappy “FRANCE” t-shirt. It would be sort of like attending the Oscars with a t-shirt that simply said “MOVIES” across the front. What a putz.

In any case, I quickly saw Dr. Demarais, who after a few questions and ten minutes of manipulating my elbow this way and that, determined that it was probably just an inflammation of the ligament. However, in order to make sure, he wanted to send me down for an “IRM,” which is exactly what you think it is. All of our conversations- and we had several of them throughout the afternoon- existed in this weird lingual netherworld between English and French; I started out, as I often do, apologizing for my poor spoken French, he starts in English, I persist in French so as to make an effort, he starts alternating between the two, and we end up in a confusing blend of Franglais.

Given the French reputation for taking their time, I was impressed with the efficiency of the INSEP operation. I was there for about four hours, at least three of them waiting, but they managed to get the screening, enrollment, initial consultation, MRI, and the review of its results all done in one afternoon. He’s prescribed me some misotherapy (sp?), which my web research indicates is some variation of physical therapy involving minor injections below the surface of the skin, and not merely dipping one’s wounded elbow in the tofu soup junk you get with sushi. Ba dum bum. The good news is twofold: First, no Thomas Juan for me. Second, he thinks that with an aggressive program, I could be good as new within 2-4 weeks, which is excellent news indeed. That would let me get some work in before resting my arm for the end-of-season tournament, which I’ll be discussing sometime over the next few weeks.

Now to get back to studying…

Scene: 8:00 AM this morning, teammate Aldo’s apartment, Bihorel, France. Our hero awakes to the realization that he is suddenly 27 years old, sleeping on the dining room floor. Enter, Conscious & Subconsci0us.

SC: Jesus F-ing Christ! What the hell is wrong with you! You’re 27 years old and sleeping on someone’s floor! You used to bill your employer more in cab fare reimbursements every week than you currently get paid each month! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?!?

Conscious (looking like the kid in 5th grade who was hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on him): Uh… um…

(Enter, Superconscious)

SupC: I don’t really have a lot to add to this conversation because the author has no idea what the superconscious mind does, or if it actually exists. Sorry. (swills from beer can)

Conscious (suddenly revitalized): What am I doing? I’m playing French baseball, that’s what I’m doing, and that’s exactly what I want to be doing, so shut your mouth and stop being such a whiny little girl. Besides, we’re going to move off the floor to a studio in Rouen tonight, no thanks to you, you ungrateful weasel. Oh, and by the way, if you actually want to help around here, how’s about you stop trying to pull outside fastballs, you frigging idiot. Who do you think you are, Kevin Millar?

{end scene}

I bring this to you as part of part 6 in an ongoing series: Existential Crises Resolved By Shouting Down The Subconscious With References To Failed Red Sox Sluggers, by Evan Meagher.

Other miscellaneous happenings…

-Kudos to Montpelier, who surprised everyone by toppling Savigny 9-3 in the Challenge de France final on Sunday. They were a decided underdog entering the tournament, as they were in 6th place or so, missing a few starters, and were the only team in the tournament without any foreigners. Sort of like the 2002 Angels, however, it was a case of the entire team getting hot at the right time and riding that to the finals. They dinged up Gaetan, Savigny’s starter, then tacked on three more against Savigny’s new Canadian pitcher. Good for them; one of the most distressing trends in French baseball- aside from the elimination of baseball as an Olympic Sport, meaning that the French baseball program will no longer be welcome at INSEP and will not receive nearly the same Federal funding in the future- is the increasing concentration of the few good players on three good teams: Rouen, Savigny, and Toulouse. It’s like there are 3 good teams that have huge budgets and everyone wants to play there. Sound familiar? The fact that Montpelier came in, stomped on Rouen in the opener, and then managed to squeak by Senart in the semis before pouncing on Savigny is great for, as Bud would say, competitive balance.

-I’ve learned that the French love gossip, maybe even more than the Americans, and French Baseballeurs (as they call them) are no different. Everyone’s always chatting about which foreigner signed in Rouen, who’s not getting a lot of playing time in Savigny, and so on. The rumor mill therefore exploded the day after the Challenge, when Toulouse’s Canadian centerfielder disappeared in a puff of smoke. He played on Sunday, when Toulouse was jobbed (in my ever so humble opinion) in the semis, and then on Monday- {poof}- he was gone, Kaiser Soze-style. I try to avoid the use of capital letters for emphasis, but this guy was YOKED. Insanely yoked. He looked like a body double in a Vin Diesel film, and he made his XL t-shirt look like an underarmour stretch top. It was borderline ridiculous. He hit an absolute seed home run to straightaway center at Rouen, and then hit a smash off Pierrick in the semis at Bois-Guillaume, the remainders of which landed just shy of the soccer field, the rest having apparently burned up in re-entry. The guy was just a monster. Of course, his rapid departure has the league abuzz. In any case, the HBWT legal department (a crack team of legal eagles) has informed me that speculation on my part would be inappropriate, so I’ll just reiterate how INSANELY RIPPED this guy was, and leave it at that. Perhaps he got called back up, as he was previously in the minors back home, in which case, good for him.

-Lastly, tonight, and last night, and come to think of it, the three or four nights before that, have all consisted of a Groundhog Day-esque constant replay reel of me going to Rouen with the intention of taking a studio in order to get off of Aldo’s floor, then some ridiculous administrative interference preventing me from doing so. Last night, literally five minutes before we were to sign the contract, we were forced to stop by the insistence that we take a look at “another option,” which turned out to be a few rooms in what appeared to be Tyler Durden’s house from Fight Club. Throughout the whole process, my mood has varied wildly, ranging from “consumed by rage” to “blind with rage,” occasionally swinging all the way over to “toxic with rage” and “paralyzed by rage.” Today, I think I even managed to reach “glowing with white-hot rage,” which was something new for me. As you can tell, it’s been quite the emotional rollercoaster… if that rollercoaster was named the “Rage Express” and consisted of a single car moving at an obnoxiously slow pace around a flat, circular loop under the hot sun in the Angerland section of the Fury World theme park.

Today was the same story, as I arrived at the appartment only to be told we would be taking two other studios a little further from the center of town tomorrow… which is naturally after I leave for Paris in preparation for Saturday’s exam. So, tomorrow will be different, because I will be moving into a new appartment. In that respect, tomorrow is identical to every day for the past two weeks. {sigh} Happy Birthday to me.

I like to think of myself as slow to anger, but boy, when it comes out, look out. After a brief but cathartic explosion- in which the key chain to the woodmobile lost it’s W as a result of the best fastball I’ve thrown since early April- I cooled off and had a beer with Sylvain. It’s not his fault, and he’s been working real hard to find us something, so I couldn’t really stay mad. As I pointed out to him, it’s only life. On y va.

Tomorrow I catch an early train into Paris, where I’ll be getting ready for the test and also seeing the best expert on pitching injuries in the country at INSEP. Usually I’d make some sort of joke here, but my weariness (being that apoplectic takes a lot out of you) and my sincere hope for recuperation has overwhelmed even my cynicism. I’ll take the test on Saturday, then come back Saturday night (possibly to a new apartment, although I’m not exactly holding my breath) for Sunday’s games against Senart. Hugs and handpounds,

ev

The semifinal was to be held at Bois-Guillaume today, provided that the rain held off all night. Naturally, it did nothing of the sort, and this morning a few inspired Normandy citizens were seen near the Parc des Cosmonautes making the preliminary preparations for a large, biodiverse cruise ship of some kind.

I almost feel like I don’t have to tell you what happened. We went out and looked at a torn-up field, and insisted that it be given some time to dry out. The umpires showed up with the Technical Director from the Federation, who declared that the game would go on as planned. Unfortunately, this time, I didn’t have a team I could pull off the field in the name of common sense, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to start handcuffing myself to the mound. Instead, I just sulked off to the side, incredulous, trying hard to resist the inclination to tell the technical director to stick his Challenge de France where the sun don’t shine, which to be fair, is in Normandy. It’s probably the angriest I’ve been at any time during my stay in France.

(Rant deleted here for the purposes of diplomacy)

In any case, Savigny played Toulouse in the semi-final, and it was a tight match throughout. I didn’t watch as I was busy studying in the clubhouse, but I came out in the ninth and watched the new Canadian pitcher for Savigny try to close out a 6-4 victory. Toulouse popped up two bunts in the inning (the French, as always, adore the bunt) and found themselves with men on first and second with two outs. A routine popup then fell in front of Romain, the Savigny left-fielder, as he didn’t get a good jump off the slippery field. (Whodathunkit? Oh, wait- me and everyone else. Never mind.) That made it 6-5, with two outs and men still on first and second. The next hitter drilled a ball into left to tie the game, but the runner on first base inexplicably rounded second and carried on toward third base. Now, if I think hard enough, I’m sure I can remember some sort of rule about making the third out at third base… What is it again? Oh, right-

YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT DO IT, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND IF YOU DO, THE BASEBALL GODS WILL SMITE YOU WITH GREAT VENGEANCE AND FURIOUS ANGER.

It’s just an absolutely unforgivable blunder, a moment of brain death that ended up costing Toulouse the game, because the home plate umpire declared that the runner from second had not yet crossed home plate as the tag was applied at third. It’s only moderately relevant that it was one of the worst calls I’ve ever seen, and that the runner was at the grass having left the home plate circle when the call was made. (A true Joe West special, by the way- apparently, one thing that doesn’t change across continents is that umps love making controversial calls that draw all the attention to them.) The fact is, that baserunner cost his team the game.

In any case, the final is going on now at Rouen. I think you can check it out at the Huskies’ website. Needless to say, these three webcams were never installed at the BG field…

After the games last night, Aldo and I cooked some pasta and roasted a chicken for dinner before watching a little bit of the Cubs’ late-inning implosion against the Braves. In terms of surreal situations, watching an internet broadcast of a Cubs’ day game at 11pm at night in Bihorel, France with a Frenchman and an Australian certainly ranks right up there. (We’ve been staying at Aldo’s during the Challenge de France, having left Neufchatel for good on Thursday morning.)

When we headed in to Bois-Guillaume this morning, we found a field that looked like it had hosted the Kentucky Derby. It had rained on and off during our games against Savigny and La Guerche on Friday, and it had rained all night as well. Not surprisingly, the field was a swamp, slashed and scarred with enormous cleat marks from the dugout to the outfield fence. Even taking into account the French (and particularly Norman) tendency to play in conditions that you would never play in back home, this was more than a tad ridiculous, and Sylvain (the club president) and Matt (the other coach) and I all agreed that there was no way we could realistically play a game that would be safe for both the players and the field, seeing as we had to host Senart next weekend and then Savigny the weekend following.

There was just one problem, however: It wasn’t our final decision. Technically, the Tres Lettres’ Technical Director had the final call on whether a field was playable, and he was adamant that the game continue as scheduled. All arguments fell on deaf ears. Several times against Savigny and La Guerche, players had slipped awkwardly on the slick infield surface, risking serious injury. In fact, in the first inning, after I had been drilled in the arm and then stolen second, I slipped awkwardly rounding third after a groundball to the shortstop, and barely got back to the bag, crawling on my hands and knees to beat the tag. (Sylvain had been the third base coach, and said that he had to restrain himself from picking me up and tossing me onto the bag like Asterix and Obelix, which is funny because, well, Sylvain is a big dude and kind of looks like Obelix.) Our shortstop, Quentin, had twice slipped and fell ass over teakettle trying to field a ground ball, and our third baseman in the second game had his leg slip out from under him while throwing to first, nearly pulling a muscle.

All of these plays had left their mark on the field, as huge puddles of mud had replaced the grass at shortstop, second base, and first base. With a series of home games coming up and limited resources to repair a field that three days ago had been in its best condition ever, it made absolutely no sense to play a meaningless game (0-2 on Friday, we were already effectively out of the tournament) and screw the field up any more. As bad as the field looked, however, it sounded even worse, by which I mean that anywhere on the field, you could hear the air pockets bubbling to the surface, reminding me of walking through salt marshes on Cape Cod as a kid. Now, I’m not a professional groundskeeper, but my personal rule is that when there’s a quarter-inch of water covering most of left field, and the field is so wet you can hear it, it’s probably not a good idea to play baseball.

Nonetheless, the technical director insisted that the game go on as scheduled. “I don’t care about next week’s games,” he said, “I care only about the tournament, and the game must be played. The field is safe.”

Sylvain, Matt, and I convened briefly, and made the right call. I pulled the coach for Senart aside and told him we would be on the field at 1:30 in full uniform to formally declare a forfeit due to the field’s unplayability. I apologized, but he said not to worry, he felt it was the right decision and that he was sorry it had to come to us forfeiting.

As I walked to the clubhouse to get dressed (a largely symbolic gesture) the head umpire arrived and asked me if I had seen the field. He was a little late to the party, and so when I said I had, he began adamantly arguing that there was absolutely no way to play on the field that day, that he was unwilling to put players in harm’s way, and that he couldn’t imagine playing as scheduled. I told him I agreed entirely, but that we were being forced to play and would instead declare a forfeit.

I knew it was the right decision, for the right reasons, and despite the effort that the entire Bois-Guillaume club had put in to host the tournament, I knew that at the end of the day, it was an easy decision not to jeopardize the health of players from both teams just because someone from the Federation wanted a final score other than 9-0. However, that didn’t make it easy. Even knowing that the field looked like the day after a Grateful Dead concert, even tired and sore and with roughly 2/3 of my body covered in black and blue marks from errant pitches or awkward dives, I still got the same rush of excitement and wonder from pulling on a pair of baseball pants. It’s no doubt a long-ingrained Pavlovian reaction. I start to pull those socks up and my body knows immediately what will soon be expected of it. “Oh, shit, these things again? Well, I guess it’s time to head out on that quarter-circle field and get reckless.”

However, this was a case of stimulus without response, because even a rush of adrenaline can’t dry up a little slice of the Everglades in Normandy. As we massed in the dugout, the head umpire declared his opinion that the field was unplayable, and the technical director said that he accepted that advice, but that it was the Tres Lettres’ decision, and the games would go on as planned.

“In this case, Bois-Guillaume will declare a forfeit,” I said, and that was that.

It’s disappointing, as I said, because Bois Guillaum went to great lengths to make this tournament come off well, and did a very good job. However, at the end of the day, I am absolutely, 100% comfortable with the decision we made. It just wasn’t even a close call. One of the club officials asked me “How would this have played itself out in the U.S.?” Well, we wouldn’t have played at all on Thursday, Friday, or today, because they would have called off the tournament as early as Monday on account of the forty days and forty nights of rain.

In any case, that’s that. The tournament goes on without us, and our next game will be Sunday at home against Senart. In the mean time, I’m going to find an apartment Monday and I’m going to try to move in on Monday afternoon. It’s just not fair to Aldo to keep putting us up, and I need a quiet place to study over the next week before this “Putain de CFA Examen,” as the French would say.

Yours in Putting Players’ Safety First and Not Making Insane Decisions,

ev

Note to Rick Sutcliffe: Stop being hammered on live television.

The following is an email from my sister, whose PhD (she’s the smart one, as I’ve said many a time) in Cultural Anthropology at Wisconsin has brought her to Tokyo for a summer of research. As you’ll see below, Meaghers, in general, tend to encounter a surplus of bizarre, surreal situations, be they Tokyo Cab Drivers or French Baseball. Enjoy….

Hey, homies.

Sorry for the delay in e-mail; the last two days have been, to say the least, hectic and disorienting. This trip is so far a mixture of Kafka and Henry Miller.

To begin, I sat on the plane with my new penpal, a handsome Korean-American kid from Houston who is just back from Iraq and was on his way to Seoul to visit friends. Honestly, a 13-hour flight is an ordeal that makes lifetime friends. If you can survive the flight cramped in like veal calves and still speak to each other, you have a special bond. He is returning to Tokyo, but alas, not until after I
have left.

I managed to get to Ikebukuro by *limousine bus* which is a lot like the airport shuttle from Mishawum Station, except that the anti-maccassars (sp?) are lace, the curtains are silk, and the overhead announces in
Japanese and then the Queen:s English, *please do not use your cellphones on this bus, as it tends to annoy the neighbors.* Excellent.

Once in Ikebukuro, the closest JR stop from Oizumi, where I am staying (the central loop around central Tokyo, Yamanote-sen, is owned by JR, the national railroad; the spokes radiating out from this hub are owned
by various private corporations, such that, in order to get around, I have to buy two monthly passes, each about 10000 yen, or 100 USD: one from Seibu Department Stores, who own the Seibu Ikebukuro line which I
have to take to get to the central loop; one from JR, to get from Ikebukuro Station to all other central destinations. I make up for this expense with my cheap lodgings, of course, but more on that scene below)
I wander around in search of Oizumi. The sense of disorientation is strong here, even when one has not been awake for over 30 hours, but after the flight it was too much. I had intended to walk to Oizumi from
Ikebukuro - the nice people at Narita (and they really are VERY, VERY nice, provided that one demonstrates effort in speaking the language and bows obsequiously) had told me it was a 10-minute walk. NOT SO. After
walking in circles for a little over an hour, I found Tokyo Metropolitan Plaza and the Crown Plaza Hotel, a bastian of Western-ness in a distinctly un-Western part of town. The bellhops and I spoke Japanese;
they disabused me of the idea that walking from Ikebukuro to Oizumi was a good idea. For this I am forever indebted to them.

I managed (somehow) to figure out my way by train to Minami-Oizumi, but only after getting off at Nerima-ku and wandering around. My first impression of Nerima is that it is extremely beautiful; although the houses are small, it truly is a country of aesthetes, all of whom display meticulously-kept semi-tropical plants. My second impression? *Damn, but there are a lot of whores here.* To their credit, they:re really meticulously-kept semi-tropical whores. After another two hours of walking around in the dense, humid air, past pachinko parlors, sake bars, and the like (resisting the by now almost overwhelming desire to stop for a hot sake, ooki no o, kudasai [the big one, please]) I found a worker:s union with a tiny restaurant where two middle-aged Japanese men gave me directions back to the station and photocopied a map for me. Like a number of people that day, they complimented me on my Japanese (nihongo ga jouzu desu ne!) A lovely young Japanese waitress from the restaurant, Arishia, walked me back to the station where, in frustration (it was by now 8:30 p.m., my plane having landed at 3:30) and on her advice, I splurged and enlisted the services of a single-fare cab (ie, anywhere in the area for 650 yen, or just under $6.50) Money well spent. For the next hour he and I drove through streets so impossibly narrow that the average American sedan would have a hard time of it -
these were, however, TWO LANE streets, so we careened through Lombard Street-like curves nearly missing oncoming garbage trucks and private cars. Also, my cabbie gave off a strong smell of whiskey and water. In
his defense, he was about 5 feet tall, so it probably didn:t take that much Suntory to suffuse his little system. Having driven in circles for about 30 minutes, we stopped and used his cellphone to call the venerable Yoshida House for better directions, but there was no answer. *dame,* we repeated, in defeat, *inai*
(no good; there:s no one there) I confess that, despite my postmodern sympathies, I was raised to believe that one can get places with a map and the correct address. Not universally the case. Every four blocks or so we would find a home whose owner was so extravagant as to have purchased street numbers, and we would get out, scratch our heads, say, *dame,* and get back in. At the end of a long alley by a tiny river we found this truly odd-looking little structure, a tiny cabin enclosed in vegetation, with two little tables with ashtrays, an odd assortment of garbage, an antediluvial naugahyde loveseat, and cement statues of Buddha. *Kore wa nan desu ka?* I asked, and he replied he hadn:t any idea. Seeing a light through the vegetation, etc., I asked to get out to ask directions of whoever was inside. I got out and saw a funky little sign adorned with a mosaic of what I think is supposed to be a whale and the words, in English, *YOSHIDA HOUSE*

*YO-SHI-DA-HAU-SU!* I yelled. *Kimashita yo!* (*we:ve made it!*) The driver leapt out, exclaiming, *yokatta! yokatta!* - *YES!* and I followed. We gave each other a high-five and I was so happy I teared up. I gave him a generous tip by Japanese standards, 20000 yen (2 USD) to compensate him for having spent an hour navigating Minami Oizumi with me for less than the price of the gas consumed, and he looked at me quizzically. *Okanemochi desu ka?* he asked (Are you a moneybags?) and I replied, no, but you were such a good driver. I was exhausted, elated, and had a Suntory contact high.

By now it was 9:30. I sought out an open door and found one ajar. I pushed it open with my free hand to find a stark naked Japanese dude who said, without any register of indignation, or even surprise, *oh , um…* I slammed the door shut, apologizing in a panic, and walked around until I found another Japanese-style sliding door, open about 1 inch, and called in, in Japanese, *excuse me, I just arrived from America. I am Meagher-san. I am to stay here.* I was met at the door by a truly enormous, and not unattractive, Frenchman named Geoffrey, who let me in and showed me my room. *Vous etes Francais?* I asked, and he was floored. He asked whether I spoke French and I replied that while I had *plusieurs annees en etudiais, je nai pas l:occasion pour le pratiquer.* He was ecstatic. He is from Lyons, but I told him about mon petit frere qui joue le baseball a quelque chose-sur-Orge. He replied, in French, *I didn:t know there was baseball in France.* I
showed him havebatwilltravel.com to confirm my claims. He was duly impressed.

Soon my first naked Japanese came in - I have seen, in my day, fully naked half-Japanese and half-naked Japanese, but this was the full Monty, (fu-ru mon-chi) so to speak. I apologized again but promised, in Japanese, that *chinchin ga mimasen deshita.* (I did not see the penis) In fact this was true. It had happened so quickly that I didn:t think to look down, even if I had been so inclined and, let:s face it, I would have been. I:m a scientist, after all. I seek to know. He thought this was hilarious, and looked relieved. Geoffrey proposed
that this was only because the chinchin was so miniscule, which met with laughter and broke the ice.

I told them I knew Peter was on vacation, but that I had arranged to stay the month. They let me in on the truth: Peter is not on vacation in Bangkok, he is in a detention center, having been deported for visa problems (which apparently plague about a third of Yoshida:s tenants) Peter left in a hurry, shackled, no doubt, to some humorless immigration official, abandoning his NINE CATS, who prowl about begging for food; the ad-hoc cat policy being not to give them any, in the hope that they will take the hint and scadoodle. One of these cats has twice followed me into my room; another tries to jump on me every time I sit down. My room, though carpeted, comes with a broom, which has proved an invaluable tool in Caitlin-cat relations.

As for my room, it is the worst place I have ever seen in my entire life, but there is something about its abject squalor that makes me want to tough it out. My floor is sunken in several places; the *bed* is an army cot covered with several quilts to signify a mattress, which I am instructed to air out every week or so to kill fleas.
Exhausted, I lay down and slept better than ever before, but was awoken by immigration officials conducting an impromptu sweep. When asked in Japanese whether I lived here on my way to the shower (one building
over!) I responded, in Japanese, *yes, since yesterday* and was left alone. The other tenants were in hiding, peering out their windows from their rooms or playing possum.

Thus I began my first full day in Japan, eight full hours of which I spent in search of an ATM that can read American cards. I spoke to about forty Japanese during the course of the day, each time reciting, *jidoukikai wa America no ka-do ga yomenaindesu ka. Amerika kara kitta bakari desu yo. Komatte ne.* (Your ATM does not read my American card. I have just come from America, and this is a terrible problem.) I was met with flattery for my language skills, sympathy, and regret that they hadn:t the foggiest idea where I could find an international ATM.

My quest took me, finally, back to Ikebukuro, where I found, in the basement behind an upscale gourmet department store (*fat kid Disney,* as I have named it) at the end of a seemingly endless hallway, a
citibank ATM which, alas, cannot for security reasons dispense more than 50000 yen or 500 USD per day to foreigners. So I was able, after an eight-hour (no, really) trek to pay my rent, but nothing more. Today
I will return to Ikebukuro to withdraw another 50000 yen. This is an excellent money-saving device: merely accessing one:s money is such an ordeal, one is more reluctant to part with those cartoon-colored bills.

So today I will return to Nerima-ku, where I will speak to Maho Cavalier of clanguage about Japanese lessons, and I will perhaps make it to Shitamachi by the end of the day. In this country, one can:t take
anything for granted.

It:s now 9:30 a.m., so I have to be off. More adventures in Tokyo later.

Love you all,

Cake

I don’t really have time to describe Sunday’s games against Rouen, so I’ll get to that later. Instead, here I’ll describe the Challenge De France, which started yesterday. We were to play Savigny on Thursday, but the torrents of rain made that an impossibility. I’ll give Sylvain credit here; the Tres Lettres officials showed up and tried to make us play in a downpour, but Sylv stuck to his guns and made it clear that no one was to play on the field that day. I’ve said before that the French play in weather that you’d never see baseball played in back home, but this would have been ridiculous. After a week of grooming the field, adding bullpens, and getting everything ready, it would have been absolutely insane to play on Thursday, and Sylvain held off the pressure to play.

Instead, we played Savigny today at 2, and La Guerche shortly thereafter. Knowing that Savigny wasn’t a match that we had any legitimate shot at winning, we threw a pitcher brought up from the second team, just to save our pitchers for La Guerche and Senart. Now, I hate this approach, where you basically concede one game to play for the other. I hate playing for ties; it ain’t democratic. However, when you’re essentially outgunned and outmanned, you have to make concessions, so we did against the Lions and suffered the predictable drubbing, 20-0 through five. Christophe, the second team pitcher, threw strikes, and we didn’t make a whole bunch of errors behind him. Savigny just did what they did best: hit. 1 through 9, they’ve got the best lineup in the league, and they pounded him mercilessly. One fella even turned on a letter high fastball and put it over the wall in right for a grand slam, or as the French call it, a Grand Jambon Fumee. They had their recent upgrades there as well, a big Canadian pitcher who’s just there for the Prague Tournament (the European Cup) in June, and a utility player from Claremont McKenna in California. When he was on second base (shit, everyone was on second base at one point or another), I asked him if he spoke any French, and whether he missed In’n'Out Burger yet. (”Not a word” and “More than you could believe,” for the record.) All was cool with the Lions, no real hard feelings or anything, although I could tell that every time they asked me if things were going well in Bois-Guillaume and if I liked it there, it was with a sort of “no, really?” kind of incredulity.

After that shellacking, we faced La Guerche, the source of our only legitimate win of the year. They threw a guy we hadn’t seen the first time we faced them, my favorite kind of ballplayer: the hefty lefty. This was a pretty big dude, softballing lefty who just threw strikes and let the defense sort them out. He hit me in my first at-bat, the second time today as Marc Rousseau had lit me up off the elbow in the first game. I grounded out in the third, and then hit my only real seed of the day in the sixth, which naturally turned into a double play when Piquet- their best player by far and the best pitcher I’ve seen in France- lept up to snatch a hit away from me and then doubled our runner off first. In the eighth I faced Piquet- in to close it- and singled through the hole on the right side for my only hit of the day. Typical of the day’s events, however, the next batter grounded into the rare (and inning-ending) 1-5-3 double play. I ended up 1-4 on the day with 2 HBP and a stolen base. Twice I was stranded on third, as we played 14 innings without scoring a run. Our luck just wasn’t there today, as we started to rake the lefty in the sixth (three hits plus mine taken away) but couldn’t convert. In the seventh he mowed through the bottom of the order, and Piquet closed the eighth and ninth.

I managed to play decently in the field, booting a ground ball in the second game for my second error in France but otherwise playing a perfect second base. I managed to turn a nice 4-3 double play, tagging the runner and then flipping to first, and actually went to my right with two outs against La Guerche and made a strong throw to first for the out. My elbow held up for the most part, tingling just a bit on that last throw to first.

We play Senart tomorrow, and they’re going to be tough. They’ve got the reputation as the Bad Boys of France, with a ton of foreigners and a chippy attitude. We’ll be throwing Vince, and we’ll see how it goes.

Hugs and Handpounds,

ev

Haven’t really had time to write up our defeats against Rouen this weekend, but I will eventually. Things have been a little tense around here lately as the 2-room apartment that we saw on Monday proved to be a studio with a loft in 2-room apartment clothing, but we’re unwinding at a friend’s house before the Challenge de France, which is not, as many have joked, keeping the students from overturning cars in Paris. It’s a four-day tournament for the French Championship that somehow has little to do with the playoffs in October for the… French Championship. What do I know? In any case, it’s usually in warm places like Toulouse or Montpelier, but this year it’s in Rouen and Bois-Guillaume, as they’re but a few minutes from each other and the nine team, round robin style tournament requires two fields. We’ve been working hard on the field all week, especially Sylvain, the club president, and it’s never looked better.

We play Thurs-Fri-Sat, and we’ll hope to pull a few games out. Tomorrow, I forget exactly who we play. Some team from just south of Paris, uh, the Wildcats, maybe? Lions? Either way, I heard they’ve had some recent managerial turnover, maybe we can exploit that somehow…

I feel that somewhere, ages and ages hence, as I lie dying on a hospital bed and my life flashes before my eyes, most of the images will be from all the baseball games I feel we should have won, the tight matches that just barely squeaked away in the end. I wish it were the opposite- all the close ones we’ve managed to pull off over the years- but I imagine it’s sort of like being a high stakes poker player who never remembers his big victories but can describe every tough beat in excruciating detail.

Both games against PUC will be enshrined in that mental hall of fame, but the second game will have its own wing.

My parents and I enjoyed a sandwich on the lawn behind the dugout, as is the custom in Bois-Guillaume, reveling in the rare Normandy sunshine. We started Matt in the second game, and he went into the ninth up 4-3. The leadoff hitter in the ninth was there pitcher, an American and a very good guy named Brian, who had pitched at Dartmouth. (After the game, we chatted a little bit, and I asked him if he knew any of my friends who went there. Naturally, they had all graduated three or four years before him, making me feel incredibly old.) He grounded to Quentin at third, who promptly skipped it past Vince at first, putting the tying run on with nobody out. He advanced to second on a passed ball, and after a popup for the first out, took third on a ground ball for the second. With two down, Eric had to go into the hole at short stop, made the sliding stop on a three-hopper, but couldn’t field it quite cleanly, and the throw came in just a split-second too late to get the batter. Instead of escaping with the 4-3 win, we were knotted at 4 going into the bottom half. Absolutely gut-wrenching.

However, Matthieu led off the bottom half with a cannon shot double into the right field gap. All we needed to do was move him over, and we’d have two cracks at scoring him from third. It was for *precisely* this situation that we had been practicing our situational hitting for the past few weeks.

Matt wanted the bunt on the first pitch, but I wanted to see what kind of defense they had on, so I didn’t give the sign. It turned out to be the exactly right call; PUC put on the wheel play, and Aldo took a strike. They had expected bunt, but not seeing it, they called off the wheel. It was, in effect, a gamble that paid off perfectly. Bluffed their bunt defense and then put the bunt on for the second pitch, when they weren’t expecting it, to make sure we moved the runner over.

Aldo fouled off the bunt, and struck out two pitches later.

Eric then tried to get a bunt down, but fouled it off as well, and struck out three pitches later.

Naturally, amidst all of this, Matthieu had taken third on a wild pitch, which would have scored him had we managed to move him over. Instead, we went into the tenth tied, unable to send Matt back out due to the limitation on foreigners throwing 9 innings each weekend. We had to send Seb out, and a few walks and a HBP later, we were on the sour-tasting end of a 6-4, extra-innings loss, our second in two weeks.

Painful.

On my end, I had the double and reached on an error, two HBP’s (my legs are now spotted black and purple all over), a walk, a couple runs scored, and three stolen bases. Sadly, I made my first error in France, failing to pick up a slow roller at second as I charged in. Fortunately, we got out of the inning on the next batter with no harm done. The elbow is starting to feel a little bit better, and my throwing motion is slowly beginning to return to normal.

The team threw a barbecue after the games, the sausages and beers doing a good job of cheering us up after two absolute dagger-in-the-stomach losses. My folks and I then returned to our hotel in Rouen for the night before heading in to Paris for two days. There’s not much to report from these days other than the picture from the Louvre below, where we appear to have found the earliest sculpture of a right-handed hitter.

I’ll get around to posting about yesterday’s games against Rouen on Wednesday or so, at which time hopefully- HOPEFULLY- Matt and I may be living in town, just in time for the Thursday-Friday-Saturday games for the Challenge of France, which will be held in Bois-Guillaume and Rouen.

One other quick editorial note: The pace of posting has been very slow lately, and as mentioned previously, this is due largely to the 45k between Neufchatel and the closest internet cafe. However, the other reason has been the impending CFA exam, which I’ll be taking June 3rd in Paris. Hopefully, after the exam, I’ll have a little bit more time on my hands, but for the next two weeks, I’m pretty jam-packed.

Just a quick update- don’t know if this has made it back to the states, but there is a Huh-yuge Italian soccer scandal going on right now. It’s nuts. Everyone, right on down to the host of a soccer TV show, has been implicated. As my Dad put it, it’s as if the Black Sox Scandal widened to the point that even Kennesaw Mountain Landis had to resign in disgrace.

Now that I’ve returned from Rouen after two days of fattening myself in Paris with my parents, I feel I’m sufficiently recovered to take a stab at describing a fairly gut-wrenching weekend on the baseball field. I probably won’t have time to post the second part until early next week, as internet acces issues once again force the telling of the story to lag behind the story itself. I was hoping that sometime next week, we’d be moving into an apartment in Rouen, but the team is apparently encountering resistance from the owner of the apartment we thought we had sewed up. I don’t really know what to say at this point. It’s just impossible that it could be so difficult to do something so basic as find an apartment for two guys in a major city like Rouen. It’s not like we’re holding out for France’s equivalent of the Dakota. We’ve had four people working on it since the beginning of April, looking for an apartment of any size, any location, literally, anything with enough place for two guys to sleep, and it cannot be done. It’s just inconceivable. I’m ready to light my skin on fire. How could there possibly be such difficulty in matching buyers and sellers of such a common good??? But I digress.

After working all Friday on Eric’s house in Neufchâtel, Matt and I headed into town on Friday night to pick up Mathieu and Quentin, the two INSEP kids on the Woodchucks. No one else on the team could put them up, so we picked them up at the train station and headed back to our country estate. We watched Platoon, and I felt prompted to point out that Oliver Stone had never served a day of his life in Vietnam and was prone to flights of historical revisions and exaggerations for the sake of a compelling story. I did, however, restrain myself from making my standard Vietnam joke to the French, which is to say “hey, thanks for that handoff. Really appreciate that one. Worked out great for us. Swell. Merci.”

We all made the long drive into town on Saturday morning for batting practice at noon, and then Matt and I had to stick around to coach the Bois-Guillaume Mini-Me’s against Les Andelys. The only problem was that we had only four kids show up, and while that may make for a strong infield defense, it doesn’t provide for much else. We forfeited, and made the mistake of agreeing to an informal scrimmage against LA. The first pitch of this ill-conceived practice more or less set the tone, as the LA catcher- lefty, naturally- failed to even slightly redirect a called strike from its unerring path towards his genitals. It never even grazed his glove, and he keeled over, emitting an agonizing “HEEEEEEEEEEINH!” as he collapsed in a fetal position.

Now, the last thing I want to do is make fun of a twelve-year old kid, but suffice it to say that I had never seen anything like this before. In fact, I turned to Matt, recognizing in his face the same double-take; did that really just happen?

Sadly, it had, and the rest of the practice was mercifully called off after about an hour. I caught a ride from one of the softball players to Rouen, and met up with my parents for a nice dinner on the Old Market Square (Place du Vielle Marche), which as I believe I’ve pointed out before, is where Joan of Arc met her end.

In the morning, we took a cab up the hill to Bois-Guillaume to find the team in disarray. Upon leaving Neufchâtel, Matt, Mathieu, and Quentin had somehow unknowingly left the trunk open. Somewhere on the autoroute, Quentin pointed out that he felt a draft, and upon realizing the trunk was open, they took inventory and discovered that Matt’s backpack had fallen out the back somewhere along the way. They pulled into the breakdown lane and started to floor it in reverse, trying to retrace their steps, but along one of the curving Normandy hills, crashed into the dividing barrier, mangling the passenger side door beyond recognition. Let’s just say that the Woodmobile is no longer an amphibious vehicle, as there’s a space about three inches wide between the doorframe and the roof, and the front windshield is cracked and missing a rearview mirror (uh, collateral damage.)

After we got everyone calmed down and took a quick BP, we started Vince in the first game. We gave him a lead, with Aldo and Matthieu both homering to spot him a 6-2 lead in the sixth. However, he tired in the seventh, and we lacked sufficient ballplayers to warm anyone up to replace him. We had exactly nine players for both games, and so we couldn’t really warm anyone up mid-inning, as the eight-pitch limit makes really loosening up very difficult. He gave up a few runs with two outs, and then just missed what would have been a third strike call to get him out of it. Instead, the pitch was called ball four to put guys on first and third, and the next guy jacked the fifth home run of the game out to left center. As the saying goes, it’s a game of inches… and he hit that one about 4,000 inches.

As a side note, I have to count both games this weekend as the worst umpired games I have ever seen, but not from a quality-of-calls standpoint. There were a few controversial safe/out calls, and the strike zone seemed very inconsistent in the second game, but for the most part, the calls were perfectly adequate, commensurate with the level of baseball. However, the umpires absolutely lost control of the game. When Seb doubled down the line in the third, scoring me and Quentin, the umpire and manager of PUC argued so long and so condescendingly at the home plate umpire, I just couldn’t believe they didn’t both get tossed. The manager appeared to be arguing that the ball had hit the ground outside the foul line, and therefore it was impossible for it to come back over the back, which is exactly what it did. Not much of an argument from a “grounded in truth/knowledge of the rules of baseball” standpoint, but it was obvious that he sincerely believed it. More importantly, the umps just sat there and took it as the opposing team heaped abuse on them, call after disputed call. The catcher was doing his best to frame pitches, but took it to a ridiculous extreme, holding the ball for- and I am not exaggerating in the least here- ten to twelve seconds at times. During my fourth at-bat, he actually stood up after two straight outside sliders missed, stepped into the left-handed batters’ box, and turned to the umpire, exclaiming “It’s called a curve ball! It curves over the plate! It starts here and curves over the plate here! Have you never seen a curve ball before???”

Whether or not the calls were correct (I thought they were both outside, but I can’t pretend to be objective when I’m the guy holding the bat), I just couldn’t believe he didn’t get tossed. Back home, you’d get about a third of the way through the word “curve” and you’d be out on your ass. In any case, everyone in the ballpark knew that after not getting the call on two breaking balls away, they would try to come with a fastball in, and while I may not be Manny Ramirez, there’s no reason that, armed with that knowledge, I shouldn’t be able to turn on that and smash it down the line in left for a standup double, which is exactly what I did.

Suddenly down 8-6, we rallied for two in the bottom half to tie it, but we ran out of pitchers. Matthew prefers to start games, so we were saving him for game two, so Quentin came in to try to close it out. Quentin has a good fastball and a knee-buckling curve, but he got rattled by the loud PUC bench, and gave up three in the eighth and one in the ninth, and we lost 12-8. You’ve got to give PUC credit- they rallied down by four runs late, played adequate defense, hit for power, and were very vocal and spirited. In fact, I can’t believe they were winless before the weekend. They had one very good American pitcher, who went to Dartmouth and was a very nice guy, and didn’t give away any at-bats. Tough team.

That said, it was a gut punch of a loss, as we had been completely in control of the game until the seventh, when Vince tired and left a few balls up. It was another one of those games that if I were available to pitch, I feel like the outcome would have been different, but who knows?

I’ll try to post the summary of game 2 some time next week. On one positive note, my elbow is slowly coming around. Late in the second game, I had to come all the way from second base to field a slow roller far to my left after I had broke to cover second on a hit-and-run, and I had to zing it to get a quick runner at first. It was pretty much as hard as I can throw without hurting my elbow, and it didn’t bother me. Last night at practice, I threw about 20 balls with an almost normal (ie non-dart-like) motion, and didn’t experience any pain. It’s coming, but slowly, and the ice/running/advil combo will continue until I can hump it up there on the mound again, so please, to my friends back home, you can stop sending me articles about Thomas Juan surgery.

It was kind of a tough weekend in HBWT land. We dropped two to PUC, two, ahem, spirited games. Frankly, I was shocked that those guys had yet to win a game. They played reasonably solid defense, and had a decent lineup, with power in the 1-6 spots. We should have won them both, and instead we lost them both, and the agonies of recalling what might have been have made it painful to type up a summary. I’ll get over it by tomorrow, and the catharsis will hopefully help me get a post up by Thursday or so. In the meantime, I’ll post a few pictures of the Bois-Guillaume home field.

There’s a nice clubhouse just outside the field, which is part of a larger athletic facility for the town’s other clubs.

Here you can see the right field fence:

And here you get a good luck at the unique square infield. Financial constraints forced the town to reduce the square footage of the dirt pattern on the infield, so instead of the typical gentle arc from first to third, it’s perfectly squared off, with dirt only on the actual basepaths. Needless to say, I had never seen anything like this before I came to France. It’s a very slow infield, and it plays even slower when the frequent Normandy rain leaves it wet on Sunday mornings; basically, you have to charge just about everything. The square basepaths result in not one but two “lips” (where the grass meets the dirt), so funny hops abound, although I feel that some of our players doth protest too much in that respect. For the most part, it’s a good infield, with the best, most comfortable (and highest- think St. Louis, 1967) mound I’ve seen in France.

As you can see, there’s a lot of foul territory, and it cost us on Sunday. It’s sort of like Oakland in that respect, with the primary difference being a general absence of pipe-fitters and welders wearing silver and black ready to throw down because someone wore a Mariner’s jersey into the upper deck.

More on Sunday’s tragedies later this week…

Check out the article in the Washington Post on another crazy baseball-playin’ Meagher!

The two-hour drive to St. Lo required Matt and I to get up before 6 AM on Sunday in order to make the long drive into town from Neufchâtel to meet up with the rest of the team. Just on a side note, the long commute is starting to really drive us nuts, and finding a suitable apartment in town has replaced “finding a decent burrito” as my highest priority.

I hopped in the back of Rafael’s car, and slept most of the way while listening to strains of French hip-hop. As I told Matthieu, the team’s resident hip-hopper, the French are do a lot of things well, like wine, cheese, and bread, but rap is not one of them.

St. Lo is on the border with Bretagne, just at the far end of Normandy. The team is called the Jimmer’s, and despite my repeated inquests, no one could tell me what a Jimmer was, exactly. “It’s a mascot,” one St. Lo ballplayer told me. Well, no kidding. Someone else though it was a bear, but that might have been lost in translation, and the mystery remains unsolved.

We arrived at St. Lo around 9:15, where I found arguably the best baseball field I have seen in France. They had a legitimate full infield, groomed and appropriately portioned. The outfield was well cared for, and among the larger I had seen (110m down the line in left, or about 361 feet.) Here are some pictures below:

In the first game, they threw their manager, a 40-year old Dominican guy with a similar appearance and demeanor as Jose Mesa, while we countered with Vince, who’s French and all of 19. Vince is a lefty with a rubber arm and a fastball that runs off the plate, and he settled down after giving up two runs in the first. He was in and out of trouble all day, but managed to get a few double plays when he needed them and generally keep the ball down, giving up only one truly hard hit ball that I remember all day. It was, incidentally, my first opportunity to make a truly great defensive play in France, a line shot two steps to my right that I dove for but couldn’t quite snare. I layed out, completely horizontal, and got a glove on it, but just couldn’t pull it in. Too bad. It would have been a highlight reel play, but I feel like since I got a glove on it, I should have had it, and it would have saved a run, not to mention a sore right shoulder.

We found ourselves down 4-0 at the end of the seventh, and I turned to Rafael and told him that if we didn’t score at least one run in the eighth, he would go in to replace me. Rafael is Venezuelan, and therefore as a foreigner, he cannot be on the field as the same time as both Matthew and I, so I’ll usually yank myself with an inning or two left or start him in the second game so as to get him his share of AB’s. However, we rallied in the seventh, plating two on three consecutive hits and a wild pitch. I came up with one out and men on second and third, down 4-2.

My efforts to “try easy” had thus far been largely unsuccessful, as I had popped up on a breaking ball up out of the zone in the second and suffered my first French strikeout
(“un ka”) in the fifth, swinging through a slider on 1-2. I actually think I got a piece of it, as the catcher dropped it at his feet, and having to check the runner at second, hesitated long enough that I was able to come barreling through first safely before he could throw me out. I had then dropped a dying quail over the first baseman’s head for an embarrassing 110-foot hit in the seventh, which of course becomes a laser beam line drive to center in “le scorebook.”

In any case, I was in the perfect situation for my newly mellow hitting philosophy, just looking for a ball up that I could elevate for an easy fly ball to right center to score the run at third. Instead, I lashed a line drive into right, scoring one run. The relay went over the first baseman’s head- which is to say, I thought it went over the first baseman’s head, so I took a wide turn at first, not realizing that it had in fact gone over the second baseman’s head directly to the first baseman, so I was caught in no-man’s land. I wish I could say I did it intentionally in order to get into a rundown and score the other runner, who had held up at third, but in fact it was just a dumb misread on my part that worked out only because I managed to stay in the pickle long enough to score that second runner, tying the game at 4. It was reassuring. No matter how badly I can be playing, I always feel like I’m going to get the hit to tie it in that kind of situation. I could be 0-5 with 5 K’s, and I’ll still feel like I’m going to drop in a base hit when it’s close and late. (Whether I actually do is another question, but it’s nice to have that confidence.)

We failed to score in our half, and then I nearly blew the game on a popup to my left, over the first baseman’s head. There wasn’t a lot of wind, but I didn’t read it well, and had to basket catch it on my left, the ball nearly popping out for what would have been a most embarrassing (and critical) error. Fortunately, I held on for the first out, later explaining to my teammates that it was “une cone de glace” (“ice cream cone”).

We had our 3-4-5 hitters up in the top of the tenth, and I thought we would score for sure, but Matt hit a long fly ball to right and Seb popped up. When I came up with two outs, I still figured we had a chance if I could play the hero, maybe sneak another base hit or walk, steal second, and then go ahead on a base hit, maybe crashing the catcher if necessary. I turned on a fastball in on the hands for a solid line drive into left field, and then stole second on the first pitch, everything seemingly going to plan. Quentin, one of our INSEP kids, then nearly made it all come true, grounding a ball in the hole between short and third as I came sprinting past the third baseman, who unfortunately made an incredible diving stop. He jumped to his feet and threw to first just in time to get Quentin. It was really a hell of a play, even if the replays later showed that Quentin was safe. (French instant replay consists of me saying to Quentin “Hey, you looked safe at first. Were you safe?” and him replying “Oui.”)

In the bottom half, Vince issued one of only five walks all day to a player that had been with Bois-Guillaume last year, and the runner promptly stole second with one out. He tagged and took third on a sac fly to center, bringing up one of the St. Lo’s youngest players. On 1-2, strangely, they put on what appeared to be the rare hit-and-run with two strikes, two outs, and a man on third. Our catcher called for a pickoff to check the runner at third, and Vince complied.

On the next pitch, disaster struck. The runner broke early from third, well before Vince had started his motion from the stretch. All Vince had to do was step off and throw a batting practice fastball to the catcher and we’d be out of the inning. Shoot, that’s the easiest play in baseball. In fact, it’s so easy that I recommend you try it some time. Just make sure that you do it in the tenth inning with a running bearing down on home plate, after you’ve pitched 9 2/3 under the hot Normandy sun, working out of jams in almost every inning, facing 44 hitters and throwing about 160 pitches. Do all of that, and you’ll see just exactly how “easy” a play it is.

After one of the most courageous pitching performances I’ve ever seen, Vince skipped a 59-footer, Matthieu couldn’t handle it, and we lost 5-4.

It’s really a shame. In any loss like that, you can usually go back and look at the missed opportunities that could have changed the game, and this one in particular was full of them. If I hang onto that line drive, or Vince makes a better throw to the catcher, or we don’t hit into two killer line-drive double plays earlier in the game, we come out on top. If Quentin is called safe, or his ground ball goes about six inches to the right, and I come rocketing around third eager to make Rose/Fosse look like a fender bender in a Safeway parking lot, and we bring in Matthew to close out the bottom half… It just kills you to think about it, and it kills you even more to remember that we again had the bases loaded with no outs and failed to score on account of a rare unassisted double play by the third baseman. That makes three times this year we’ve had the bases full of Woodchucks with nobody out, which is almost inconceivable. The Tangotiger run expectancy matrix shows that the expected run value in that situation should be about 2.4 in the major leagues, and it’s doubtlessly much higher in a league with fewer double plays like the elite league in France. It also shows that the probability of scoring at least one run- again, in a league where the defenses are much more crisp- is 87.2%, meaning that the odds of managing not to score in that situation three consecutive times is approximately 0.21%. In our league, I’d guess it’s probably half that, or about one in one-thousand. The mind reels.

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a hundred times, and you can make it a hundred and one as of Sunday: when two evenly-matched teams play a game like that in the first game of a doubleheader, the loser always has a hard time responding in game two. We went down two runs early, but unlike game one, couldn’t respond with any kind of comeback. As Rafael had sat the entire first game (not to mention both similarly tight games in Montpelier, after a full day of travel to get there), I started him in right in the second game. In the sixth inning, he broke up their Venezuelan pitcher’s perfect game (!) with a soft line drive just over the second baseman’s glove. We rallied for two runs, but couldn’t come any closer, losing 11-2 in a game that ended in the most hellacious rain storm in which I have ever played baseball. We had stopped for a rain delay after the eight with us down by nine, but when we restarted during a brief moment of respite, the rain came pouring down immediately. I will give this to the French; they play through conditions that you would never see teams play in back home, reasoning that if they stopped for rain, they would never get to play, particularly in Normandy. For those last three outs in the ninth, it was raining so hard that the entire team was just relieved when the final hitter struck out, content to get out from under the deluge and get out of Dodge.

In my only at-bat in the second game, I took the very first pitch off the calf for a HBP, and limped to first seeing stars. It caught me just under the knee, and it hurt. On the second pitch, I tried to steal second, and got thrown out for the first time in France, ending the seventh inning. It was a strange play. The throw was up the line a bit, and the second baseman took a half step towards first and extended his glove at the precise second that I went into a headfirst slide. His glove hand, ball inside, jammed directly into my shoulder as I launched myself forward, and he shrieked in pain, collapsing in agony on the infield dirt. I was afraid he might have broken the wrist, but he later returned to finish the game after being helped off the field.

If you’re wondering why I was stealing down, at that point, five runs in the seventh, it’s just because I didn’t think they could get me, and I was still pissed off that I had gotten plunked. I waited a pitch to try to get some life back in my legs, but maybe I’m just not as fast as I think I am, especially after getting drilled in the calf.

Some more pics from Game 2:

All in all, a disappointing weekend, but one from which we have to rebound. We play against PUC at home on Sunday, and my parents will be in town visiting, so we better win them both. My elbow is feeling slightly better, but not enough to throw with any authority, so I’m trying to line up a time to see a specialist at INSEP next week.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this brief editorial note, which is that, as the recent Boston globe article pointed out, I will be attending MIT’s Sloan School in the fall. I officially accepted their offer this morning. As I have written here previously, the whole grad school application process was not something I felt merited inclusion in this blog, but it has certainly occupied a great deal of my time and energy on the side, even forcing me to shave my ridiculous (and widely appreciated) moustache in March for an interview with the MIT admissions director in Paris. I mention it here only because it reminds me just how ridiculous that last week was in Savigny. On Saturday, I got fired. On Sunday, I threw a no-hitter*. On Tuesday, I was accepted to MIT, and on Thursday, I was hired by the Woodchucks. Now, compared to all the weeks I worked in investment banking, where I occasionally went a few months without a day off, each week blurring into the next… well, that, my friends, is a week that I will remember vividly until the day I die.

Hugs and handpounds, baby, I’m coming home!

Check out the pub that HBWT got in the Boston Globe!

p.s. a few minor inaccuracies but overall very cool!

A fling with French baseball
Banker abandoned job to play game he loves
By Chris Forsberg, Globe Correspondent | May 7, 2006

The irony that he had quit a lucrative job to move 6,000 miles away, then was fired from a job that paid less than minimum wage, wasn’t lost on Evan Meagher. But this was his dream.

Well, maybe not exactly.

About two months ago, Meagher, a Reading native and Stanford University graduate, touched down in Paris to play professional baseball for the Savigny-Sur-Orge Lions of the French Baseball Federation, leaving behind his job as an investment banking analyst in San Francisco.

The 26-year-old Meagher was to be paid 300 euros (roughly $378) per month to both play and coach Savigny’s thriving baseball program, which fielded an elite team that had won the French national title in five of the past eight seasons.

Despite a 2-0 start, Meagher was summoned by the board of directors on April 1 and relieved of his duties. Slowed by injuries, Meagher hadn’t lived up to what the Lions had been expecting as a player. He later joked that they were expecting Pedro Martinez circa 1999 and received David McCarty circa 2004.

‘’I remember coming home to my girlfriend, who was visiting at the time, and saying, ‘I got fired. This is the most disappointing thing that has ever happened to me,’ ” Meagher recalled in a telephone interview last week while practicing with his new team, the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks. ‘’But when you think about it, I got fired by a French baseball team. Let’s step back and assess just how ridiculous that is. Take away the human tragedy of it all and it’s downright hilarious.”

The episode made for great fodder for the ‘’Have Bat Will Travel” blog Meagher is keeping to chronicle his adventures (www.havebatwilltravel.com). But Meagher didn’t go to Europe to write, he went to play baseball. So he soon found himself hooking up with a new team.

In a lame-duck performance with Savigny, Meagher fired a five-inning, mercy-rule-shortened no-hitter against Bois-Guillaume, which soon recruited him to its struggling squad. (If the Lions are the New York Yankees of French baseball, the Woodchucks are the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.)

Over the next three months, Meagher will prepare Bois-Guillaume for the postseason tournament, in which the Woodchucks will be fighting simply to remain in the nation’s elite division. The playoffs determine which teams drop to the second division and which teams vault to the elite division.

Meagher is scheduled to return stateside in August to start an MBA program at MIT, but he plans to commute to France on the weekends to compete for the Woodchucks as a pitcher and third baseman and pen the final chapter of a whirlwind year.

‘’At the height of the story, when things can’t get any more ridiculous or absurd or surreal, I’ll be commuting to Rouen from Cambridge,” Meagher said with a laugh. ‘’This was my dream.”

A dream that got concocted a half-decade ago while Meagher was finishing up his senior year at Stanford. Chatting with some friends about his unclear future, it came to his attention that France had pro development leagues where the talent wasn’t quite as fierce as in the States.

The idea slipped to the back of his mind after Meagher found a job in investment banking in San Francisco shortly after graduation. But he found himself working 100-hour weeks, and his only enjoyment came from a weekend baseball league.

On a trip home, Meagher’s mother, Judythe, noticed how the job had worn him down.

‘’I drove him to this business meeting, and there was a limo waiting for him,” said Judythe, who lives in Reading. ‘’He said to me, ‘I love my job, but I hate my life.’ Evan’s a bit of a Renaissance man, and he just didn’t have a chance to do all the things he loves.”

Music is one of his hobbies, and Meagher plays a mean harmonica, or ‘’blues harp,” as he calls it. But baseball is his true passion, and while he hadn’t played since his junior year at Belmont Hill, he decided to pursue what once seemed like a pipe dream.

What did his mother think about it?

‘’I used to practice law, but now I’m an artist,” said Judythe. ‘’I'm big on following dreams. I was actually relieved that he was going to leave that job. . . . My view was that, hopefully, some day he’s going to be married, have children, and have a mortgage, so I was happy that he was going to pursue his dream while he could.”

After all, Meagher had nothing to lose. He had saved enough money working overtime to fund his trip and soon began working out with strength and conditioning coach Andrew Wun at Velocity Sports Performance in California to prepare for his pro debut.

Soon he had a batting cage installed at his sprawling apartment outside of San Francisco. Meagher does everything at full speed. His teammates on the Bay Area Reds of the adult baseball league can confirm that.

Meagher ‘’stole home numerous times while with the Reds. . . . It was an awesome sight seeing him barrel home, diving headfirst, causing a Charlie Brown dust pile,” said manager Ben Ferreira. ‘’And when the dust settled, Ev was safely across the base, leaving the other team scratching their heads. . . . He definitely sparked the Reds with his enthusiasm, energy, and love for the game.”

Scott Siegler was always impressed with Meagher’s baseball knowledge. Meagher crafts his own bats and has been known to create his own baseball lexicon.

‘’Ev oozes baseball,” said Siegler, a teammate with the Reds. ‘’He knows all of the traditional jargon and never fails to call a home run anything but a home run. He usually finds the existing phrases either too hackneyed, too unimaginative, or insufficiently descriptive, so he is constantly spouting off new terms on the fly” — things like ‘’Jimmy-Jack” instead of ‘’tater” or ‘’dinger” as a nickname for home run and ‘’Bingle” for an RBI single.

Bring up baseball and Meagher and the stories flow like wine in France. From the one about him trying to walk onto the baseball team at Stanford (a letter to the school president helped Meagher get a tryout after the gruff baseball coach had, in so many words, told Meagher he didn’t have time for players who hadn’t been recruited by Major League scouts), to his plans for the future ('’He’s going to buy the Dodgers and bring them back to Brooklyn,” said Meagher’s father, Kieran).

For now, he’s living his first dream of playing professional baseball.

‘’I was in the supermarket the other day and I was telling a friend about what Evan’s doing over there,” said his mother. ‘’The cashier just stopped what she was doing and said, ‘Your son is living every person’s dream.’ And he really is.”

The apartment search continues, as the place we found on Tuesday wanted an unreasonable four months deposit plus one month’s agency fee… It blows my mind how difficult it is to find a place to live in Rouen. I feel like back home, even in the SF housing boom, you just looked online, called up a dozen places, went to see five, and chose one, and it’s done and over with within a day’s time. Here, it’s like we’re searching for the lost city of gold.

My elbow remains tender, which is to say it hurts only when I try to accelerate a baseball forward. This is discouraging, but the worst thing to do would be to come back too early only to make matters worse. In the meantime, I’ll be icing, running, and taking my anti-inflammatories, and hoping for the best. The good news is that my bat is coming around. I feel like I’ve been a little too tense at the plate lately, trying to do too much. A friend back home gave me the advice to “try easy,” so in BP I tried relaxing a little bit and just trying to let the bat do the work. In a situational hitting drill, where I was just trying to elevate the ball a little to score a runner from third with less than two out, I started hitting some pretty good shots, including one that scraped the wall in left and another that crashed through the trees in left center. Whether I can carry that relaxation into a game situation remains to be seen, but we’ll see. This Sunday we travel to St. Lo, the team that earned promotion to the elite division last year by winning the second division. Typically you’d expect that such a team would be a doormat, particularly given the fact that this is their first year playing with wood bats, but they took both Rouen and Savigny to 10 innings before falling, so they can’t be too bad.

Last Monday Matt, Eric, and I went to Dieppe, the site of the first Canadian/English raid on German-controlled France in 1942. It was one of those unique opportunities, as Eric, a French Canadian fluent in both English and French, wrote his PhD on the Dieppe raid, and in so doing managed to be the first historian to get access to and compare the recently declassified English and French files on the raid. Moreover, his unit in the Canadian military participated in the raid, so he had unique access to internal documents. Essentially, we were visiting this enormously important WWII battle site with possibly the most qualified person in the world as our tour guide, sort of like getting a lecture on macroeconomics from Alan Greenspan. The raid was more or less a total disaster, and Eric’s thesis was that it was due largely to failed reconnaissance. Apparently the Germans got wind of the raid and instead of replacing the division on watch there according to a normal rotation, they kept them in Dieppe and doubled up with the new division that would usually take their place. In the picture below, you can see the main landing point, one of six beaches on which the Candian forces landed. Of the 6,000 who landed on the beach on the far left, six- yes, 6, a basketball team and a sub- made it to the church, the tallest building on the far right.

We then checked out two nearby German Bunkers that were built after the ‘42 raid. I can’t imagine a year or two spent inside one of these things, waiting for the inevitable allied assault.

After the bunker, Eric took us to the Canadian cemetery that commemorates the raid. Check out the inscription on the last picture. If you can look at something like that and not be moved, you’re a harder man than I.

Finally, we headed home, but not before stopping at an enormous castle just outside town. Unfortunately, it’s sealed off to the public on account of safety, but we walked around the moat and busted drawbridge.

More updates next week as we’ll hopefully be at an apartment in Rouen!

Editor’s Note: Cheers to Marques Colston, AKA The Quiet Storm, who was drafted 252nd by the New Orleans Saints. May his first months as a professional proceed more smoothly than my own, may he prove to be the Lynn Swann to Reggie Bush’s Franco Harris, and may I one day turn to my son some twenty years hence and say “see that guy, #81, who just scored the touchdown? Yeah. Your old man was faster than him for about a week…”

No real update today, as Matt and I are busy trying to find an apartment in Rouen. You’d think we were looking for the holy grail, it’s so difficult. Apparently, the internet is not so popular for apartment hunting in France, as searching on Google for “Rouen Appartements” (in both French and English) pulls up this blog. Hmmm. We just need to find an apartment in town, because Matt and I are about ready to blow our brains out with the 40km drive (and subsequent 8 euros in petrol costs) from Neufchatel just to work out, practice, or get online.

Cheers,

Ev

The past week has been pretty quiet. For the most part, I’ve been laying low, trying to ice my elbow whenever possible and stay on the schedule of anti-inflammatories prescribed by the doctor I saw, who, incidentally, is both a chiropractor and a physician.

The Australian and I have spent a few days working on Eric’s new house, which is, to put it lightly, a pretty big project. The house is about a hundred years old, and he’s on an incredibly ambitious schedule to get it ready for move-in by September 1st. We started out by taking down an upper floor with shovels and crow bars on a jobsite that would make OSHA blush. We then performed a major excavation task, cracking through a layer of tile and then digging down 25cm from the original level so as to make room for insulation and the heated floors that are popular in France. It’s hard, backbreaking work, but it doesn’t aggravate my elbow at all, and the company is good. Incidentally, I’m pretty sure this is how Manny and Ortiz train together in the Dominican in the off-season. When it’s not on the fritz, I’ll put my Ipod out with a little mini-speaker and we’ll pass the day swinging shovels in Normandy, listening to the Meters or Credence Clearwater Revival. By the end of the day, we’ll crack a few cold beers and shoot the breeze. It’s like the Woodchucks’ equivalent of re-tarring the roof at Shawshank.

Here are a few pics:

Editor’s Note: Hey, sorry for the long layoff between posts. The problem, as you know by now, is that the closest internet access is 40km away, and we’re looking for an apartment where we can hook it up permanently. Till then, once a week posting is probably all I can hope for. Sorry!

Two French baseball teams meet on a field in Normandy for a doubleheader and do the exact same thing: win one, lose one. One is thrilled with the result, the other, furious. Guess which team I play for?

La Guerche came into town hoping to take both games. Against powerhouses like Senart, Savigny, and Rouen, their strategy is to match Piquet up against the weaker of the two starters, and hope it’s enough to steal a split. Against the Woodchucks, they assume they’ll win game one with Piquet, and try to get their junkballer righty to steal the second one. For our part, Bois-Guillaume looks at the Hawks as a team that they can beat with a few breaks, even with Piquet on the mound, because their lineup lacks the top-to-bottom strength to put a game quickly out of reach. A few bounces here or there, and who knows?

We hopped up early on Piquet, taking a 1-0 lead on a close play at the plate, our young catcher Matthieu scoring from second on a ground ball base hit to the left side. With Vincent gone for the weekend, we had a dearth of arms available in the pen, and so had no choice but to ride Quentin, our young righty with the killer curveball, for a few innings longer than we would have preferred. He gave us five solid innings, ultimately tiring and losing his control, forcing us to go to Seb and then Eric. However, the story of the first game was Piquet, who recovered from an early deficit to blank us the rest of the way.

I had a hard time sleeping on Saturday night, partially due to the erratic sleep schedule I had maintained the week before, and partially because I was so fired up for the game. In retrospect, busting two bats (and failing to pitch on account of a sore arm) against La Guerche basically led to my dismissal in Savigny, so I felt extra motivation to go out and do the best I could against the Hawks. My first at-bat was probably my best, as Piquet quickly got ahead 0-2 before trying to paint the corners. I battled him for eight or nine pitches, fouling off several breaking balls and a fastball down and in while taking a few balls away. While I doubt he recognized me as the American who shattered two bats against him on Opening Day, he almost certainly saw that I was crowding the plate, and tried to bust me inside with a fastball inside on 3-2. He missed by about six inches, and I took the heater off the bicep without moving, jogging to first with the catcalls of the Reds (“DON’T RUB IT!”) ringing in my ears.

Now, that ball was off the plate, and it certainly would have been ball four, so you might be wondering why I didn’t just get out of the way and take the walk. First off, it’s tough to overcome that instinct, which is to say, if you can wear a ball and get yourself on base, you do it. Second of all, I’d almost rather the HBP. If I’m going to get first base, I’d prefer to feel that I’d earned it, the hard way, if necessary.

In the third, I grounded sharply to the second baseman. Those kinds of at-bats are the most frustrating, because it’s hard to figure out what you did wrong, and therefore, how to fix it. I got ahead in the count, saw a good pitch to hit, a fastball away, and put a good swing on it, but instead of the slashed double in the gap I envisioned in my mind’s eye, I beat the ball into the dirt. You can reassure yourself all you want with the fact that difference between the two is perhaps a quarter of an inch on a 5-ounce sphere hurtling towards you at 85 miles per hour, but it’s frustrating all the same.

With two outs and men on first and second in the fifth, I saw practically the same pitch, maybe a little further up in the zone, and slapped it into right on a line for a base hit. Sadly, our catcher was the runner on second, and I hit it hard enough that he was unable to score from second.

Things got interestingly briefly in the seventh, as I found myself up with no one out and two men on. Matthew had crushed a double over the centerfielder’s head, and Seb had walked just as it began raining. I approached the plate as the heavens opened, and the umpire signaled for a rain delay, but not before I noticed that the third baseman was playing me deep at third. I decided to try to drop one down even before Matthew came to me and suggested I do the same. Play resumed twenty minutes later as the Normandy showers moved on. On the first pitch, I laid a perfect bunt down the third base line, beating it to first without a throw for my second base hit of the day.

They say that good pitchers are able to reach back and find a little more with runners on base, and I have to give Piquet credit, he did just that with the bases juiced and nobody out in a 4-1 game. He struck out our six, seven, and eight hitters, all looking, to eliminate the threat, and that was pretty much all she wrote. The difference in the game was that with runners in scoring position, La Guerche had made us pay, and we couldn’t return the favor. The seventh inning marked the second time in two weeks that we had loaded the bases with no outs. The results: 6 batters, 5 strikeouts, one groundout, zero runs. It’s like someone called the 2000 Red Sox and ordered up the French equivalent of Darren Lewis, Jeff Frye, and Donnie Sadler, as worse situational hitting simply could not be imagined. Bottom line, we’ve got to put the ball in play in that situation, and you’ve got to tip your hat to Piquet for preventing us from doing just that.

In the ninth, I came up with Seb on second and one out, and hit my hardest ball of the day to that point, a crushed line drive that sadly turned out to be an atom ball, which is to say that I hit it right at’em, “em” being the second baseman. He appeared to trap the sinking liner, but immediately threw to second, doubling Seb off to end the game. As I jogged back, dejected, to the dugout, I asked the umpire with as much politeness as I could muster, “you are certain that he caught that on the fly?”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know it looked close, but he had his glove underneath, on the ground. It was a very pretty play, but yes, he caught it.”

“Look,” I replied. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s never pretty if I’m the one who hit it.”

Unfortunately, I started the second game off the same way, crushing a hanging slider directly at the second baseman for my second L4 of the day.

“Buzzard luck,” I shouted upon arriving at the dugout, laughing just to keep from crying. “BUZZARD LUCK!!!”

Needless to say, this expression does not translate well to French.

After the 6-1 loss, the Woodchucks gathered on the grass behind the dugout, this time the third base dugout, as Matthew had declared that every team always used the third base dugout as their home dugout.

“Uh, not at Fenway, they don’t.”

Must be an Australian thing.

Between games back home, guys usually lunch on crude sandwiches or fruit, but in France, they often have full lunches prepared by their wives or girlfriends. A full meal, including an éclair or chocolate croissant for dessert, is not uncommon. For my part, I had a protein shake. Point, France. As we gathered for the second game, I reiterated what I had said that morning. “We were in that game, we just didn’t take advantage of opportunities. Game two will be different. Today, we play to win.”

Things started poorly, as Matthieu, moved from behind the plate to the mound, had trouble throwing strikes and had poor luck with a few ground balls that found holes or got kicked around. He almost got out of it in the first, but with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-2 count, the runners were running on the pitch. He uncorked a wild one, and between his tardiness in covering the plate and Seb’s inability to corral it quickly at the backstop, the runner from second scored as well. I don’t want to dwell on it, but I’ve never seen that happen at any level of baseball, and I hope I never see it again.

Walks plagued us in the second again, as Matthieu again found the bases loaded with two outs. Unfortunately, we couldn’t close them out, and two base hits later, we found ourselves down 5-0 with a potentially long day ahead of us. We put him on a short leash in the third, and with one out and two runners on base via walks, we decided to bring in the Australian.

It’s a funny thing, momentum. When you’re playing a baseball game and the momentum shifts, it’s so palpable, even the spectators who don’t understand the game at all can feel it. Matt came in throwing gas, and right away the mood changed. Suddenly, the game was not a question of how much the Hawks could pour it on us, but whether they could hold on to a 5-run lead that looked increasingly tenuous. We scored two in the fourth on a couple of walks and an error, and then two more in the fifth when Aldo, our leadoff hitter and left-fielder, bailed me out after a terrible squeeze call. With the bases juiced and no one out, I was afraid of our #9 hitter pulling a repeat of our struggles against Piquet, so I called for a bunt, and stuck with it even after he fouled one off. He missed the second one on a pitch away, and our runner was dead meat at the plate. Given the fact that our #9 hitter rarely makes it to practice and probably couldn’t be relied upon to put the ball in play under pressure, it was a dumb, dumb, stupid, dumb call on my part, and we only got away with it because Aldo followed it up with a double to the left center gap, scoring two. With two outs and a man on third, I tried to get cute by dropping down another bunt, but didn’t get it far enough down the line, and I was out by a half step. It was another bad decision on my part; while it would have worked if I had just got it down the line further, the second pitcher wasn’t as tough as Piquet, and I should have been swinging away, trying to find a ball I could drive. In retrospect, the two straight hard hit balls with nothing to show for it had gotten in my head, and my frustration caused me to try to get a little too fancy.

Another funny thing happened that inning as well. Almost out of nowhere, the second base umpire- who is a pretty good guy despite his tendency to show up wearing a Yankees’ hat- stopped play and tossed Piquet out of the game from his shortstop position. Apparently, Piquet had said something in English to Matthew at second complaining about the umpires calls, sprinkled liberally with a few f-bombs describing his evaluation of their efforts thus far. He thought he could get away with it, because most of the umpires speak only baseball English, but this one understood him perfectly. The same umpire had been behind the plate in the first game, when he had tolerated several complaints about balls and strikes from Piquet. This last comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Piquet was unceremoniously tossed. The lesson, as I explained to the rest of the Woodchucks: You’ve always got to just assume that the umpires speak French, English, Mandarin Chinese, and Esperanto, and so you’re going to get caught if you cuss them out in any language.

In the sixth, Matt cracked another double, and Seb reached on a walk to bring me up with nobody out. I was trying to hit the ball to the right side to advance them into scoring position, and I did with a soft groundball to the second baseman. While I technically got the job done, I- and more importantly, the team- expect a little bit more out of myself in that situation, and I would have liked to put a more aggressive swing on it than the defensive, inside-out number I pulled on the inside fastball.

Fortunately, they both scored on a sac fly and a passed ball, and we found ourselves with our first lead of the game. However, Matt was tiring, and the inning previous, had said that he only had one left in him. After a quick sixth, he decided to go one more, and it was like that for the rest of the game. While Eric has frequently done a great job of coming in to stop the bleeding when we had no other options, he knew, we knew, and the Hawks knew that they would be right back in the game if we pulled Matthew. In one of the gutsier performances I can remember, Matt kept pulling it out of him, one inning after another, striking out about 10 in 6 2/3 scoreless. His velocity dipped in the eighth, but after surrendering his only base hit of the game in the ninth, he got the final outs on a K looking and a groundout to the shortstop, and the Woodchucks had their first legitimate victory of the season.

It’s been a fairly hectic week, which has prevented me from getting in to Rouen to post at the cyber café where Matthew and I are now regulars. I still haven’t signed up for internet access at home, because we’re hoping to move out of our place out in Neufchatel. The 40km drive each way has led to exorbitant gas expenses (107€ in a week and a half), and the one-bedroom apartment is spacious for a single guy or a couple, but inadequate for two grown men. We’ve been looking for something a little closer to Bois-Guillaume, but in the meantime, my only access to the web comes in our periodic trips into Rouen.

On Wednesday, we took Le Woodmobile into Bois-Guillaume to work out at the team’s gym, in an effort to counteract the dietary effects of too many pain au chocolate’s. We then held practice at 6:30, doing our best to run an efficient training session despite the custom in Bois-Guillaume of having the baseball and softball team practice at the same time. Apparently, last year this led invariably led to “baseball practice” consisting of merely playing softball, which in retrospect, might have had something to do with the striking disparity between the two teams’ win-loss records (baseball won three games, while I think the softball team won their league). Going forward, we’re lobbying to re-arrange the two practices for separate nights.

After practices on Wednesday, the team usually goes out for a kebab and a beer. Kebabs are sort of the French equivalent of burrito joints; ubiquitous, fast, cheap, greasy spoons that aren’t particularly healthy. We then proceeded to our weekly hangout, the Underground Pub, as it’s one of few establishments in Rouen that carry Beamish Irish Stout, a favorite of Sylvain’s. After a few beers, we decided to head downstairs to check out the karaoke scene on the lower level.

I’ve always prided myself on being a good teammate in baseball, which can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it means staying late to help another player work on some aspect of his game. Sometimes it means being willing to sacrifice yourself to move a runner over. And sometimes it means playing wingman for several of the wee, tiny hours of the morning in the nightclubs of Rouen while one of your teammates chats up a couple of Mexican foreign exchange students studying business at the local university (which may or may not be akin to taking a semester of courses in Feminist Studies at the Citadel).

After jumping on that grenade- or should I say, granada- for the benefit of a fellow Woodchuck, we headed back to Neufchatel in the early morning to catch a few hours of sleep before team batting practice at 4:00 and my doctor’s appointment at 6:00.

Eric and I headed to the team’s doctor, a chiropractor on the edge of Rouen. He thought that the inflammation in my elbow had been caused by me favoring my shoulder (quite possible), and that it wasn’t serious but could be addressed by anti-inflammatories and rest. He cracked my back twice, gave me the prescription, and that was that. I’ve always been more than a little bit suspicious of chiropractors- once gleefully describing them as “quacks and charlatans” to a dismayed attorney for the plaintiff, resulting in my dismissal from jury duty- but this guy seemed to know what he was doing, and hopefully the pills (not to mention next week off) will help my elbow return to form.

I then returned to town to meet up with my friends Alex and Jools, who had taken the train in from Paris that morning while on vacation from their teaching jobs north of London. It’s funny to think that my life has gotten bizarre to the point that drinking Normandy cider with two English people at a sidewalk café in Rouen could actually make me feel more at home. While everyone in Bois-Guillaume has been incredibly welcoming and friendly, it’s always nice to see some familiar faces and relax for an evening, speaking comfortably in English without having to worry that a misconjugated verb could leave your host horribly offended.

I stayed in Rouen on Thursday night with Alex and Jools before bidding them goodbye on Friday morning. Matthew and I then spent Friday afternoon helping Eric with his new house. He’s recently purchased a ramshackle turn-of-the-century brick house on a beautiful lot on the outskirts of Neufchâtel, and we’ll be working there occasionally as a way to pull down a few extra Euros and help him maintain an aggressive timetable that has his family moving in on September 1st. I’ll post more about the not insignificant project later, but it felt good to get out in the sun and swing a crow bar around for a few hours before returning home to catch up on some missed sleep.

It’s Saturday morning and we’re about to head to the field for some batting practice. Tomorrow we host La Guerche, and it’s the type of weekend where we should be looking to take at least one game. The Hawks have got one very strong pitcher in Piquet, but if we play aggressive, fundamental baseball and don’t beat ourselves with walks and errors, we should hopefully be able to manage at least a split. I’m also excited about facing Piquet again. If you remember, the first time I faced him, I went 1-3 with a walk, but he pretty much mopped the floor with me and the shards of my two broken bats, so I’m looking forward to hopefully getting the better of him this time. It’s likely that I won’t update until Tuesday, as we’re planning on heading to the D-Day beaches on Monday to see the sights there.

What with my recent relocation, there are a lot of new characters in the Have Bat, Will Travel story. There’s Matthew, the hard-throwing Australian who is returning for his second year with the Woodchucks despite speaking hardly a word of French. There’s Eric, the former club president who bravely takes the mound periodically when we need someone to step in and stop the bleeding. There’s Clement, the student working with the club who hopes that his skills as an expert fencer will help ease his transition to the game of baseball, Seb, the streetwise shortstop who speaks excellent English on account of having played two seasons at the College of Marin just across the bridge from San Francisco, and others too numerous to name. All in all, I cannot complain, as without exception, everyone in Bois-Guillaume has been exceptionally friendly and welcoming. However, of all the new characters, there’s one in particular that I hold dearest: My new car. Or should I say, the car that has newly arrived in my life, but not upon the roads of France, as it appears to have been banging around the roads of Normandy since the Reagan administration, and the years have not been kind. Let me explain.

As I’ve said, Bois-Guillaume is a suburb of Rouen, about ten minutes’ drive from the city center. However, the apartment the club found to accommodate Matthew and me is in Neufchatel, a town famous primarily for its particular brand of cheese. Neufchatel is some 40km outside of town, and when I say outside of town, I mean outside of town. The pitch blackness that engulfed us as we drove their for the first time last Saturday night made it clear to me that we had left the urban environs of Rouen for something decidedly more rustic.

“Oh, man,” I exclaimed, accidentally letting myself slip into English as we rocketed through a countryside devoid of street lights. “We country now, boy.”

“Quoi?” (“What?”) asked Clement.

“Oh, uh, rien (“nothing”).”

Unlike most U.S. cities with their urban sprawl, Rouen ends pretty much as soon as you leave the downtown area, and the autoroute past Bois-Guillaume to Neufchatel is immediately horses, hills, and haystacks as far as the eye can see. On the average morning drive into B-G for a workout at the club’s weight room, I’ll see more cows than cars, the big beasts grazing happily in-between overgrown German bunkers on land that sixty years ago was valued at hundreds of human lives per square mile.

In order to help us navigate this rural highway, the team provided us with a car, which has been the property of the club for the past few years since Eric donated it. Ladies and Gentlemen, feast your eyes upon the little slice of heaven that everyone on the team refers to as…

Le Woodmobile.

Let’s just back up for a second to make sure that nothing was lost in translation here: I am now driving around Normandy in a car roughly the size of an American refrigerator, which features my baseball team’s faded logo of a grinning Woodchuck emblazoned across the hood.

I think I can fairly saw that this is the most awesome thing that has ever happened to me, and while I have yet to propose marriage or witness the birth of my first child, I think it’s furthermore fair to say that the rest of my life, such as it is, is unlikely to top this recent development. I don’t want to overstate Le Woodmobile’s importance to me, but I now segregate my life into two parts: the part where I am driving the Woodmobile, and the part where I wasn’t, the latter of which can be forgiven only because it ultimately lead to the former.

Technically a late 80s Renaud Spring, Le Woodmobile’s idiosyncrasies (in addition to the huge woodchuck on the hood) are what make it truly charming. The heat is always on, for example, and defies any attempt to turn it off, and opinions are mixed as to whether or not this contributes to a gas mileage more commonly associated an SUV towing a speedboat… with the anchor down. It struggles mightily up hills, and the driver takes both his life and the sanctity of his rotator cuff in his hands when attempting to turn a steering wheel seemingly equipped with power anti-steering. There is but one speaker for the radio, located just above the right rear wheel, its cone torn from excessive volume, and the driver’s seat is locked at an angle of recline that Superfly might have chosen had he deigned to cruise downtown Bois-Guillaume looking for talent.

In short, Le Woodmobile is like a ray of sunshine on even the cloudiest of days, one that never fails to make me smile every time I see it and wince every time I have to drive it. To all my friends back home, if ever you are worried about me, and how I’m making my way in Bois-Guillaume, I merely suggest that you reread this post, close your eyes… and picture me rolling.

Slowly.

In Le Woodmobile.

Just a quick note. Some of you may remember my post on “Kyle,” a guy I had worked out with in San Francisco. Well, I originally changed his name for his privacy, but it’s actually Kelly Corliss, and he’s recently put up a website. You can find it here, and I suggest you check it out. His miraculous recovery to this point has resulted in not insignificant medical bills, and he and his wife could sure use some help. Kyle’s a big, strong kid, and he’s a battler, and while the salary of a French baseball player isn’t much, I’m going to send some euros his way for support, and I hope you do too. In November, Kelly’s accident showed me that you’ve got to take advantage of opportunities in life while you can, because you never know when things are going to change suddenly. Now it’s April, and he’s showing me that if you keep grinding, keep battling through, you can overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. Go get’em, Kelly.

Again, that URL is

www.runforkellycorliss.com

Go check it out.

We took the train to Paris on Saturday afternoon, changing at the St. Lazare station. We took the 14 line to Gare de Lyon, and caught another train to Montpelier, getting in around 10:00. If you want to get a bunch of funny looks, try bringing a French baseball team through the Parisian Metro with sacks of bats, balls, and helmets.

Our late arrival in Montpelier forced me to break a rule I have held ever since arriving in California for college and discovering In ‘N’ Out Burger: Never, ever eat at McDonald’s, or “MacDo’s,” as they call it here in France. Fermin had told me that it’s better over here, or at least different, than it is in the States. Let me tell you: it is not.

One Big Mac & fries later (ballgame or no, I refuse to pay 6€ for a salad from Micky D’s) we racked out at Montepelier’s Formula 1 Hotel, a chain of budget hotels across France that I’ll probably discuss in a separate post. I don’t want to spoil it, but think “Econolodge,” but more… French. This particular Formula 1 was actually outside the city center and its bustling nightlife, much to Matthew’s chagrin. Evidently, he and the other players found upon their arrival at a downtown hostel last year that they would be sharing the hostel with a troupe of Norwegian schoolgirls, and several of them found the joint accommodations decidedly amicable.

There were no such distractions this time, and instead we got a good night’s sleep before a quick breakfast and bus ride to the field. Every field in France I’ve seen so far has been a little quirky, and Montpelier’s was no different, which is to say, it was completely different than anything I had ever seen before. If you can’t tell from the pictures below, the home of the Montpelier Barracudas features an all-dirt outfield with an artificial infield. It’s like someone gave the grounds crew an aerial shot of a ball field and told them to work off of that, but accidentally gave them the photonegative and they got the colors backward. As a result, the infield plays very fast, until the ball leaves the turf and enters the basepaths, completely changing the trajectory of any bounding ground ball. If you’re unlucky to get caught on an in-between hop or the ball hits the lip, as it did once to Eric and once to me during the second game, a ball hit hard enough will hop up to about neck height.

I batted fifth in the first game and played second base on account of my elbow. I had been running and icing it all week, but sure enough, as soon as I tried to make the throw to first on a double play in warm-ups, it flared up painfully, and I was constrained to throwing dart-style for the rest of the game, although I managed to play an errorless second base.

We started one of our young kids, Vincent, a lefty whose fastball has pretty good movement. He started ignominiously, walking the first two hitters and then giving up consecutive fly balls that our left fielder misread, turning possible fly ball outs into doubles. They tacked on four in the first frame and it looked like it was going to be a long day. However, Vince settled down, giving up only four the rest of the way. The Barracudas helped him out with a few braindead baserunning errors, running into two double plays, but all in all, it was a very gutsy performance, bouncing back from a rough first and going the distance.

On our side, we scratched out only three hits, but managed to parlay that into five runs through six, finding ourselves down 6-5. Unfortunately, we just blew too many solid scoring opportunities to win. In the seventh, I popped out with men on first and third to end a rally, and in the eighth, we had the bases loaded with no outs and failed to score on account of a missed bunt sign followed by two strikeouts and a groundout to second. Just painful.

Vince gave up two in the eighth on two walks (we would give up 19 walks or HBP in the two games) and two base hits, but we again threatened in the ninth. Seb and I walked with one out, and an error and another walk brought us to 8-5 with the bases loaded and one out. It is at best a symbolic victory, but Montpelier was forced to bring in their hard-throwing submarine closer. Think of him as a sort of a French Dan Quisenberry (“Le Q”).

He came in and struck out our #6 hitter on a few pitches up out of the zone, then gave up a booted ground ball and walked in a run to make it 8-6. With our #9 hitter up, I was just hoping he would bring the top of the order up and give us a chance to steal the win. To his credit, he hit a high chopper just out of the pitcher’s reach, and for a second I thought he might be able to beat it out, or draw a wild throw that would allow us to tie the game. Unfortunately, the shortstop made a tough play, charging in on the turf and getting the runner by two steps.

The second game was similarly disappointing. We trailed 3-2 in the seventh, after Matthew had pitched a solid five innings of 2 ER ball. With a guy on first, I lofted a soft, sinking liner into left for my only hit of the day, and took second as the ball squirted off the left fielder’s glove on the short hop. We tied it on a sac fly to center, and I stole third on the next pitch. I was a little bit surprised, because the throw beat me to third, which in my admittedly biased view of the universe, should never happen. Either I’m getting old, or the hot sun in the South of France had sapped some juice from my legs over the previous 16 innings. In any case, I managed to slide in under the tag, and scored on a wild pitch with two out to put us ahead 4-3.

Now, the Barracudas were clearly the more talented team, but in the first game we had pushed them right to the brink and nearly stolen one, forcing them to go to their closer to finish us off with the tying run on second. In the second game, we suddenly found ourselves up a run with nine outs to go, clinging desperately to a fragile lead and hoping the wheels would stay on the bus long enough for us to sneak out of town with a stolen win.

As so often happens when you’re playing against a better team, the wheels did not stay on the bus.

They fell off the bus.

They rolled down the street.

They ricocheted off an onrushing 16-wheeler.

They bounced over the cliff, plummeting out of sight before emitting one last soft {poof!} and accompanying Wile E. Coyote-esque puff of smoke upon impacting the canyon floor below.

Four hits, four errors, three hit batsmen, and three walks later, we were on the wrong end of a 10-4 loss that had been so promising just two innings before. We had gone to Quentin, one of our youngest pitchers and a player at INSEP, to close it out, and he actually pitched pretty well given the circumstances. He has an incredible, Bert Blyleven-type sweeping curveball, and early on, he was consistently catching the Barracudas off guard with it. After we went up 4-3, however, they started sitting all over it, just waiting for a big curve to poke into left or gleefully taking hangers off the elbow to get on base. He would have gotten away with it, for the most part, but our defense, almost uncharacteristically solid all day to that point, suddenly faltered, and the floodgates opened. We headed back to Montpelier, making it to our train just in time, and this time got even funnier looks by bringing the same baseball team through the Paris Metro, this time smelling like a pack of goats.

At the end of the day, it’s a pair of tough losses no matter how you slice them, and it’s small consolation that no one expected us to even be in those games against the first place Barracudas. Had we not wasted so many opportunities in the first game and played better defense in the second, we could have pulled out either or both despite the talent discrepancy between the two club. Moreover, it would have helped if we had had another arm in the bullpen, I don’t know, maybe a hard throwing American who’s just dumb enough to think he could have made a difference if his elbow wasn’t screaming in protest every time he tried to accelerate his arm forward. In all seriousness, it is frustrating: while I’ve certainly shown my capacity to get lit up by some of the better hitting teams here in France, I’d like to think that if I had been at 100%, maybe we would have had a shot at pulling that second one out. I’m going to try to see a doctor some time this week to get a look at the elbow. Hopefully it’s nothing serious, as we play La Guerche at home this weekend and then have a week off, so I’ll have three weeks without pitching to get my arm back in shape and get back on the mound.

So ends the Woodchucks’ brief appearance in third place. On Thursday night, the Tres Lettres confirmed the rumor that had been going around regarding the use of unlicensed players and too many foreigners. Apparently, Savigny’s treasurer- incidentally, the same guy that gave me the pink slip- had been tardy in sending in the check for four players’ licenses to the Federation, and so they had all played illegally in the Lions’ first four games (all wins against La Guerche and Bois-Guillaume). Senart was also found guilty of having used too many foreigners; only two can be on the field at the same time, and the coach had apparently gambled that one of his foreigners had received French citizenship by marrying a French woman (a sort of reverse Green Card) in time so as not to count. The end result is that Savigny forfeited their first four games 9-0, and Senart forfeited its two wins against Bois-Guillaume. The Woodchucks benefited doubly, having turned four losses (two of them 20-0 drubbings at the hands of the Lions) into four wins and found themselves suddenly 4-2 going into Montpelier.

That also sort of closes the door on the Ev Meagher era in Savigny. Instead of 4-0, the team’s record under my stewardship will be forever remembered as 0-4. No wonder they fired me before I could become a 10-5 man (10 weeks in the league, 5 with the same team)! Moreover, my pitching appearance against the Woodchucks is wiped from the books, making it “the asterisked no-hitter that wasn’t.” On the plus side, my 1-for-7 start is erased, and for a few days there I was hitting .400. Take the good, take the bad…

Read this, by the way, in the spirit in which it is intended. There’s no sense of schadenfreude here, and I just feel bad for the Lions’ players, who won those games fair and square (not to mention convincingly) and now face a still achievable but suddenly uphill battle to make the playoffs on account of an administrative fiasco. Savigny is talented enough that they should still finish among the top four in the league and therefore advance, but in a short 30-game season, four losses against the weaker teams could potentially come back to haunt them.

Editor’s Note: Sorry for the long layoff, as I’ve been away from email access. I’ll post more next week as I try to get caught up a little better, but I probably won’t have access until Monday or so. I’ve met my new roommate, and he’s a great guy, and we’re gearing up for this weekend’s games in Montpelier. We’ll hop on the train on Saturday and get back late Sunday night. The elbow is still tender, but hopefully I’ll be able to play a little infield this weekend, if not pitch.

Remember the baseball strike in 1982, when the season started a few months later and SI just re-ran the same baseball preview cover they had run in March with the caption changed to “Here we go again?” Of course not, no one remembers that, but that’s how I feel. It’s Opening Day for me (again), my first game as a Woodchuck.

I woke up to Clement’s knocking on Sunday morning, and we drove to Bois-Guillaume from Neufchatel. I tried to memorize the directions along the way, as the three or four turns in town and 35km (22 miles) through the rolling hills of Normandy on the autoroute will soon be my commute.

We arrived at 9:45 and began warming up. Rouen had brought about 18 ballplayers to B-G, while we had only nine for the first half of the doubleheader. With my elbow still sore from last Sunday, I played left field, and with the exception of one badly misplayed ball, managed to avoid humiliation. In the fourth inning, Rouen’s catcher hit a blast to left center, a towering fly ball that seemed to hang up forever. I caught up with it around the warning track, and despite a minor collision with the centerfielder, managed to snag it in the middle of what was part dive, part stumble, and part I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-in-the-outfield kind of fall.

In the dugout the next inning, I told Aldo, the fireplug center fielder, the Yo La Tengo story*. It would not prove my final collision of the day, however, as that very half-inning, I took an 0-2 curveball off the left bicep for my first French HBP. With one out, I found myself at third base, and our shortstop dinked a Texas leaguer into left field. I thought it would hold up long enough to be caught, so I retreated to third and tagged, which was more than a little aggressive given how shallow the ball was. I was surprised to see the ball arrive a half step before I got to home plate, at which point it was impossible to change my slide completely. Now, one of the first things I asked Fermin was whether it was legal to really break up a double play, and whether you were allowed to crash the catcher, as most leagues in the U.S. have the “we have to go to work on Monday” rule preventing such aggressive play. I’ve always loved collisions at the plate, and it made my week to hear that such a style of play was permitted in France.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t gone into my slide anticipating a collision, so it was too late to change to a full-on bull rush. Instead, I slid towards him rather than away from him as originally intended, and gave him half a shoulder, sort of like a fullback trying to get just enough of a piece of a blitzing linebacker to slow him down without disrupting his own pass pattern. It wasn’t the full-bore, lights-out, Ronnie-Lott style pancaking of the catcher that I’d prefer, but it proved enough, as it knocked the off-balance catcher onto his back, and to my surprise, squirted the ball loose to the backstop as the crowd (all 20 of them) roared in appreciation.

We played Rouen tight until about the fifth inning, when it quickly went from 11-7 to the final score of 25-9. One of your younger pitchers actually pitched pretty well, but left some fastballs up in the zone, as the Huskies’ bats warmed up in a hurry. They ripped three home runs in two innings, and four total on the day, one of them a monumental blast to left center that still hasn’t landed. To put it in perspective, Normandy hasn’t had this many bombs dropped on it since… uh… Sorry, couldn’t think of anything. Lost my train of thought.

We dropped the second game as well, hanging in at 7-3 before it got out of hand and they invoked the 12-run mercy rule in the 7th or 8th inning. From the team’s perspective, it was as much of a success as we could have hoped for. There was a lot of talk on the elite division message boards about the dual 20-0 blankings at Savigny, with some questioning whether a team that got blown out so badly really belonged in the elite division. While Rouen is clearly the superior team, the fact that the Woodchucks put up a fight and managed to keep it close is a big morale-booster, and will hopefully provide us with some momentum going into the rest of the season, where we have some games we’ll have a better chance of winning. Above all, I was impressed with the team’s resilience. The Woodchucks pride themselves on always taking and leaving the field running, in playing hard regardless of the score, and in always holding their heads high. They did so on Sunday despite a lopsided score, and I feel like we’re in a good position to build on that over the next few months.

From a personal perspective, I was just happy to get in a Chucks’ uniform and get the first one out of the way. Moreover, I’m pleased that my bat is starting to come around. Lost in the drama surrounding my departure from Savigny was the fact that I started the season an unimpressive 1-for-7 with a walk, and it was a dinked infield hit at that. After grounding into a fielder’s choice in my first at-bat and getting plunked in the second, I lined a 2-1 fastball into left in my third at-bat for my first honest-to-goodness base hit in the first game. In the second game I picked a good 0-2 curveball off of my shoe tops and slapped it on a low line drive into the hole past a diving shortstop, a good piece of bad-ball hitting, and later beat out a chopper to the third baseman for my third hit of the day. I finished 3-for-7 with a HBP, two runs, a stolen base, and an RBI.

It’s always something with me, though, and right now the only cloud in the sky is the condition of my elbow. As I explained to the Woodchucks, who were clearly disappointed that I would be unable to pitch, I pitched my last game in Savigny against them like it would be my last game of the season, and as I didn’t hear back from them until Thursday, I hadn’t taken the usual post game precautions like running and icing until then. As a result, my elbow- the forearm, really- remains sore, and while I’m hoping I’ll be able to pitch this coming weekend in Montpelier, I would put it at a less than 50% chance. It’s a long season, and I don’t want to come back to early and jeopardize my ability to take the mound in June, July, and August. There’s no secret recipe here, it’s just ice, Advil, and running, so that sound you hear in the background is my Ipod starting to crank up the Chariots of Fire theme as I try to become Prefontaine over the next few days…

As I write this, it’s Sunday night, and I’m trying to do my part to fight global warming by attaching roughly 2/3 of the ice in Normandy to my left wrist, right knee, and throwing elbow. As many of you will likely spend Sunday night several hours from now, I’m enjoying a little Sunday Night Baseball with Joe Morgan… the exception being that it’s a game between the Giants and Dodgers from 1992. Clement borrowed a tape from the Woodchucks’ baseball library, which consists of a random assortment of regular season games dating back to the late 1980s. It’s actually pretty hilarious. As Joe Morgan has pointed out, the keys to the game for the Giants are to keep Brett Butler off the basepaths and try to get to Orel Hershiser early. The highlight for me was a commercial for the ill-fated Olympics Triplecast. Interestingly, there’s a young kid named Royce Clayton starting for the Giants, but he’s hitting .186 and it doesn’t look like he’s going to stick around very long in this league.

A Note To My French Readers: It’s pretty easy to tell by IP addresses and referral links who reads the site, and so I’ve known for a while that players around the elite division have been checking out the blog, which is great. I just want to make two things clear.

1) For the last time, I have no hard feelings towards anyone in Savigny, and as with everything I’ve ever written here, I mean it. They’re not jerks or bad people, and I wish them only good luck for the rest of the season, except on June 11th, when the Woodchucks and I are going to do our best to give them hell, just as we do every weekend against every opponent. In the meantime, though, this story is not about the Lions anymore, it’s about the Woodchucks, and I’m just thrilled to be one.

2) While this blog is written neither by a great writer nor by a great baseball player, it is written by an honest man, and everything I’ve written here has been the truth.

*From Answers.com: “During the 1962 season, Richie Ashburn, the center fielder of the New York Mets, was crashing again and again with Venezuelan Elio Chacon. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, “I got it! I got it!” only to collide with the 160-pound Chacon, who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, “Yo la tengo! Yo la tengo!” which is “I’ve got it” in Spanish. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacon backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by 200-pound left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish.”