On the Road Again

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.