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 […]
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.
