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 […]
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.
