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 […]
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.
