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 […]
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
