Check out the pub that HBWT got in the Boston Globe! p.s. a few minor inaccuracies but overall very cool! A fling with French baseball Banker abandoned job to play game he loves By Chris Forsberg, Globe Correspondent | May 7, 2006 The irony that he had quit a lucrative job to move 6,000 miles […]
Check out the pub that HBWT got in the Boston Globe!
p.s. a few minor inaccuracies but overall very cool!
A fling with French baseball
Banker abandoned job to play game he loves
By Chris Forsberg, Globe Correspondent | May 7, 2006The irony that he had quit a lucrative job to move 6,000 miles away, then was fired from a job that paid less than minimum wage, wasn’t lost on Evan Meagher. But this was his dream.
Well, maybe not exactly.
About two months ago, Meagher, a Reading native and Stanford University graduate, touched down in Paris to play professional baseball for the Savigny-Sur-Orge Lions of the French Baseball Federation, leaving behind his job as an investment banking analyst in San Francisco.
The 26-year-old Meagher was to be paid 300 euros (roughly $378) per month to both play and coach Savigny’s thriving baseball program, which fielded an elite team that had won the French national title in five of the past eight seasons.
Despite a 2-0 start, Meagher was summoned by the board of directors on April 1 and relieved of his duties. Slowed by injuries, Meagher hadn’t lived up to what the Lions had been expecting as a player. He later joked that they were expecting Pedro Martinez circa 1999 and received David McCarty circa 2004.
”I remember coming home to my girlfriend, who was visiting at the time, and saying, ‘I got fired. This is the most disappointing thing that has ever happened to me,’ ” Meagher recalled in a telephone interview last week while practicing with his new team, the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks. ”But when you think about it, I got fired by a French baseball team. Let’s step back and assess just how ridiculous that is. Take away the human tragedy of it all and it’s downright hilarious.”
The episode made for great fodder for the ”Have Bat Will Travel” blog Meagher is keeping to chronicle his adventures (www.havebatwilltravel.com). But Meagher didn’t go to Europe to write, he went to play baseball. So he soon found himself hooking up with a new team.
In a lame-duck performance with Savigny, Meagher fired a five-inning, mercy-rule-shortened no-hitter against Bois-Guillaume, which soon recruited him to its struggling squad. (If the Lions are the New York Yankees of French baseball, the Woodchucks are the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.)
Over the next three months, Meagher will prepare Bois-Guillaume for the postseason tournament, in which the Woodchucks will be fighting simply to remain in the nation’s elite division. The playoffs determine which teams drop to the second division and which teams vault to the elite division.
Meagher is scheduled to return stateside in August to start an MBA program at MIT, but he plans to commute to France on the weekends to compete for the Woodchucks as a pitcher and third baseman and pen the final chapter of a whirlwind year.
”At the height of the story, when things can’t get any more ridiculous or absurd or surreal, I’ll be commuting to Rouen from Cambridge,” Meagher said with a laugh. ”This was my dream.”
A dream that got concocted a half-decade ago while Meagher was finishing up his senior year at Stanford. Chatting with some friends about his unclear future, it came to his attention that France had pro development leagues where the talent wasn’t quite as fierce as in the States.
The idea slipped to the back of his mind after Meagher found a job in investment banking in San Francisco shortly after graduation. But he found himself working 100-hour weeks, and his only enjoyment came from a weekend baseball league.
On a trip home, Meagher’s mother, Judythe, noticed how the job had worn him down.
”I drove him to this business meeting, and there was a limo waiting for him,” said Judythe, who lives in Reading. ”He said to me, ‘I love my job, but I hate my life.’ Evan’s a bit of a Renaissance man, and he just didn’t have a chance to do all the things he loves.”
Music is one of his hobbies, and Meagher plays a mean harmonica, or ”blues harp,” as he calls it. But baseball is his true passion, and while he hadn’t played since his junior year at Belmont Hill, he decided to pursue what once seemed like a pipe dream.
What did his mother think about it?
”I used to practice law, but now I’m an artist,” said Judythe. ”I’m big on following dreams. I was actually relieved that he was going to leave that job. . . . My view was that, hopefully, some day he’s going to be married, have children, and have a mortgage, so I was happy that he was going to pursue his dream while he could.”
After all, Meagher had nothing to lose. He had saved enough money working overtime to fund his trip and soon began working out with strength and conditioning coach Andrew Wun at Velocity Sports Performance in California to prepare for his pro debut.
Soon he had a batting cage installed at his sprawling apartment outside of San Francisco. Meagher does everything at full speed. His teammates on the Bay Area Reds of the adult baseball league can confirm that.
Meagher ”stole home numerous times while with the Reds. . . . It was an awesome sight seeing him barrel home, diving headfirst, causing a Charlie Brown dust pile,” said manager Ben Ferreira. ”And when the dust settled, Ev was safely across the base, leaving the other team scratching their heads. . . . He definitely sparked the Reds with his enthusiasm, energy, and love for the game.”
Scott Siegler was always impressed with Meagher’s baseball knowledge. Meagher crafts his own bats and has been known to create his own baseball lexicon.
”Ev oozes baseball,” said Siegler, a teammate with the Reds. ”He knows all of the traditional jargon and never fails to call a home run anything but a home run. He usually finds the existing phrases either too hackneyed, too unimaginative, or insufficiently descriptive, so he is constantly spouting off new terms on the fly” — things like ”Jimmy-Jack” instead of ”tater” or ”dinger” as a nickname for home run and ”Bingle” for an RBI single.
Bring up baseball and Meagher and the stories flow like wine in France. From the one about him trying to walk onto the baseball team at Stanford (a letter to the school president helped Meagher get a tryout after the gruff baseball coach had, in so many words, told Meagher he didn’t have time for players who hadn’t been recruited by Major League scouts), to his plans for the future (”He’s going to buy the Dodgers and bring them back to Brooklyn,” said Meagher’s father, Kieran).
For now, he’s living his first dream of playing professional baseball.
”I was in the supermarket the other day and I was telling a friend about what Evan’s doing over there,” said his mother. ”The cashier just stopped what she was doing and said, ‘Your son is living every person’s dream.’ And he really is.”
