A short drive from the Formula 1 took us to the Toulouse baseball field. It’s a very respectable field, no goofy cutout infields or concrete mounds or anything. The team is actually just called Stade Toulousain, with interlocking ST on their caps, because they’re affiliated with the Stade Toulousain rugby team, one of the biggest, […]
A short drive from the Formula 1 took us to the Toulouse baseball field. It’s a very respectable field, no goofy cutout infields or concrete mounds or anything. The team is actually just called Stade Toulousain, with interlocking ST on their caps, because they’re affiliated with the Stade Toulousain rugby team, one of the biggest, most successful rugby teams in France. The club athletic system in France has these sort of affiliations all the time, sort of like if the New England Patriots had an associated baseball team as well.
We rolled in at around 9:30 for the first of two games, and quickly found ourselves enveloped in a swarm of “moucherons,” or flies. Now, there are but a few things that moucherons love in the world, and it starts with eyes, ears, and noses. Most of all, however, they love exposed cuts; it’s like they can’t get enough of them. Sadly, all of these attractions were readily available on my face, and so I spent the rest of the day doubling as a sort of dipteran Disneyland. Even in warmups, sprinting back and forth in the outfield, I swallowed about three or four of the little buggers, and they seemed to have a nasty tendency to swarm around the batter’s box as well.
With only nine ballplayers under a 35-degree sun (I’m not sure the conversion to Fahrenheit, but I think it’s roughly 240 degrees), no one expected we would put up much of a fight against Toulouse, at 17-3 just one game behind Rouen for the league lead, particularly against their ace (and French national team pitcher) Samuel Meurant. However, we did just that, and took them to 11 innings before falling 4-3. Meurant was tough, but we managed to squeak 3 off him in the third, with me scoring the first run after being plunked off the elbow. Quentin gave us his best game of the year, going 5 strong with only one earned run, and he handed it over to Matt with a 3-2 lead to start the bottom of the sixth. Matt ran into trouble in the seventh with a walk, sac bunt, and double to tie it at three, and we went to extras.
Meurant was tough, with a good fastball, big looping curve, and a decent changeup. I had a good at-bat with a disappointing result to lead off the game, fouling off three or four pitches on 3-2 before swinging through a fastball that was probably a little bit up. After the HBP, I had another good third at-bat, again fouling off a few pitches on 0-2, working it to 2-2 before hitting a one-hop smash right back at him. Sadly, he snared it and threw me out easily, which was a real drag because even if he just got a piece of it I think it would have squirted into no-man’s land between short and second and I could have squeaked out a base hit. I hit another ground ball up the middle in the seventh, but the second baseman ranged to his right to get me by half a step. Frustrating all around.
By the ninth, I decided it was time to get a base hit no matter what, so I dropped a drag bunt down the third base line and it was a beauty. I had it beat, but just as I was barreling across the bag, the first baseman lept for an errant throw that had brought him across the bag and up the line. It was too late for me to do anything to avoid him, and I plowed through him, albeit entirely accidentally. He was tall and skinny and stretched out like a wide receiver reaching for a Joey Harrington special, but fortunately he was okay after the resutling collision spun him like a top. I took second as the ball rolled out of play, but was left there after Seb flew out to right and Mathieu popped out to second to end the inning.
My only regret on the day is that I should have tried to steal third. I was getting a good lead, as they weren’t paying too much attention to me, but I held off because I didn’t want to take the bat out of our #2 and #3 hitters’ hands. Instead, we didn’t score, and we lost it in the 11th on a base hit, a sac bunt, and a deep fly to right field that fell in down the line.
In the second game, we had absolutely no one to throw. Just no one. We had thrown Quentin and Matt in the first game, and Vincent had to miss the game on account of his high school graduation exams (known as the “BAC” in France”) the next day. We went with Seb, and while he settled down after a first inning in which he walked the first three hitters on 13 pitches, we found ourselves down 4-2 and never got any closer than that. We lost 13-2 in 7 innings, and headed back on the long drive home.
The second game notwithstanding, it was really our best effort of the year. We took Toulouse, arguably the best team in the league, to 11 innings with their ace on the mound. After he went nine, they had to bring in their #2, also on the national team, to close it out, which again, was probably not expected by anyone in the league. In fact, we should have scored in either the ninth or the tenth, and it was our failure to execute those offensive opportunities that cost us the game. Our #8 and 9 hitters went a combined 1-16 with 12 K’s… which just isn’t going to get the job done at any level of baseball. So be it.
That makes seven, count’em, seven games that we’ve lost by one run, and three in extra innings. I feel like you hesitate to say that it’s a “hard-luck” team, but at a certain point you have to call a spade a spade. On the one hand, it’s taken our best baseball to be in those games, and at the end of the day, it just wasn’t good enough, but one extra bounce here or there and instead of being 5-17 and one game out of last place, we are 12-10 and shocking the league in the last playoff slot. What can you do?
At a certain point you start wondering exactly what you can do to turn around a team with buzzard luck. I remember a class in college that I took at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, years before they swatted my application into the 17th row and called me a “sucka,” which I thought was a bit excessive- a mere “no thank you” would have sufficed- but I digress. It was called Managing Strategic Change, and in one session, we watched Twelve O’Clock High, where Brigadier General Frank Savage tried to turn around a similar “hard luck” bomber unit. It may explain my mediocre performance in the class- not to mention subsequent admissions decision years later- but I’m not sure I can identify the incisive leadership decision that made the difference. If I remember correctly, ol’ Frank just kept sending the boys off to die over Normandy. Hmmm…
Fortunately, the Woodchucks’ morale is significantly better than the 8th Air Force’s was, and we’re all looking forward to our vacation, which came early with today’s rainout against Montpelier. Most of the teams across France got rained out, so we’ll probably be making the game up on the reserve date of September 10th, when, incidentally, I’ll be in my second week as a 1L in Chicago. Hooah!
There’s a lot more to post, but unfortunately it’s going to have to wait. I’ll be dribbling it out over the next few weeks, determined largely by my limited internet access. We have four weeks off until our only game in July at La Guerche, and then another four weeks off before our final three games of the regular season starting in late August and then five weeks of playoffs, which I will be discussing in a later, and far more serious post. In the meantime, I’m headed to Ireland to get my mind off baseball a bit. Slainte,
Ev