Many readers (okay, a dozen, tops) have emailed me asking about the recent post regarding the future of baseball in Bois-Guillaume. B-do summarized it succinctly, asking if the mayor’s objections to the club’s existence couldn’t easily be solved with an advanced piece of technology known as a “net.” Well, the immediate answer is “oui.” The […]
Many readers (okay, a dozen, tops) have emailed me asking about the recent post regarding the future of baseball in Bois-Guillaume. B-do summarized it succinctly, asking if the mayor’s objections to the club’s existence couldn’t easily be solved with an advanced piece of technology known as a “net.”
Well, the immediate answer is “oui.” The more accurate answer is, as Fermin said to me God knows how many times, “Complicated, Evan; France is complicated.”
So yes. On the surface, the problem is that the three or four houses situated next to the baseball field have complained about the occasional baseballs entering their yards, smashing windows, frightening children, and causing general mayhem. Let’s break this down.
The Woodchucks play a 30 game schedule, and during the season, I would say they practice 1.5 times per week (which might explain last year’s less-than-impressive record.) If the season lasts about 16 solid weeks (subtracting the 2-mont layoff in the middle of the season), that works out to 54 practices, for a total of 84 practices/games. Now, in my experience, each game or practice resulted in fewer than one ball launched into nearby yards, but for the sake of argument, let’s be very, very conservative and say that *two* balls landed in a yard each game. Keep in mind that the only yards affected run from about home plate until the foul pole, along the left field line, with a massive, 30-foot tall fence protecting them the length of the foul line. This means two things: first, that two balls per practice/game is unreasonably high, and second, that screaming line drives are caught by the fence, so only high pop-ups make it into the yard.
Now, if I remember correctly, there are four or five houses that span the left-field line. Obviously, the one closest to home plate probably receives more balls than the one furthest down the line, but again, for the sake of argument, let’s say that each house gets the average number of balls in their yard per game. That’s a total of 84 x 2 = 168 balls per year, plus, let’s say, another 32 balls for the various cadet, minime, and softball games and practices each year, which in practice, rarely if ever hit a ball over the fence. That brings us to 200 balls per year, or 40 per house. Of those 40, I can guarantee you that the *vast* majority never go far enough to reach the houses, which are set back from the fence because the street is on the other side of the houses. As a result, some 80-90% of the balls hit over the fence land in the houses’ backyards. Even guessing conservatively, that means that only 40 balls per year, or 10 per house, ever actually make it to the house.
That’s 10 per year, or one per 36.5 days. Now here’s the kicker:
From what I’m told, the Bois-Guillaume baseball club has existed at its present location for far, far longer than any of the affected houses. This is what’s known in American law as “coming to the nuisance”; that is, even if we determine that having baseballs fly occasionally off the premises of the field is a “public nuisance,” the case for the plaintiff is weakened significantly (although not entirely disregarded) by the fact that the defendant carried on the activity creating the nuisance the plaintiff relocated to an area affected by that nuisance, ostensibly aware that the nuisance existed. An eerily similar case in English law (that all American law students are required to read in Torts class) deals with a similar complaint regarding a cricket pitch. Lord Denning’s famous decision in Jackson v. Miller read as follows:
In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket. But now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket ground. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at week-ends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for more houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much the poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.
Obviously, one thing bleeds through from this holding, and that’s Lord Dennings decision that the social value added by the cricket club outweighed the suffering by the club’s neighbors, particularly seeing as the neighbors knew what they were getting into by moving next to a cricket club. The difference, obviously, is that a French official will likely show less deference to the value the club brings to the Bois-Guillaume community.
Now, nothing has been posted as to an update on the Chucks’ site, and I don’t have any new information. But at the end of the day, it seems that beyond any legalese, what we really need here is… a net.