So… This one’s going to take some explaining. I couldn’t sleep at all on Friday night. Not a wink. Just 7 hours of staring at the roof of my tiny hotel room. I’m not even sure that I blinked. It was a combination some personal/family stuff back home, and it left me absolutely exhausted come […]
So… This one’s going to take some explaining.
I couldn’t sleep at all on Friday night. Not a wink. Just 7 hours of staring at the roof of my tiny hotel room. I’m not even sure that I blinked. It was a combination some personal/family stuff back home, and it left me absolutely exhausted come exam time on Saturday morning. I powered through the morning essay section, feeling pretty good. I knew I couldn’t eat a really heavy lunch or I’d just collapse during the afternoon session, so I had a wrap at a nearby Lebanese place. Needing to remain coherent, I ordered a coffee after lunch, which is standard in France but rare for me. The shopkeeper asked me if I wanted a regular coffee (which, by the way, is high-test espresso in France, none of this decaf shit) or his Lebanese coffee, explaining “It’s very strong.” I opted for the Beirut Bombshell, and as advertised, it was like drinking space shuttle fuel. I blasted through the first half of the multiple choice afternoon session but soon found myself running out of steam. I was gassed, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t keep my focus on anything, and wrapped up early, less than optimistic that my strong morning session could make up for my afternoon meltdown.
I took the train back to Rouen, where Matt picked me up and explained that we had not in fact moved on Friday as planned. Once again, the apartment we were to move into fell through, and we were going to go look at a place on Tuesday. Will wonders never cease. He also declared that I’d be playing first base on Sunday, because he had decided that my weak arm had to be moved from second despite the strong throw I had made going to my right in the Challenge. I tried explaining to him that doing so would downgrade two positions defensively, as my replacement at second lacked range and sure hands, while I had never played first base in my life, but I was too tired to argue it. Fine, I thought. Whatever. First base. What’s the worst that could happen?
I awoke on Sunday to find myself in a mood completely foreign to me. Nothing has ever given me as much joy as playing baseball, but I was just out of it, unable to muster my usual enthusiasm. Even putting on the uniform, while giving the usual jolt of adrenaline to the system, failed to pull me out of my doldrums, and for the first time in my life, playing seemed like work to me. I don’t know how to explain it; I just couldn’t focus, and my play showed it. I busted a stick (Sic Itur Ad Astra, you gave me a good 20 or so hits in the French leagues, you’ve earned your retirement) on an inside fastball in the first, then fought another ball off the hands in the third for a fielder’s choice. Had it not been a maple bat, it probably would have broken too. About the only good thing I did all day was steal second immediately after, but I was left stranded on third with two outs for about the tenth or twelfth time this season. I struck out swinging on a fastball up and in for my third at-bat, and then took a called strike three a little off the plate in the 8th. To put this in perspective, I had struck out twice all season before Sunday, and never against a French pitcher. Moreover, it was the third time in my life that I’ve struck out twice in a game: once a few years back with the Reds against a hard-throwing young black kid with a tough tailing fastball, and once when I was eight years old.
I was a disaster. I feel like I’ve always made the most of my limited physical tools with above average mental preparation, but it was nowhere to be found during that first game on Sunday. It was doubly disappointing, because in addition to wanting to do well for myself, I feel like the Woodchucks deserve better, that they’re paying for better. It’s not that the effort wasn’t there- I was still running at 100%, busting my tail as always- but that for the first time I can remember in my life, the head just wasn’t there. The lights were on, but nobody was home.
We lost 3-2 against Senart in a heartbreaker. Vince pitched a hell of a game, going 7.1, settling down after a 2-run jack in the first to give up just one unearned run. We got on the board in the fifth and added another in the sixth, but couldn’t get the offense going. You can pin it pretty squarely on me. When your leadoff hitter goes 0-4 (my first 0-4 in France) with two K’s, you’re not going to win a whole lot of games.
One of the other player’s fathers saw that I hadn’t brought anything to eat, and hooked me up with a quintessentially French lunch of ham, bread, and salad. I started to collect myself a little bit, and as the second game started, I felt that I was getting it together, starting to get my head in the game. We’ll never really know about the former, because I did the latter almost immediately in a fashion that won’t be gracing highlight reels anytime soon.
With one out and me holding a runner at first, the batter hit a seed at Pierre, our new second baseman. He was already playing close to the bag, and so he snared it on one hop, came across the bag, and turned to throw. Strangely, the hitter hadn’t moved out of the box, apparently thinking it had been caught on the fly, so Pierre just had to toss it softly to first for the inning-ending double play. Instead, he threw it absolutely as hard as he could, a laser beam that skipped about six feet in front of the bag at first.
I’ve spent a good portion of my life as a shortstop or third baseman, silently cursing out first basemen that don’t stay down on throws in the dirt to make a scoop. Any time they would simply wave at a ball, or refuse to bend at the waist in an effort to dig a ball out, has always driven me crazy. Having already made a nice scoop on a low throw from third base in the first game, I did what I had always heard coaches shout at first baseman on balls in the dirt: stay down on it.
However, the field at Bois-Guillaume is a treacherous one, especially in the soft dirt where runners take their lead off first. The ball skipped up on me, over my glove, crashing into my nose with a sickening crunch. The world went silent.
Rivers of blood. Fountains of blood. Torrents of blood, spewing forth from my nose before the ball even fell to the ground in front of me. Think Chinatown. Think that scene from Silence of the Lambs where Lecter eats the security guard’s face. It might give you some small semblance of the carnage that appeared suddenly on the Woodchuck’s infield. Forget “drops” of blood, because there were no drops; it was like turning on a garden hose halfway and then holding your finger over the nozzle to increase the volume. I saw the shortstop’s face contort in a mixture of horror and dismay as I wandered over to pick up the ball. As the world suddenly switched back from silent film to dolby surround, I heard the catcher screaming “UNE! UNE!” I wheeled and flipped to the pitcher, covering at first. As I turned, his jaw dropped, and I immediately knew that this looked every bit as bad as it felt. At the very least, I finished the play, just your routine, run-of-the-mill 4-3-broken nose-1 double play.
I staggered off the field as the president called the paramedics. First base looked like a murder scene, and as I collected my things to get in the back of the ambulance (a little bit over the top if you ask me), I’m pretty sure I saw our left fielder using a push broom to sweep the blood off the basepath, like you would sweep a porch after heavy, heavy rain.
If you ever want to get some funny looks, walk into a hospital in Rouen, wearing the uniform of a sport no one understands, with metal cleats, looking like Carrie on prom night. After some confusion as to my insurance status (all ballplayers at the elite level are insured by the Tres Lettres), they took a quick X-ray, the doctor proudly declaring that according to his diagnosis, my nose was, as Mick Jagger might say, shattered. (Shadoobie). It was sort of like the overdose scene in Boogie Nights– “oh, you think so, doctor?”
You learn something new every day, and on this particular Sunday in French baseball, I learned not only that I’m not J.T. Snow, but also that the French don’t really believe in local anesthesia, even while putting in stitches for a massive cut on the bridge of the nose that make you look like Frankenstein’s monster. Not wanting to disgrace Americans (and ballplayers) everywhere, I sat there and took it, as the old blues song goes, “laughing just to keep from crying.” I now have three gruesome stitches on my horrifically swollen nose, and my twin black eyes have me sporting a Rocky Racoon kind of look. To put it mildly, I am not a handsome man right now. That said, it’s not that big a deal. Who wants to die without scars, or for that matter, with a nose in a straight line?
Two team supporters picked me up at the hospital and took me back to the field, where I discovered that we had lost the second game- drumroll please- 26-0. I’d like to think that I could have made a difference, but even in my long-past prime, I was never worth more than 22, maybe 23 runs in a game. I took an exceptionally ginger shower, and headed out to find the “Pharmacie de Garde,” which is to say a pharmacy that stays open on Sundays and holidays (of which, of course, today is one.) Apparently it’s like bathroom cleaning duty in college dorms- this responsibility rotates between pharmacies every week, and you have to call a hotline to figure out which one happens to be the one on duty that particular week. After much driving around and several calls to the hotline, I found the on-duty pharmacy. With my luck this weekend, I will give you two guesses as to whether or not it was actually open, and the first one doesn’t count. Their storefront proudly declared that they would be on duty Monday, in direct conflict with the hotline’s assertion that they were on call Sunday as well. As such, my painkiller for the evening was not the prescribed Ixprim-325, but the lesser prescribed Laguvulin-16, with a self-prescribed dosage of four fingers… for each hand. It’s an oft-overlooked sedative, but it gets the job done, goes down smooth, and is remarkably cheap on this side of the pond.
I stopped by a Kebab shop to get dinner for Matt and me, and snagged an extra one of the honey-almond cakes that I’ve grown to love so. Much of my experience in French baseball has operated on so-called “Summer Camp Rules”- first kid to camp gets the top bunk, no pissing in the shower, and so forth. In this case, Summer Camp Rules applied as well, which is to say that if you break your nose during afternoon activities, you get extra dessert.
All in all, I think it might be a stretch to call it the worst weekend of my life, but I’ve certainly had better, like the time I ruptured my kidney playing football, or the time I nearly impaled myself on a fountain during an ill-advised early-morning scooter ride. In any case, I’m off to Caen tomorrow for the June 6th D-day ceremonies, secure at the very least in the knowledge that things will get better, if only because they could hardly get worse.
Editor’s Note: Cheers to Danny and Becky Kramer, whose wedding I missed in San Francisco this past weekend. As I said in my exceedingly corny (but heartfelt) testimony, recorded in Bihorel and sent by mp3 via the wonders of the interweb, I love you guys from the bottom of my heart, and I’m so happy that you’ll be spending your lives together.