The two-hour drive to St. Lo required Matt and I to get up before 6 AM on Sunday in order to make the long drive into town from Neufchâtel to meet up with the rest of the team. Just on a side note, the long commute is starting to really drive us nuts, and finding […]
The two-hour drive to St. Lo required Matt and I to get up before 6 AM on Sunday in order to make the long drive into town from Neufchâtel to meet up with the rest of the team. Just on a side note, the long commute is starting to really drive us nuts, and finding a suitable apartment in town has replaced “finding a decent burrito” as my highest priority.
I hopped in the back of Rafael’s car, and slept most of the way while listening to strains of French hip-hop. As I told Matthieu, the team’s resident hip-hopper, the French are do a lot of things well, like wine, cheese, and bread, but rap is not one of them.
St. Lo is on the border with Bretagne, just at the far end of Normandy. The team is called the Jimmer’s, and despite my repeated inquests, no one could tell me what a Jimmer was, exactly. “It’s a mascot,” one St. Lo ballplayer told me. Well, no kidding. Someone else though it was a bear, but that might have been lost in translation, and the mystery remains unsolved.
We arrived at St. Lo around 9:15, where I found arguably the best baseball field I have seen in France. They had a legitimate full infield, groomed and appropriately portioned. The outfield was well cared for, and among the larger I had seen (110m down the line in left, or about 361 feet.) Here are some pictures below:
In the first game, they threw their manager, a 40-year old Dominican guy with a similar appearance and demeanor as Jose Mesa, while we countered with Vince, who’s French and all of 19. Vince is a lefty with a rubber arm and a fastball that runs off the plate, and he settled down after giving up two runs in the first. He was in and out of trouble all day, but managed to get a few double plays when he needed them and generally keep the ball down, giving up only one truly hard hit ball that I remember all day. It was, incidentally, my first opportunity to make a truly great defensive play in France, a line shot two steps to my right that I dove for but couldn’t quite snare. I layed out, completely horizontal, and got a glove on it, but just couldn’t pull it in. Too bad. It would have been a highlight reel play, but I feel like since I got a glove on it, I should have had it, and it would have saved a run, not to mention a sore right shoulder.
We found ourselves down 4-0 at the end of the seventh, and I turned to Rafael and told him that if we didn’t score at least one run in the eighth, he would go in to replace me. Rafael is Venezuelan, and therefore as a foreigner, he cannot be on the field as the same time as both Matthew and I, so I’ll usually yank myself with an inning or two left or start him in the second game so as to get him his share of AB’s. However, we rallied in the seventh, plating two on three consecutive hits and a wild pitch. I came up with one out and men on second and third, down 4-2.
My efforts to “try easy” had thus far been largely unsuccessful, as I had popped up on a breaking ball up out of the zone in the second and suffered my first French strikeout
(“un ka”) in the fifth, swinging through a slider on 1-2. I actually think I got a piece of it, as the catcher dropped it at his feet, and having to check the runner at second, hesitated long enough that I was able to come barreling through first safely before he could throw me out. I had then dropped a dying quail over the first baseman’s head for an embarrassing 110-foot hit in the seventh, which of course becomes a laser beam line drive to center in “le scorebook.”
In any case, I was in the perfect situation for my newly mellow hitting philosophy, just looking for a ball up that I could elevate for an easy fly ball to right center to score the run at third. Instead, I lashed a line drive into right, scoring one run. The relay went over the first baseman’s head- which is to say, I thought it went over the first baseman’s head, so I took a wide turn at first, not realizing that it had in fact gone over the second baseman’s head directly to the first baseman, so I was caught in no-man’s land. I wish I could say I did it intentionally in order to get into a rundown and score the other runner, who had held up at third, but in fact it was just a dumb misread on my part that worked out only because I managed to stay in the pickle long enough to score that second runner, tying the game at 4. It was reassuring. No matter how badly I can be playing, I always feel like I’m going to get the hit to tie it in that kind of situation. I could be 0-5 with 5 K’s, and I’ll still feel like I’m going to drop in a base hit when it’s close and late. (Whether I actually do is another question, but it’s nice to have that confidence.)
We failed to score in our half, and then I nearly blew the game on a popup to my left, over the first baseman’s head. There wasn’t a lot of wind, but I didn’t read it well, and had to basket catch it on my left, the ball nearly popping out for what would have been a most embarrassing (and critical) error. Fortunately, I held on for the first out, later explaining to my teammates that it was “une cone de glace” (“ice cream cone”).
We had our 3-4-5 hitters up in the top of the tenth, and I thought we would score for sure, but Matt hit a long fly ball to right and Seb popped up. When I came up with two outs, I still figured we had a chance if I could play the hero, maybe sneak another base hit or walk, steal second, and then go ahead on a base hit, maybe crashing the catcher if necessary. I turned on a fastball in on the hands for a solid line drive into left field, and then stole second on the first pitch, everything seemingly going to plan. Quentin, one of our INSEP kids, then nearly made it all come true, grounding a ball in the hole between short and third as I came sprinting past the third baseman, who unfortunately made an incredible diving stop. He jumped to his feet and threw to first just in time to get Quentin. It was really a hell of a play, even if the replays later showed that Quentin was safe. (French instant replay consists of me saying to Quentin “Hey, you looked safe at first. Were you safe?” and him replying “Oui.”)
In the bottom half, Vince issued one of only five walks all day to a player that had been with Bois-Guillaume last year, and the runner promptly stole second with one out. He tagged and took third on a sac fly to center, bringing up one of the St. Lo’s youngest players. On 1-2, strangely, they put on what appeared to be the rare hit-and-run with two strikes, two outs, and a man on third. Our catcher called for a pickoff to check the runner at third, and Vince complied.
On the next pitch, disaster struck. The runner broke early from third, well before Vince had started his motion from the stretch. All Vince had to do was step off and throw a batting practice fastball to the catcher and we’d be out of the inning. Shoot, that’s the easiest play in baseball. In fact, it’s so easy that I recommend you try it some time. Just make sure that you do it in the tenth inning with a running bearing down on home plate, after you’ve pitched 9 2/3 under the hot Normandy sun, working out of jams in almost every inning, facing 44 hitters and throwing about 160 pitches. Do all of that, and you’ll see just exactly how “easy” a play it is.
After one of the most courageous pitching performances I’ve ever seen, Vince skipped a 59-footer, Matthieu couldn’t handle it, and we lost 5-4.
It’s really a shame. In any loss like that, you can usually go back and look at the missed opportunities that could have changed the game, and this one in particular was full of them. If I hang onto that line drive, or Vince makes a better throw to the catcher, or we don’t hit into two killer line-drive double plays earlier in the game, we come out on top. If Quentin is called safe, or his ground ball goes about six inches to the right, and I come rocketing around third eager to make Rose/Fosse look like a fender bender in a Safeway parking lot, and we bring in Matthew to close out the bottom half… It just kills you to think about it, and it kills you even more to remember that we again had the bases loaded with no outs and failed to score on account of a rare unassisted double play by the third baseman. That makes three times this year we’ve had the bases full of Woodchucks with nobody out, which is almost inconceivable. The Tangotiger run expectancy matrix shows that the expected run value in that situation should be about 2.4 in the major leagues, and it’s doubtlessly much higher in a league with fewer double plays like the elite league in France. It also shows that the probability of scoring at least one run- again, in a league where the defenses are much more crisp- is 87.2%, meaning that the odds of managing not to score in that situation three consecutive times is approximately 0.21%. In our league, I’d guess it’s probably half that, or about one in one-thousand. The mind reels.
If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a hundred times, and you can make it a hundred and one as of Sunday: when two evenly-matched teams play a game like that in the first game of a doubleheader, the loser always has a hard time responding in game two. We went down two runs early, but unlike game one, couldn’t respond with any kind of comeback. As Rafael had sat the entire first game (not to mention both similarly tight games in Montpelier, after a full day of travel to get there), I started him in right in the second game. In the sixth inning, he broke up their Venezuelan pitcher’s perfect game (!) with a soft line drive just over the second baseman’s glove. We rallied for two runs, but couldn’t come any closer, losing 11-2 in a game that ended in the most hellacious rain storm in which I have ever played baseball. We had stopped for a rain delay after the eight with us down by nine, but when we restarted during a brief moment of respite, the rain came pouring down immediately. I will give this to the French; they play through conditions that you would never see teams play in back home, reasoning that if they stopped for rain, they would never get to play, particularly in Normandy. For those last three outs in the ninth, it was raining so hard that the entire team was just relieved when the final hitter struck out, content to get out from under the deluge and get out of Dodge.
In my only at-bat in the second game, I took the very first pitch off the calf for a HBP, and limped to first seeing stars. It caught me just under the knee, and it hurt. On the second pitch, I tried to steal second, and got thrown out for the first time in France, ending the seventh inning. It was a strange play. The throw was up the line a bit, and the second baseman took a half step towards first and extended his glove at the precise second that I went into a headfirst slide. His glove hand, ball inside, jammed directly into my shoulder as I launched myself forward, and he shrieked in pain, collapsing in agony on the infield dirt. I was afraid he might have broken the wrist, but he later returned to finish the game after being helped off the field.
If you’re wondering why I was stealing down, at that point, five runs in the seventh, it’s just because I didn’t think they could get me, and I was still pissed off that I had gotten plunked. I waited a pitch to try to get some life back in my legs, but maybe I’m just not as fast as I think I am, especially after getting drilled in the calf.
Some more pics from Game 2:
All in all, a disappointing weekend, but one from which we have to rebound. We play against PUC at home on Sunday, and my parents will be in town visiting, so we better win them both. My elbow is feeling slightly better, but not enough to throw with any authority, so I’m trying to line up a time to see a specialist at INSEP next week.
In the meantime, I will leave you with this brief editorial note, which is that, as the recent Boston globe article pointed out, I will be attending MIT’s Sloan School in the fall. I officially accepted their offer this morning. As I have written here previously, the whole grad school application process was not something I felt merited inclusion in this blog, but it has certainly occupied a great deal of my time and energy on the side, even forcing me to shave my ridiculous (and widely appreciated) moustache in March for an interview with the MIT admissions director in Paris. I mention it here only because it reminds me just how ridiculous that last week was in Savigny. On Saturday, I got fired. On Sunday, I threw a no-hitter*. On Tuesday, I was accepted to MIT, and on Thursday, I was hired by the Woodchucks. Now, compared to all the weeks I worked in investment banking, where I occasionally went a few months without a day off, each week blurring into the next… well, that, my friends, is a week that I will remember vividly until the day I die.
Hugs and handpounds, baby, I’m coming home!
