Editor’s Note: Feast or famine, it seems. After weeks with nothing, you get this Kaczynski-style rant… oh well. I thought about breaking it in two, but it seemed better to just get it down on paper while it was fresh. Hugs and handpounds, Ev Seeing as how I tend to run off at the lip […]
Editor’s Note: Feast or famine, it seems. After weeks with nothing, you get this Kaczynski-style rant… oh well. I thought about breaking it in two, but it seemed better to just get it down on paper while it was fresh. Hugs and handpounds,
Ev
Seeing as how I tend to run off at the lip from time to time- or, in fact, almost all the time- it should come as no surprise when I say that there’s so much to say and so little time in which to say it. I’ve got anywhere between 10 and 15 posts that I’ve started but not finished, finished but not edited, and edited but not posted, and the list keeps growing as some of these topics become increasingly irrelevant with the passage of time. There were two posts on the World Cup, one on French radio, a few other language hijinks, and the wrap-ups for the games at Rouen and La Guerche. I had several posts prepared during my weeks off, just a few goofy stories that happened while I was traveling around, and another on the state of French baseball. I’d like to think that these will eventually see the light of day.
In the meantime, however, here’s an honest snapshot of Have Bat, Will Travel- and by extension, my life- on August 21, 2006, and where it’s going over the next two months. But first, let’s backtrack a bit.
If you remember, the idea all along was that I wanted to play professional baseball in Europe, to settle a bet or give a joke a punchline, however you want to look at it. Well, check. I quit a lucrative but miserable job as an investment banker, trained for six months, and flew off to France to join the Savigny Lions, who promptly fired me on April Fool’s Day, a scant four weeks after my arrival in the country. On my last day in a Lions uniform, I no-hit the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks over five innings, and they acquired my contract from the Lions for a little bit more than the average tank of gas in France. Battling serious elbow pain that stemmed from my over-extending myself during what I believed to be my last game in France, I managed to hit and field well enough during my recovery to avoid getting fired, coaching the team through a difficult season along with our other foreigner, an Australian pitcher. I even managed to break my nose playing out of position at first. Still with me? Good.
Here is where it gets complicated.
When I was on the phone with the Woodchucks in early April, agreeing to come to Normandy, they asked me how long I would be in France. “Until the end of the season,” I replied. “Jusqu’au but.”
At this point, it was easy to make such a promise. On account of my woefully unimpressive résumé and hall-of-fame GPA (in that 1-out-of-3 will get you into the hall of fame), I had successfully been rejected or waitlisted by every school to which I had applied. For any future MBA applicants that are reading, might I suggest you avoid the “I quit a career in a go-getter industry so I could earn 300 Euros a month playing French baseball” angle to your application essays. Harvard and Stanford (my alma mater, I say with only the slightest tinge of bitterness) had told me to go pound sand, and Northwestern’s JD/MBA program had put me on the waitlist for a program with only 25 spots: not exactly the catbird’s seat. It seemed pretty likely that I wouldn’t be going to grad school in the fall after all, and therefore I could commit myself freely to a team until the season ended in mid-October. I knew they’d want someone until the end of the season, and I was all too eager to get picked up.
In a simple twist of fate, the day after talking to the Woodchucks, I was accepted at MIT, the only other school to which I had applied. Suddenly, the future was a little bit brighter, if more complicated. Two months later still, Northwestern came through with an offer off the waitlist, and after weeks of churning over it for all the wrong reasons (“Sure, the program at NU is probably better for me in the long run, but it’s a hell of a lot farther from Fenway,” for example) I found myself convinced by the suggestions of all my trusted friends and some very good Napa Valley wine. Sweet Home Chicago, here I come.
So there’s the rub. Northwestern’s first-year law students (the JD/MBA’s begin their first year at the law school in Chicago) arrive at orientation on August 25th, or as those of us in the industry call it, Friday. Even before a rainout against Montpelier dictated that we play two makeup games on September 10th, I knew that the Woodchucks would have games on the 27th of August and on the 3rd of September. More importantly, however, there is the matter of the playoffs, or as they call it in France, the “playdown.”
French baseball is like most European sports in that the top team in the second division gets to advance to the first division, while the bottom team from the top division gets relegated to the second division. It’s so prevalent that the French were astonished to hear me explain that if the Yankees finish last, they don’t get relegated to Triple-A. If that were the case, the Royals would currently be fielding a schedule against the Nashua Pride and the Toledo Mud Hens Alumni Club.
In the case of the 9-team (more on that later) Elite Division in French baseball, this means that the top four teams according to W-L records will play for the championship. (This will almost certainly be Toulouse, Rouen, Savigny, and one of La Guerche, Senart, or Montpelier). The bottom five will run some sort of tournament to determine who gets relegated, which may or may not involve some participation by the teams in the second division (called N1A). Now, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but seeing as almost every week this summer, I posted about us dropping a heartbreaking two games, we’re a whole lot closer to the bottom than we are to the top. In fact, we’re currently tied with PUC for last place, and even then only on account of four forfeit wins from the first games of the year.
Earlier in the summer, rumor had it that the bottom five teams in Elite would play a ten-game (five weekends) tournament against the top seven teams in N1A to determine the six teams that would remain in an expanded ten-team elite division. It’s still unclear- no one seems to know what the Tres Lettres has decided at any one time- but it seems now that the expansion to ten teams has been cancelled, and instead the elite division will constrict back to eight teams for the purposes of scheduling. Going off on a small tangent, you may wonder why the league would ever consist of an awkward number like nine teams. The reason is that last year, Bois-Guillaume and PUC were once again tied for last place, and relegation was at stake during the last weekend’s doubleheader, when the two clashed at PUC’s home field at INSEP in the woods east of Paris. Bois-Guillaume miraculously pulled out both games, avoiding demotion and sending PUC down to the second division… until, of course, the Tres Lettres intervened, reasoning that PUC, the only club in Paris and one of the oldest and once wealthiest, couldn’t possibly be demoted to N1A regardless of the outcome on the field. Unhappy with the results of pure competition, they decided instead to expand to eight teams to keep PUC in the ballgame. It would sort of be like Fox Sports looking at last year’s World Series matchup and saying “wait a minute, White Sox/Astros? Screw that- Yankees/Dodgers is better for ratings!” In any case, you can be damned sure that if Bois-Guillaume is on the short end of the stick this year, no paternal Federation is going to swoop in and save them from demotion. To put it mildly, everyone expects Bois-Guillaume to go down, and frankly, a lot of people *want* Bois-Guillaume to go down.
You can see where they’re coming from, I suppose. Savigny just couf’d on us twice, 20-0, 20-0, and we never came close to beating Rouen in four tries. We lost preposterously (26-0, I believe) to Senart in the game where I broke my nose in the first inning, and 20-0 to La Guerche. On the other hand, with a break here or there, we could have eight additional wins. We lost 7-6 to Savigny, 4-3 to Toulouse in eleven innings, 5-4 to St. Lo in 10, and 7-6 to PUC in 10. We dropped two games to Montpelier by a combined three runs, lost 3-2 to Senart in the first game before the subsequent blowout, and should have beaten PUC in both of our games. Naturally, there’s a sentiment that this is only on account of the Australian’s pitching, expressed to me as recently as Sunday by of all people one of the umpires. He mentioned something about how we were having a tough season, and while not at all defensive, I told him it was tough without all your players, and how with a few breaks we could have won a whole lot more games. “Sure, but those were just the games started by, what was his name, Blackmore? The Australian?” Swallowing my temper, I calmly pointed out that the Senart, St. Lo, and one of the PUC matches were started by Vincent, and the Toulouse close call by Quentin, but he replied only with a disinterested “Ah bon?”, which in this case was the French way of saying “I’m not really listening, but I get the distinct impression that whatever you’re saying is probably horse shit.” Keep in mind, this assumption that B-G has been annihilated in every game not started by an expensive import was being voiced to me by an umpire who was actually at a lot of the games in question. I’ll leave it at that, because the rest of that rant goes into a separate post I’ve been working on entitled “Why Bois-Guillaume Always Gets Treated Like the 110-Pound Man In Prison.”*
Anyway, they’re entitled to their opinions. Hell, maybe they’re even right. Maybe Bois-Guillaume “should” go down to the second division. The point is, it’s not my job to determine who “should” go down. That’s not why I’m here. It’s my job to fight like hell every weekend to see that we don’t. Unfortunately, I don’t have strings I can pull in the Federation offices should it come to that, and I don’t have people I can call to get us that extra bat or that extra arm we need to put us a leg up. All I’ve gotten is an elbow that’s slowly on the mend, a few wood bats I haven’t broken yet, and some legs that still have a little spring despite existing in a body that’s far closer to an MBA than it ever was to the MLB.
And maybe it won’t be enough. But I’ll be damned if we just roll over and enjoy it. If we go down, it’ll be down in flames, hair on fire, fighting tooth and nail to the end. And if we start to get a few bounces, and the bats come out of their summer-long swoon, and a certain 27-year old elbow makes a miracle recovery, and if, and if, and if…
There I go again. Sounding like a Red Sox fan.
Which leaves you where, you might ask, for grad school? Cutting to the chase, it’s obvious that the smart thing to do would be to bow out gracefully, thank everyone for the opportunity, hop on a plane back to Chicago and get on with the rest of my life. Hang up the spikes, join a rec league, admit that the whole crazy “play French baseball for a year” idea was fun while it lasted, and return to the real world where there are bills to pay and classes to attend and a future to build.
Obviously, that would be the smart thing to do, the rational thing. It’s equally obvious to me that if I were the type of person who always did the “rational thing,” I wouldn’t be tapping out this message in a dingy Rouen apartment, looking proudly across the room at a dirt- and blood-stained Woodchucks jersey with my name on the back. (I’d probably be back in investment banking, looking at a promotion, a six-figure salary and an expense account, while figuring out how to best slash my wrists in the nearest bathtub.) I’d much rather consider myself the type of person about whom the worst that could be said was that when he made a promise to a team that took a chance on him, stuck with him when he wasn’t at full health, and did everything they could to make him comfortable in a strange land, he didn’t turn around and drop his end of the bargain simply because it became inconvenient. At the end of the day, the Woodchucks stuck by me when I needed them; I won’t turn around and bail when they need a good ballplayer, even if I’ll have to do in a pinch.
While you can’t have your cake and eat it too, I think you can try to begin a three-year, dual-degree program while doing everything you can to help a baseball team keep it’s head above water in a country that couldn’t care less about the sport, in a league that couldn’t care less about the club. And so it’s with some sadness that this is my last week living in France. After Sunday’s games, conveniently in Paris against PUC, I’ll be staying at a friend’s place (thanks Sierra and Miklos!) before catching an early morning flight to Chicago to begin at Northwestern… for a few weeks. From mid-September until mid-October, I will be commuting back-and-forth from Chicago to Paris for five weekends of playoff games, leaving Friday night and returning Monday morning. There were air miles and a good travel agent and some personal savings involved, but I got it done.
When I first started the HBWT website, I got a few messages saying “You’re nuts” or “This is a big mistake.” They might have been right, but what those people didn’t understand was that I was never doing any of this for a job, or for a career, for money or for fame. I was doing it for me, because I thought it would be fun, and because I thought it would make a good story to tell some day ages and ages hence, be it in a watering hole with other has-beens or, as my friend Jools put it, at a dinner table to a misbehaving toddler (“Shut up. Your gramps got paid to play baseball once. Eat your greens.”)
I like to think that even now, with the mission accomplished, the nose broken, and the jersey and t-shirt safely acquired, that the same spirit is still at work. “Flying back and forth from grad school in Chicago to Paris to try and help a French baseball team avoid demotion to the second division? How incredibly cocky to think you could make a difference. It’s absurd, it’s silly, it’s crazy, and it’s impossible.”
Perhaps. Perhaps it is.
But that’s how I roll.
* I want to make it clear that I don’t think that there’s any sort of conspiracy against Bois-Guillaume in this respect; we get the same calls, good and bad, that every other team gets around the league. I mention this incident only because it’s entirely representative of the overwhelming disrespect that BG gets not only from teams around the league but also from umpires and officers of the league itself.