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by Aurelien Breeden
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Pershing Stadium, Bois de Vincennes Five garbage collectors watch a baseballgame.
he five garbage collectors
seem confused as they walk
up to this secluded spot of
the Bois de Vincennes, a sprawling
public park that borders the eastern
edge of Paris. They are here to empty
the trashcans around a sporting
complex known as the PershingStadium, which includes a race track
and a cluster of soccer fields. A group
of men nearby are playing boules on a
dirt track, and their metal balls fall to
the ground with a familiar thud. But in
this corner of the compound, the five
men are drawn to the much more
unfamiliar crack of a bat connecting
with a ball.
The smell of hamburgers and
hot dogs on the grill wafts through the
air as they approach the fence and stop
to watch the ball game. One of them is
sporting a tribal tattoo on his bicep;
another tucks his fluorescent jacketinto a pocket, revealing a green hoody
with a growling bulldog underneath.
Gruff and burly, the five men stand
and watch.
Ah, you see, after three
players are eliminated, they switch.
But why was he eliminated?
T
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Its because he arrived after
the ball.
The ball really goes fast
No wonder they wear
protection.
Minutes go by as the five men
slowly piece together the rules of this
strange game, until one of them
wonders aloud where the teams are
from. The ones in red? They are from
Beaucaire, comes an answer from the
other spectators. Ah. And the ones in
black? They are from Snart.
Oh really? The man in the
green hoody pauses. Waitso you
mean they are from here? he says.
Beaucaire is in the southeast of France,
and Snart is a town 25 miles south of
Paris. Both teams are here for the
Challenge de France, a yearly baseball
tournament that brings together the
best French teams.
We thought they were
foreigners!
aseball is a sport so alien to most
in France that the very idea of
French baseball players and clubs feels
odd. It has one of the oldest and most
complex sporting histories in the
country, and yet club presidents and
federation officials alike feel they
spend most of their time convincing
people they actually exist. The French
Baseball, Softball and Cricket
Federation (FFBSC) has a little over
10,000 members and a yearly budget
that hovers at 1 million euros, both of
which are 200 times less than what the
French Soccer Federation has. Even
the French Baton Twirling Federation
attracts more members than the
FFBSC.
With little to no presence in the
French media or sporting culture,
players often stumble upon the sport
the same way the five garbage
collectors did, by accident. Their
chances of discovering and loving the
sport depend on the fluctuating cycles
of Frances love-hate relationship with
the United States. In the past,
baseballs development in France has
often hinged upon events like World
War I or Frances NATO exit; today, it
is still part of American soft power,
deployed by the State Department and
Major League Baseball (MLB) alike.
Many stay committed once
they are pulled in, despite the financial,
structural and cultural obstacles that
stand in baseballs way. There is a
crying lack of fields, money, publicity
and professional prospects, but they
keep the flame burning. You have to
be different to take care of baseball in
France, said Didier Seminet, the
FFBSC president for the past three
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years. Because of all the constraints it
generates and the little visibility it has,
its really a calling.
The history of a little known
sport
calling is how one could
describe Jean-Christophe Tins
self-ascribed mission: to uncover the
early history of baseball in France and
to lay it out for all to see. Tin is a 42-
year-old senior financial lawyer at a
large French corporation who until last
year was secretary general at theFFBSC as a volunteer, like the
A
Source: French Ministry of Sports, 2011
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overwhelming majority of those who
work in baseball here.
Tall and blond, with a square
face and boyish features, Tin fell in
love with baseball thanks to one of his
uncles, a baseball coach for the French
national teams. The uncle came by
Tins house one day when he was 16,
just before the schools Mardi Gras
carnival.
I needed a costume and I
didnt have anything at all, Tin
recalls. He told me Come to my car,
Ill give you a uniform, a bat and a
glove. I had never touched a glove or
a bat, and here I was, disguised as a
baseball player. Six months later,
Tin and some friends helped create
the Snart Templars baseball club, the
current runner-up in the French top-tier
championship.
Last year, frustrated with
baseballs lack of visibility, he started
a blog called Forgotten history of a
little known sport that chronicles the
emergence of the game in the late 19th
and early 20th century. The blogs URL
uses a quote by Albert Goodwill
Spalding, an American baseball player,
manager and entrepreneur who toured
the world in 1888 and 1889 to promote
the sport and who declared on Jan. 9,
1914 that "The next baseball country
will be France.
Tins combined passion for
history and baseball has led him to dig
up surprising anecdotes about the sport
between the 1880s and the 1930s,
when a series of factors did seem to
indicate France had such potential.
Americans flocked to Paris
during theBelle poque, many of them
artists who continued to play their
national pastime in France. The
movement to revive the Olympic
games, led by Pierre de Coubertin, and
a general consensus that physical
exercise was necessary to energize the
nation after the 1870 defeat against
Prussia also sparked interest in
baseball. The triumphs of American
sporting legend Jim Thorpe at the 1912
games in Stockholm spiked particular
curiosity about the game.
He was the prototype of the
perfect athlete that the French and the
whole sporting community was
looking for at the time, a complete
athlete, Tin says. And he had
played baseball. Suddenly, the French,
inspired by Spalding and others,
thought: Thats what we need!
In 1924, the year the FFBSC
was founded, a series of exhibition
games in Paris pitting the New York
Giants against the Chicago White Sox
drew 4,000 spectators, although many
of them were probably American
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expatriates. Even the French military
took a keen interest in baseball,
according to authors Don and Petie
Kladstrup, an American couple that
live here and are writing a book about
baseball in France.
By the time World War I
rolled around, the French were very
eager to have America come into the
war, Petie Kladstrup says. They
decided that one of the best ways to do
it was to make sure that if the
Americans came they felt welcome. So
they ordered the poilus [French
infantrymen] to learn to play baseball.
A ship called The Kansan was sent
over, full of baseball equipment paid
for by the Ball and Bat Fund which
had been established by Major League
baseball owners to support the war
effort. German U-boats sank it in the
Bay of Biscay on July 10, 1917.
French military authorities
even saw baseball as a possible
training regimen for its soldiers. We
had just come out of trench warfare,
where you needed to be able to run
quickly from one trench to another and
to lob grenades into other trenches,
Tin explains. In the French army,
there was a regular grenade throwing
contest, where each regiment sent their
best thrower. When the Americans
arrived, they beat everybody.
Two men socialize at the Challenge deFrance
ut France did not embrace
baseball the way it embraced
other American sports that crossed the
Atlantic during the same period.
French sociologist Peter Marquis, who
teaches American studies at the
University of Rouen and who plays
baseball himself, has studied the
sporting interactions between
American soldiers and the French
population during World War I. Many
of them took place in resting houses
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for soldiers set up by a French branch
of the YMCA, where Americans
introduced sports like volleyball,
basketball and baseball to the French.
But baseball still didnt spread beyond
the confines of the small expatriate or
anglophile community.
In the years after the war,
thousands of French people started
playing basketball thanks to
patronages, these Christian groups that
organized youth activities, Marquis
says. Baseball wasnt chosen by this
pre-existing network, and its spread
became difficult.
Another influx of American
troops during World War II did
nothing to change the situation. I
often read about GIs talking about how
it was great to play "their" game on
French soil, says Josh Chetwynd, a
former baseball player, in an email.
Chetwynd authored Baseball In
Europe, a country-by-country
exploration of the sport in the Old
Continent. I don't blame them. They
were homesick...But the attitude,
generally speaking, wasn't Lets focus
on getting the French to love the
game.
Even the post-World War II
reconstruction craze for all things
American did not usher in an era of
French baseball. Jazz, rock, chrome
cars, pin-ups and American movies all
fascinated and shaped the personalities
of many artists, and still do today,
Marquis says. Popular culture like
comic books had a strong impact. So
why wasnt baseball part of that
baggage?
French president Charles de
Gaulles decision to withdraw France
from the North Atlantic Treaty
Organizations integrated military
command in 1966 certainly didnt
help. We consider that the NATO exit
really put us at a disadvantage, because
we lost all the Americans who were
stationed in France on military bases,
says Franois Collet, the head of
communications at the FFBSC.
In 1967, as the last American
troops were leaving France, their
colleagues in Germany and Italy
maintained a steady presence that
would prove valuable decades later
when they left fields and a history of
playing behind them. Today, there are
three times as many baseball players in
Germany as there are in France, and
Alessandro Liddi recently became the
first player born and raised in Italy to
play in the American major leagues,
with the Seattle Mariners.
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any French school children
still play thque, a centuries-
old ball game similar to baseball,
which only thickens the mystery as to
why baseball didnt catch on.
It is unclear whether thque
might have evolved into baseball at
some point in time. Baseball historian
David Block, the author of Baseball
Before We Knew It, wrote in a
chapter called The Mysterious French
Connection that there were too many
variations of thque and too many
contradictory historical accounts of its
origins since the Middle Ages to make
that claim.
There is no doubt that baseball
originated in England, but it is possible
that older ball games practiced on the
continent may have crossed the
English Channel or North Sea in
earlier centuries and somehow
influenced this process, Block added
in an email, noting that there was no
direct evidence of such a crossing.
In the minds of many French
people, baseball is an American sport,
Tin says. There are those who like it
because they like whats American,
and there are those who dont like
whats American. He believes the
improvement of Franco-American
relations since 2008 after the rocky
years under President George W. Bush
has helped bring in more players.
Baseball is a sport that has
always been in the landscape, even if
most French people arent aware of it,
Tin says. The French public knows
what baseball is, they know about the
sport. But actually trying to get into the
sport and understanding the rules,
thats more difficult.
M
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The Devils warm up in the suburbs ofLyon.
Field of dreams?
swear these rocks are
multiplying.
Mark Schapiro is the American Consul
in Lyon, Frances third most populated
city and a crossroads between the northand south of France that sits on the
Rhne and Sane rivers. He is also a
New Yorker and a devout Yankees
fan. But on this chilly morning in
April, as he rakes the pitchers mound,
Schapiro is second baseman for the
Devils, a baseball club with 120
members based in the suburbs of Lyon.
He stops and looks at the pebbles
strewn across the mound, half-amused,
half desperate.
The Devils are playing two
home games against the Cards, another
local team from a town nearby called
Meyzieu. Players clear out empty beer
bottles left by squatters from one of the
dugouts, which are painted bright red
and blue but are covered in graffiti.
Morning dew and remnants of the
previous days downpour cling to the
grass as the Devils take out balls, bats
and helmets from an old container and
set out with the chalk marker to
delineate the outfield. According to
Baptiste Fourmaux, the Devils coach,
of all the fields Ive been to in the
region, ours might be the best. Most
dont even have a dugout.
Soon, though, it could be gone.
We went to see the mayor to fix up
the current field, says Sylviane
Garcia, president of the Devils club.
She told us very plainly that we
couldnt because it isnt land that
belongs to Saint Priest but to Lyon,
and that it cant be built upon. She told
us that eventually, the houses around it
are going to choke it off, and we wont
be able to play anymore.
Problems that all small clubs
face managing small budgets,
juggling conflicting personal
I
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commitments and working with local
authorities are multiplied ten-fold
for amateur baseball players in France.
And the slow creep of neighboring
construction projects is one of the
biggest issues for the Devils, a club
created in 2002 with the merger of the
baseball teams from Bron and Saint
Priest, both small towns in suburban
Lyon.
They arent the only ones with
neighborhood problems. The fate of
the Savigny-sur-Orge baseball club is a
cautionary tale for many baseball fans
here. Located in the southern suburbs
of Paris, the Savigny-sur-Orge Lions
are one of Frances best baseball clubs,
with five championship titles and a
thirty-year-old history. Last year,
however, neighbors filed a petition
complaining about the dangers of stray
balls landing on their property. The
town hall promptly enforced a stadium
ban for the adult teams, and pending a
solution like higher backstop netting,
only little leaguers can play.
Armand Varnat, the president
of the Rhne Alpes baseball league,
knows its only a matter of time before
a similar fate befalls clubs in his
region. We know that eventually
Saint Priest is threatened, Meyzieu is
threatened, he says at the game.
Varnat is a former hypermarket
manager from Agen, a city in the
southwest of France that sits squarely
in rugby territory. In 1982, his son
came back from school with the firm
intention of playing baseball after
reading about it in class. A year later,
with no background in the game
whatsoever he played soccer as a
semi-pro Varnat founded the Agen
Blue Catchers ball club with an
entrepreneur who had just come back
from Canada.
Varnat has short white hair, salt
and pepper stubble and steely blue
eyes matching his steely resolve,
which was put to the test when his son
died in a car accident at the age of 25.
It was also the time of my life
when I was having health problems
and I had to stop working, Varnat
says as he sits on the bench in the
Devils dugout, wearing a Chicago
Cubs jacket. He had lots of baseball
projects. I took up the torch to honor
my sons memory, because I needed
to. He has been involved in baseball
since then and became president of the
Rhne Alpes league in 2009.
Much of his work involves
promoting and developing baseball in
his region. There were eight clubs
when he took over the league. Today
there are 12, with five more in the
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works. In Cruzilles-les-Mpillat, a tiny
village north of Lyon, he helped set up
top-notch baseball facilities with
showers and locker rooms, luxuries
that only clubs with financial backing
and strong local support can afford.
Next pages:
Top left: Housing construction is slowly
creeping towards the field. Top right:
Richard Duregne fills in as coach for the
Devils. Bottom left: The Devils pitch in the
first inning of game 1. Bottom right: ADevil starts running to first base.
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he day is not unfolding well for
the Devils. They claw their way
back to an honorable 10-6 loss after
conceding five runs in the first inning
of their first game, but the second one
is starting with a similar slump.
Encouragements and
exhortations to make decisions,
dammit and to get a move on
stream forth from the dugout, where
players shelter from the afternoons
first drops of rain. There are no fans or
spectators, and not just because of the
weather. If you had places for them to
sit, you might get 100 to 150 people,
based on families and friends,
Schapiro says. On a nice day, we get
15 to 20 people showing up.
Right now, Armand Varnats
major project is the Trfle French for
clover. He reaches into his backpack
and pulls out a file with Lets Go
Rhne Alpes! written on the cover
and a picture of four baseball fields
arranged like a four-leaved clover.
The Trfle baseball complex
would include locker rooms, four
fields with synthetic grass and seating
for 500 on one of them. The estimated
price tag is 5 to 6 million euros, but the
baseball federations real issue is
finding the 50,000 square meters of
land it needs to build the facility.
Varnat has been pitching the project to
various local authorities with the
American consulates assistance.
Pushing for baseball, Schapiro
said, fits very neatly with public
diplomacy objectives like promoting
American culture and doing youth
outreach, but not all local authorities
are receptive. Some people get it, and
some people dont, he says later at the
consulate, a small office in central
Lyon that overlooks the Rhne River.
And those who do get it dont always
have subsidies to spare for baseball,
which is heavily dependent on
financial help from the state.
You build a gymnasium, you
can play volleyball, squash,
badminton, indoor soccer, basketball,
says Collet, the FFBSC head of
communications. A city that builds a
gymnasium is going to serve 20
different sports associations. A city
that builds a baseball field only serves
one, often the smallest at that.
In a sense, the Devils are lucky.
The club that predated the merger was
created in 1976 and was able to obtain
a field when the mayor, who had
friends at the club and had promised to
build one, was successfully elected.
Saint Priest kept its commitment to
baseball, even after that mayor left,
Garcia says, who has been club
president for the past nine years.
T
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Eight years ago, the town hall
paid 70,000 euros for the dugouts,
fences and the backstop netting. Four
years ago, it paid 35,000 euros for dry
toilets which Garcia says was a
salutary change from the neighboring
field the players had to use before. It
was hell with the farmer. He planted
wheat there, but we had no other
choice, Garcia says. Stray balls
would also land in the field, and they
would ruin his machinery.
The farmer and his field are
now gone, but the clubs worries
arent. There are still no showers or
locker rooms. Trespassers regularly
come for barbecues or quad bike
rodeos over the pitchers mound. The
field has a locked entrance on one side
but is still accessible from the other
because the door there was stolen
twice. Baseball bats have gone
missing.
The Devils dugout.
he afternoon ends with a second
defeat (14-8) and muddy shoes.Richard Duregne, a towering 32-year-
old with the number 77 on his back
and a cigarette in his hand, says family
and friends arent really involved in his
baseball life, which started when a
friend of a friend brought him to a
game in Toulouse. Its more of a
personal pleasure, he says as he walks
toward a group of Renaults and
Peugeots with major league logos on
their rear windshields.
On the drive back to Lyon, this
manager at a biotechnology quality
control firm launches into an
impassioned declaration of love for the
T
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sport. He learned the rules playing
video games. He used to read Strike
Out, a French baseball magazine that
no longer exists. He loves Japanese
baseball manga like Rookies or
Major, which, with the Nintendo
Wii, are some of the more
unconventional ways French children
discover the game. People dont have
negative preconceptions of baseball,
he says. Its more like: No shit, it
exists in France?
Duregne is particularly
disappointed that 42, the recent
Jackie Robinson biopic, was not
released in France. Warner Brothers
probably reckoned that the subtleties
of stealing bases one of Robinsons
specialties would be lost upon a
French audience. But if Hollywood
cant be trusted to convert France to
baseball, who can?
Youth and international
development
hen Frdric Carbonne, 47,
was on vacation with his
family a few years ago in San
Francisco, his seven-year-old son saw
an on-going baseball game in a public
park. Out of curiosity more than
conviction, Carbonne bought a bat, a
ball and a glove to try it out with his
son. They even went to see a Giants
game. It was a vacation gimmick,
Carbonne said.
But when they got back to
France, his son wanted more and asked
if he could play in Paris. To
Carbonnes great surprise, it turned out
he could. He signed his son up with the
Paris University Club, or P.U.C.,
which has one of the oldest baseball
sections in the country. Soon his
daughter followed.
If you want your kid to play,
youve got to follow them, youve got
to get involved, Carbonne says at the
Mortemart Stadium, a small field also
located in the Bois de Vincennes
where the P.U.C. little leaguers were
playing on a March weekend. Now,
Carbonne says, We are hooked.
Behind him, for lack of a real organ, a
small group of parents launches into
the baseball charge theme to encourage
their children in the biting cold.
Getting them while they are
young is an essential strategy for
baseball authorities in France. The
key for our federation is youth, says
Didier Seminet, the FFBSC president,
a bald man with square glasses and a
soul patch who used to play and
manage for Snart. Not only do
enthusiastic children help get parents
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involved, they are the only way to
ensure the number of players continues
to grow.
Paradoxically, being one of
Frances oldest team sports without
anybody noticing actually helps.
Because it never broke through,
people in France see it as an innovative
discipline, Seminet says. To help
introduce baseball in schools, the
FFBSC recently signed agreements
with the Primary Education Sporting
Union, an organization that promotes
sports in schools.
France even has two baseball
training academies for high-school
level players in Rouen and Toulouse,
which recently received $100,000 from
the Baseball Tomorrow Fund, a grant
program managed by the MLB.
French expertise in the training of
young players is fairly well
recognized, says Jean-Christophe
Tin, the baseball historian.
But baseballs small size and
lack of visibility still hamper its
development, mainly because it isnt
the easiest extra-curricular activity to
chose for your child. Edith Back is an
American mother from Mississippi
with two 15 and 12-year-old boys who
also play baseball at the P.U.C. She
says baseball equipment is more
expensive than in the United States and
that longer school days arent
conducive to spending more time at a
sport.
Because baseball clubs arent
evenly spread out over France, finding
someone to play against can involve
quite a road trip. When you are 16
and you have to cover approximately
100 kilometers at minimum to play a
game, you really have to be into it,
Seminet says.
These difficulties mean the
FFBSC has a high turnover. We lose
approximately 33% of our members
every year, which means that we have
a problem keeping them, Seminet
says. But we gain 35%. Thats just
enough to sustain a small growth rate,
but still not enough to reach 13,000
members, the federations peak in the
early 1990s.
Foreigners from countries with
baseball cultures also help bring in
more members. The little leaguers
playing at Mortemart Stadium have
recently been joined by a group of
Japanese children. At the Challenge de
France, Latin pop blares from the
loudspeakers during breaks, a
testament to the strong presence of
Latin American expatriates in French
baseball.
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But the lack of adequate
infrastructure and the small pool of
members create a vicious circle. Clubs
need operational facilities and
sufficient staff to attract new members,
but they cant get more subsidies or
find skilled coaches willing to
volunteer until they get new members.
Even those who make it into
the best clubs have little to look
forward to if they want to pursue a
professional career in baseball. All
the kids who play baseball in high
school or in college dream of one thing
only, the draft, Seminet says of
American players. We dont have the
draft.
Next pages:
Left: A boy hangs on to the Pershing
Stadium fence during the Challenge de
France. Right: Children play in the
inflatable batting cage at the Challenge de
France.
Source: FFBSC
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N
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either do they have the
Olympics. Baseball was played
sporadically at different Olympic
games starting in 1904 and became an
official sport for the 1992 Olympics in
Barcelona, but the International
Olympic Committee (IOC) voted
baseball and softball out in 2005. This
barred the sports from the 2008 and
2012 games in Beijing and London,
with dire consequences for the FFBSC.
Unlike baseball leagues in the
United States or in Japan, the FFBSC
is in a public-private partnership with
the French state whereby the Ministry
of Sports gives the federation money to
organize and run baseball. Government
subsidies make up roughly half of the
FFBSCs 1 million euro annual budget.
The other half is brought in through
member licensing fees, tournament
entry fees and other external sources of
income.
But Olympic sports get more
money than regular ones. When the
IOC dropped baseball and softball in
2005 the first time a sport was
eliminated since polo was in 1936
the FFBSC felt the pinch. We
gradually lost nearly half of our
subsidies, says Collet, the federations
head of communications.
He says state help dropped
from 850,000 euros in 2008 to 450,000
euros today. And its tumbling down
because we are in a context of crisis
and austerity.
There is hope that the IOC
might vote to reinstate baseball and
softball this September after it dropped
wrestling earlier this year. Wrestling is
trying to reclaim its spot for the 2020
games, and baseball is not the only one
vying to replace it: climbing, squash,
karate, wakeboarding, wushu and
roller sports are also contenders.
espite this Olympian setback,
there are tentative signs that
French baseball is becoming
increasingly visible in the world,
starting with the MLB, which has an
office in London. We absolutely do
believe there is potential in Europe,
says Mike McClellan, director of
international game development in
New York for the MLB. Down the
road there is a business return, but its
in the big picture, he says, whether
for recruiting talents or getting
Europeans to watch televised baseball.
According to McClellan, MLB
interest in developing European
baseball started in the mid-1990s and
has picked up since then. Every year
the MLB sends over American coaches
N
D
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to the academies in Toulouse and
Rouen to help train young French
players, and it provides equipment
assistance.
The MLB also organizes the
European Academy, a yearly elite
development program that usually
takes place in Italy, where young
players from around the continent are
selected to train for free with major
league level coaches. McClellan says it
is heavily scouted, often by 20 or
more American clubs. This includes
the eight ones that have full time
scouts in Europe already, like the
Baltimore Orioles, the Pittsburgh
Pirates or the New York Mets.
McClellan says that when he started
working on international development
at the MLB in 2000, there were only
three.
This is good news for the
FFBSC, which says it entertains good
relations with baseball leagues in the
United States, Japan and elsewhere in
the world. For the first time this year,
France took part in the qualification
rounds of the World Baseball Classic
(WBC), an international tournament
sanctioned by the International
Baseball Federation.
France lost to Spain and South
Africa and did not make it past the
preliminaries. But for the FFBSC, the
invitation to the WBC was a godsend,
with all expenses paid by the MLB. It
opens up a whole range of networks
for us that we just need to build upon,
Seminet says.
Today there are no French
players in the American major leagues,
although in the past some have signed
with MLB minor league affiliates, like
Joris Bert with the Los Angeles
Dodgers or Frdric Hanvi with the
Minnesota Twins. Both are now back
in France. Pitcher Alexandre Roy
recently signed a minor league contract
with the Seattle Mariners.
oy used to play for the Rouen
Huskies, who with 9
championship titles in the past 10 years
are currently Frances strongest club
and its best showcase in Europe.
Xavier Rolland is a French television
journalist who founded the club back
in 1986 with fellow students and who
has been president since 1997. Rolland
says a long-term strategy based on
developing young talents has paid off.
We were ahead of everybody
else, we focused on training over a 10
year period and not just for the next
season, Rolland says. He is sitting at a
picnic table under the food tent at the
Challenge de France, where the Snart
Templars are crushing the Beaucaire
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Knights 16 to 3 in the seventh inning.
The Huskies are up next.
The Italians, the Dutch, they
are professionals, they have stadiums
with seating for 20,000, and we beat
them, he says proudly. Rouen is the
only French club to have reached the
Final Four, a post-season tournament
between the best four European teams.
And a growing international reputation
helps attract enough financing from
exterior partners like the MLB to cut
off from public subsidies.
In a way, the Huskies could be
the future of French baseball: a strong
European team with financial
independence and a long-term
development strategy that helps export
top players abroad. But even Rouen
cant seem to win over the home
audience, which is key for baseball to
truly blossom in France.
Rolland says the Rouennais are
sympathetic towards the team and
appreciate its victories but dont show
up at games. He is particularly irritated
by the fact that the soccer team in
Rouen gets more media attention than
they do despite poorer results. When
a soccer player gets a cold, he gets a
whole page even though he plays in a
low division, he says. We are at the
European summit, we are getting
interest from Japan, and we dont get a
sentence.
For Rolland, complexity isnt
an excuse. People say We dont
understand anything! We always
answer: the Americans understand it,
he says jokingly. How hard can it be?
Players from Beaucaire at the Challengede France food tent.
The culture question
ack at the Challenge de France,
the five garbage collectors are
gone but the crowd of spectators has
swelled to a couple hundred, bringing
the concentration of French people
who actually know what the Red Sox
or Braves logos on their clothes and
caps stand for to an unusually high
threshold. Some of them bask in the
B
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Aurelien Breeden 24
sun on the bleachers while others bring
their children to an inflatable batting
cage or buy them fries and a hotdog
in a baguette.
Baseball faces so many
difficulties in France that many have
their own theory about what element of
French culture isnt compatible with
the sport.
According to FFBSC president
Didier Seminet, we will never be able
to change French sporting culture, or
even the European one: its a sporting
culture that goes left-right, left-right.
Victor Vitelli, who has worked
extensively on baseball at the
American consulate in Lyon with
Mark Schapiro, says theres a
distorted image of what you actually
need to play baseball because the
French focus too much on fields and
stadiums that fit international norms.
You just need a place where you can
hit a ball, he adds.
For Baptiste Fourmaux, the
Bron - Saint Priest Devils coach, the
French find baseball too long and slow
because they are used to shorter,
concentrated games. In soccer, you
arrive at the beginning, everybody
squeezes in, and when the game is over
everybody leaves and goes home, he
says. Whereas in baseball, people
come and go, its more relaxed.
Peter Marquis, the sociologist,
says the implantation of a sport is a
long and complex process, and
baseball just might be too atypical to
export. After all, he says, how can you
call it Americas national pastime and
expect it to grow elsewhere?
nd yet, difficultly and
haltingly, baseball grows in
the hearts and minds of
French children, teenagers and adults,
who come from the biggest cities and
the tiniest villages and who discovered
the sport in too many different ways to
count.
Michel Bachelet, 28, is
unemployed. He studied engineering
and spent six months in Florida on a
university exchange program, where
he fell in love with the game. When he
came back to Lyon, he started playing
with the Devils.
After the game in April, on the
metro ride home, he thinks about what
it is, exactly, that drew him to baseball.
Its a sensation. The ball is going up,
its right there He stops, looks up
and smiles. He says there is nothing
like that short adrenalin burst when
you face your opponent, an individual
duel frozen in time, unlike the constant
flow of soccer. Bachelet himself seems
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frozen while the crowd bustles around
him. Its the pleasure of hitting the
ball, of catching the ball.
Several weeks later, a
travelling Christian evangelical
community trespassed on the Devils
home field and settled there with cars
and trailer homes. The Devils do not
know when they will be able to play
next.
A lone mascot at the Challenge de France
Next pages:
Top left: Trophies at the FFBSC
headquarters in Paris. Top right: Snart
throws out a Beaucaire runner. Bottom
left: P.U.C. little leaguers play atMortemart Stadium. Bottom right: Muddy
Devil shoes in Saint Priest.
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