Bleu, Blanc, Baseball? · 2013-10-09 · 10,000 members and a yearly budget that hovers at 1...

© Aurelien Breeden 1

Bleu,

Blanc,

Baseball?

by Aurelien Breeden


Pershing Stadium, Bois de Vincennes – Five garbage collectors watch a baseball game.

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 Pershing

Stadium, 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 jacket

into 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


“It’s 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 Sénart.”

“Oh really?” The man in the

green hoody pauses. “Wait…so you

mean they are from here?” he says.

Beaucaire is in the southeast of France,

and Sénart 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 France’s love-hate relationship with

the United States. In the past,

baseball’s development in France has

often hinged upon events like World

War I or France’s 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 baseball’s 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

B


years. “Because of all the constraints it

generates and the little visibility it has,

it’s really a calling.”

The history of a little known

sport

calling is how one could

describe Jean-Christophe Tiné’s

self-ascribed mission: to uncover the

early history of baseball in France and

to lay it out for all to see. Tiné is a 42-

year-old senior financial lawyer at a

large French corporation who until last

year was secretary general at the

FFBSC – as a volunteer, like the

A

Source: French Ministry of Sports, 2011


overwhelming majority of those who

work in baseball here.

Tall and blond, with a square

face and boyish features, Tiné fell in

love with baseball thanks to one of his

uncles, a baseball coach for the French

national teams. The uncle came by

Tiné’s house one day when he was 16,

just before the school’s Mardi Gras

carnival.

“I needed a costume and I

didn’t have anything at all,” Tiné

recalls. “He told me ‘Come to my car,

I’ll 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,

Tiné and some friends helped create

the Sénart Templars baseball club, the

current runner-up in the French top-tier

championship.

Last year, frustrated with

baseball’s 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 blog’s 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.”

Tiné’s 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 the Belle Époque, 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,” Tiné says. “And he had

played baseball. Suddenly, the French,

inspired by Spalding and others,

thought: ‘That’s 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


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,”

Tiné 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 de

France

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

B


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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 ‘Let’s 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 wasn’t baseball part of that

baggage?”

French president Charles de

Gaulle’s decision to withdraw France

from the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization’s integrated military

command in 1966 certainly didn’t

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 François 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.


any French school children

still play thèque, a centuries-

old ball game similar to baseball,

which only thickens the mystery as to

why baseball didn’t catch on.

It is unclear whether thèque

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 thèque 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,”

Tiné says. “There are those who like it

because they like what’s American,

and there are those who don’t like

what’s 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 aren’t aware of it,”

Tiné 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,

that’s more difficult.”

M


The Devils warm up in the suburbs of

Lyon.

Field of dreams?

swear these rocks are

multiplying.”

Mark Schapiro is the American Consul

in Lyon, France’s third most populated

city and a crossroads between the north

and south of France that sits on the

Rhône and Saône rivers. He is also a

New Yorker and a devout Yankees

fan. But on this chilly morning in

April, as he rakes the pitcher’s 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 day’s 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 I’ve been to in the

region, ours might be the best. Most

don’t 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

couldn’t because it isn’t land that

belongs to Saint Priest but to Lyon,

and that it can’t be built upon. She told

us that eventually, the houses around it

are going to choke it off, and we won’t

be able to play anymore.”

Problems that all small clubs

face – managing small budgets,

juggling conflicting personal

“I


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 aren’t 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 France’s 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 Rhône Alpes baseball league,

knows it’s 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

Devil’s dugout, wearing a Chicago

Cubs jacket. “He had lots of baseball

projects. I took up the torch to honor

my son’s memory, because I needed

to.” He has been involved in baseball

since then and became president of the

Rhône 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


works. In Cruzilles-les-Mépillat, 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: A

Devil starts running to first base.


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 afternoon’s

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 Varnat’s

major project is the Trèfle – French for

clover. He reaches into his backpack

and pulls out a file with “Let’s Go

Rhône Alpes!” written on the cover

and a picture of four baseball fields

arranged like a four-leaved clover.

The Trèfle 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 federation’s 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 consulate’s 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 don’t,” he says later at the

consulate, a small office in central

Lyon that overlooks the Rhône River.

And those who do get it don’t 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


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 club’s worries

aren’t. There are still no showers or

locker rooms. Trespassers regularly

come for barbecues or quad bike

rodeos over the pitcher’s 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 aren’t really involved in his

baseball life, which started when a

friend of a friend brought him to a

game in Toulouse. “It’s 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


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 don’t have

negative preconceptions of baseball,”

he says. “It’s 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 Robinson’s

specialties – would be lost upon a

French audience. But if Hollywood

can’t be trusted to convert France to

baseball, who can?

Youth and international

development

hen Frédéric 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

Carbonne’s 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,

you’ve got to follow them, you’ve 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 Sénart. Not only do

enthusiastic children help get parents

W


involved, they are the only way to

ensure the number of players continues

to grow.

Paradoxically, being one of

France’s 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

Tiné, the baseball historian.

But baseball’s small size and

lack of visibility still hamper its

development, mainly because it isn’t

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 aren’t

“conducive to spending more time at a

sport.”

Because baseball clubs aren’t

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%.” That’s just

enough to sustain a small growth rate,

but still not enough to reach 13,000

members, the federation’s 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.


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 can’t 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 don’t 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


N


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

FFBSC’s 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 federation’s

head of communications.

He says state help dropped

from 850,000 euros in 2008 to 450,000

euros today. “And it’s 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 it’s

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

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D


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 Frédéric 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 France’s 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 Sénart

Templars are crushing the Beaucaire

R


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

can’t 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 don’t 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 don’t get a

sentence.”

For Rolland, complexity isn’t

an excuse. “People say ‘We don’t

understand anything!’ We always

answer: the Americans understand it,”

he says jokingly. How hard can it be?

Players from Beaucaire at the Challenge

de 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


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 isn’t 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: it’s 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 “there’s 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, it’s 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 America’s 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.

“It’s a sensation. The ball is going up,

it’s 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

A


frozen while the crowd bustles around

him. “It’s 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: Sénart

throws out a Beaucaire runner. Bottom

left: P.U.C. little leaguers play at

Mortemart Stadium. Bottom right: Muddy

Devil shoes in Saint Priest.

Bleu, Blanc, Baseball? · 2013-10-09 · 10,000 members and a yearly budget that hovers at 1...

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Transcript of Bleu, Blanc, Baseball? · 2013-10-09 · 10,000 members and a yearly budget that hovers at 1...