Baseball has disgusted me in recent weeks. Arte Moreno sold the Anaheim Angels for $4 billion, marking a $3.8 billion profit despite being, for two decades, one of MLB’s worst owners. The alleged self-dealing of Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter ignited a debate about the dark money sloshing around sports. And MLB team owners as a group remain hellbent on an offseason lockdown. Then I found a baseball field in Paris, and I had a catch.
Intellectually, I knew how rare baseball was on the continent when moving to France last year. I was still struck by how absent the game is. The NBA has a store down the street from me (and the French, through Tony Parker and Victor Wembanyama, have a long love affair with the San Antonio Spurs). The NFL brings a game to Paris next month, and expat and sports bars regularly play American football. Hockey is an extremely popular sport in central and eastern Europe. MLB is truly nowhere.
CANAL+, a major broadcasting platform in France, often lists an MLB game on one of its several sports channels, with first pitch in the middle of the night. I tried it last year for the playoffs. I never got past a loading screen. There certainly aren’t baseball watch parties or retail stores. One bar owner told me that he had once declined to put on a Texas Rangers game when a tourist asked for it, even though the bar did have the channel. That’s even with MLB stars playing for European nations in the World Baseball Classic (albeit often with tenuous familial links to the countries). That’s even with Curaçao providing the Netherlands a serious baseball culture. None of this deters the Paris Patriots.
For longer than I have been alive, the French have sustained the Patriots baseball club at Stade Pershing in the Bois de Vincennes. They’ve won several regional championships—there are dozens of baseball clubs in France with whom the Patriots compete—and now their club fields teams in several youth divisions. For adults, there are several competitive levels in baseball and softball, and all genders are welcome.
I learned this during the club’s open house, which they had advertised on their Instagram. A friend, a fellow baseball obsessive who plays in a co-ed league in Los Angeles, asked me to tag along with her. The weather was Southern California-like, and it felt like a hug hearing the familiar pings and thuds of the game. What was new was hearing people yell “Je!” to call for a flyball.
A double play was un double-jeu. Second base was le deuxieme. I thought I heard one player borrow from football and call a foul ball hors-jeu, the French term for offsides. It was amazing to see this version of baseball, even though, out of practice, I had forgot a hat and had to squint through the sun to watch it.
After the team finished their scrimmage, my friend and I borrowed a couple of gloves and we had a catch on the field. Stade Pershing is named after the legendary American general because, according to Baseball Reference, American troops used the grounds to stage baseball games during World War I. There is nothing exceptional about Stade Pershing, and nothing peculiar. It’s a standard-issue community baseball field. Baseball is baseball is baseball.
In writing about having a catch, I risk wading in nostalgic and sentimental waters. But if the simple yet powerful act reminds me that, despite their monopolistic ideologies and their best efforts, MLB team owners don’t and can never own the game of baseball, then call me Roy Hobbs.