Pole Espoir Practice Game

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On Wednesday before our scheduled practice we had a scrimmage against Pole Espoir, a school/sports academy just outside of Rouen. There are several programs at schools throughout France for baseball, but Pole d’Espoir is the top school where kids from 14-18 years old go to study and practice baseball. They have 15 hours a week of baseball year-round, and then in the Spring they play games against the other baseball schools and against some club teams. Two of the players on the Bois-Guillaume team are students at Pole Espoir who play for us on the weekends.

The head baseball coach and instructor at Pole Espoir is also the head coach for the U-15 French National Baseball Team, and many of his students at the school are also on the national team.

I absolutely loved playing in the game. Compared to our game on Saturday, this was a much higher level of baseball. Pitchers were throwing strikes, people were making plays in the field, people were stealing bases and taking extra bases. There were lots of errors on both sides; the game was a bit sloppy, but it had more of a semblance of competitive baseball. The Pole Espoir team had a structure, they had a warmup routine, the pitchers on the mound were thinking about what pitches they were throwing and where, the batters had an approach at the plate.

I pitched two innings and was caught by Amin, a 14 year old who plays for the Pole Espoir team. He did a great job catching—one thing he and I talked about during the game was where he was setting up his target. I was wanting him to give me location for each pitch, i.e. to set his glove up on the inside or the outside of the plate, but every time he would set up right down the middle. He told me that Sylvain, his coach, taught them to always start the first pitch with a strike right down the middle. In fact this is a great thing to teach kids when they are younger and learning, because even at Division III college level, where I played in the US, with the exception of a few hitters in every lineup, many hitters either take the first pitch or do not hit it very well because they are not ready for it. This allows you to get ahead of the hitter early in the at-bat.

I hit a home run in my third at-bat, over the right-center fence. That was fun. The bat I used to hit the home run with was broken later that day by another player during batting practice later that same day. He swung at an outside pitch, hit the ball off the end of the bat and ‘crack,’ the bat snapped in two.

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Alternate Roads
Will, During WW2 we found that the French had set up parallel routes to always be available in time of war. Gerard Huve's dad told me about this.