Before the 75th anniversary of D-Day begins to feel too much like ancient history, I wanted to mention a baseball game that may have played…
Saw this recently. At first I thought it was a chestnut, or moldy piece of fruit. I was wrong.
With so many starts and stops, even the most canny prognosticator would have been hard-pressed to predict where French baseball was heading. Was it just hype when A. G. Spalding predicted…
We’re publishing this article to commemorate one of the most deadly battles in history, the Battle of the Somme which began 100 years ago today and claimed nearly 20,000 lives on the first day alone. By the time the…
It was not exactly the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, but it was fierce: the competition between the baseball-playing artists of Pont-Aven and their counterparts in Concarneau. The two picturesque coastal towns of…
A.G. Spalding’s big bet at the base of the Eiffel Tower - that is, his staging the first professional baseball game in France during the Universal Exposition of 1889 — paid off. A single game by the pros and…
Up and down, up again and down. That pretty much tells the story of French baseball. Today it seems to be edging up, albeit slowly. There are about 13,000 players, about a thousand added each year, and there are teams all over the country, but none of them are professional.
Yes, Virginia and everyone else, there really is baseball in France. And it’s been in this country for more than a century, almost from the beginning of the organized game. Surprisingly, it owes its…
Mash together a celebrity, a businessman and a promoter with an eye to the main chance and what do you get?