Alto y bajo

Luis looked at me from third base. He took a step and fired the ball over to me at first as hard as he could. I got the message. It's the most important phrase in Cuban baseball. It means: get your head in the game, listen to what I have to say, fix your body language and focus on the next pitch. All without uttering a single word.

A couple hours earlier, we were using plenty of words. Loud, heated, face to face, mostly Spanish with some French words. I hadn't pitched in a month, due to two off weeks sandwiched between two Sundays of games against the bottom of the league. Games that we had won before they started, where he wanted the 16 year old Cuban Leo to pitch instead of me so he could get work in. Which I understood. I also understood that Leo could have pitched for our lower level squad, and above all else I understood that I was in France to pitch. And going five weeks between starts was a waste of my time. So I tried to get Luis to understand that.

Exactly one month earlier I had thrown a five inning no-hitter against PUC, the second place team and our main competition. The game was called early on the mercy rule, and my no-hitter sullied by the PUC scorekeeper, who retroactively switched an error to a hit to avoid embarrassment. The PUC field, overgrown grass jaggedly framing the red dirt of the infield cutout, sprawling across a clearing in the Bois de Boulogne forest on the outskirts of Paris, reminded me of fields in the Caribbean. The only things missing were palm trees lining the outfield fence. It was a spectacle of wasted potential, a lack of caring for the field and for the players on it. The Paris field and team should be the jewel of French baseball. But no one wanted to put in the work.

A month later, my record was the same as it was at the end of that day in Paris, Leo had pitched poorly against Thiais, and Luis stormed off the field as soon as the game ended. An uneasy tension is struck when dealing with something that you think you care about immensely but devote minimal time to. This contradiction pulls at French baseball from different directions, threatening to tear it in two.