Tag: World Series

Watching the Playoffs in Paris

If you mention baseball to a french person, they will either look at you incomprehensibly or roll their eyes. It’s not that they don’t know about the sport of baseball. It’s that they don’t understand such slow action and, therefore, the French do not do baseball. At the World Baseball Classic, an every four-year event that actually includes teams from all over the world, the Dutch have a baseball team, the Italians have a baseball team, but the French team is largely composed of Major League players who have some French in their ancestry.

Opening Nite in Houston-Game 1 (photo from CNN website as are all the rest of the photos).

So it is with great gratitude that I watch Apple TV+’s Weekly WrapUp every Saturday. In the US, it is shown on Friday nights, but as I live in a timezone that is six hours ahead of the East Coast, I get it on Saturdays. Now that the PlayOffs are in full swing, I get a daily report which I watch at noon. I can watch a nine-inning game in eight minutes. I’m so happy I get that. And for some people, eight minutes is just perfect. They get all the action and none of the stress of waiting, inning by inning, to learn who wins. For those of you who aren’t big baseball fans, the better team doesn’t always win. It’s part of baseball.

For Game 1 of the World Series, the Philadelphia Phillies were playing the Astros in Houston. I don’t know how fans in the US feel but, for me, the Astros have taken over from the Yankees as “the team we love to hate.” After the Astros won the World Series in 2017, it was discovered by Major League Baseball that the team was stealing signs. They did not lose their title. Fans were outraged. Maybe not Houston fans! Ok, then there is Dusty Baker who is now the manager of the Astros. He’s just about as nice a baseball person as you can find. It’s hard to imagine that he would be a party to sign stealing (any more than the rest of the teams). I know there are fans who are convinced that the Astros are still crooked.

Dusty Baker, manager of the Houston Astros

Back to Game 1 played last Friday. It went ten innings. For a fan like me, watching a nail-biter in eight minutes just doesn’t do it. As the lead went back and forth between the teams, I was just imagining what it would be like sitting in the stands, ecstatic when it is your team ahead and down in the dumps when the other team took the lead. In the end, in the tenth inning, the Phillies won. So a word about the Astros Opening Nite pitcher. I realize that for some of you this is way more information than you care to know. But it will help you understand why some people breathe baseball. And why as my friend, Darcy’s father used to say: “there are two seasons in the year. Winter and baseball season.” He was not wrong.

Justin Verlander, Opening nite pitcher for the Astros.

Justin Verlander was the Opening Nite pitcher for the Astros. He is and has been a great pitcher. He used to pitch for the Detroit Tigers. Back in the day when the Oakland A’s finished first in the American League West, somehow their first opponent in the playoffs was the Detroit Tigers two years in a row. And twice with the two teams tied 2-2 with one game to go to play the next tier of the playoffs, Justin Verlander would be on the mound for Game 5. It didn’t matter how tired he was, like Marly’s ghost, he loomed large over the A’s. And the A’s lost. Justin Verlander is moche ( french for ugly, total yuk) in the minds of A’s fans. And here he was, ten years later, Opening Nite pitcher for the team we love to hate. It may have only been an eight-minute game, but for this A’s fan, I jumped up and down when the stats said that Verlander was the losing pitcher!!!

I grew up for the first fourteen years of my life in the Philadelphia suburbs. Nothing about Philadephia says ‘home’ to me. My mother moved from Princeton, NJ to lower Bucks County in her late seventies. So it is easy for me to root for the Phillies. The last time the Phils won the World Series was in 2008, the year my mother died. The Oakland A’s started out in 1904 as the Philadelphia A’s. In 1954, they moved to Kansas City. After a short unsuccessful stint there, they moved to Oakland in 1967. I’ve always felt a kinship to the Philadelphia A’s and, at one point in my life, was given a lifetime membership to the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Museum. 

Jimmy Foxx of the Philadelphia Athletics

Four World Series games have been played. The teams are tied 2-2. Only the first two games were tight with the teams matching each other play for play. Last night, the Astros set a WS record: 4 pitchers pitched a No Hitter. Not one Phillies player got a hit. So what’s left is the best of three!

fans in Philadelphia waving their rally towels

If you’ve read this far, thank you. People ask how I could have ever moved to Paris when I love baseball so much. I really don’t have an answer to that question. I can tell you that it feels very nice to write about baseball. I am hoping to go to Spring Training in Arizona next March. So I’ll end with a shout out to all Phillies fans around the world. Go Phighting Phils!!!

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A Bientôt,

Sara

The Bad and the Good

Somewhere I heard a saying “Make plans, God laughs” or something to that effect.  After having written my post on Monday and looking forward to my flight to San Francisco on Tuesday, everything changed.  I woke up at 4:15 and treated myself to a taxi since it was a bank holiday in France and I wasn’t sure of the trains.  I arrived a little before 6am to learn that my flight was ‘delayed’ 11 hours.  Would I like to reschedule?  After hearing my options, I told the woman at the check-in desk that I’d rather wait for a direct flight at 7pm.  I’d just go back into Paris.   Weeeelllll, she really did draw that word out, it might be safer if I rescheduled another flight.  She clearly already knew what she couldn’t tell me–that the flight would be cancelled 20 minutes later.

It seemed my only option was to wait at Charles de Gaulle for 5 hours then fly to Washington D.C.  I would go through passport control and customs in Washington then go to a domestic terminal after checking my luggage back in.  I’d get a flight to SFO about 2 hours later.  And even though I had upgraded to Business Class with miles, “we are so sorry, Madame, there are no business class seats left, so you’ll fly economy”

CDG-star-alliance-business-class-lounge-cdg-05443-533x400.jpg                                                                              United Lounge at Charles De Gaulle airport

First, I’m not good with change.  It throws me.  I’m not very good at waiting.  However I managed to sit in the United Lounge for my requisite hours, e-mailing people that I wouldn’t be where I was supposed to be and boarded the plane to Washington.  I’ve been very lucky, as it turns out.  Both Paris and San Francisco are very lenient with flights coming from both cities about getting through customs.  Not so in Washington D.C.  I was walking down the walkway when a cute looking beagle walked right up to my suitcase smiling away.  The beagles handler asked me if I had fruit etc in the suitcase and I said yes, and waved my Drs letter.  She gave me an orange sticker and pointed me in the direction of  a new conveyor belt.  Between fatigue, disappointment over all the changes and some basic unfounded fear, I had myself a temper tantrum.  The little woman in charge of investigating criminals bringing one apple into the US was tearing open all my presents I had bought in tax-free while waiting at CDG.  She found my apple and gleefully raised it with an ah ha, gotcha you.  I tried some 10 year old manipulation tactics that never worked when I was 10 years old so not sure why I thought they’d work now.  Yes, I made a scene and in so doing, turned what was already an uncomfortable day into a bit of a nightmare for myself.

 

CBPDulles_800_1.JPG                                                                     My cute little beagle at Dulles International!!

Sans apple, I rechecked my luggage and made my way to the second leg of my flight. I got to my home in Oakland, California about 9 hours after I was rescheduled to arrive.  I didn’t have to stay awake until this time zone’s night time, I went right to bed and got a good night’s sleep.  But it took me another day to stop blaming customs in Washington DC for my “nightmare” trip and own up to the fact that I brought quite a bit of it on myself.

My willingness to be a little more generous may have had a lot to do with the fact that I got to see my first baseball game Wednesday evening since last April.  For a baseball fan, that is quite a drought.  And what a game!  Game 7 between two evenly matched teams that were both in search of an illusive World Series Championship.  For the Chicago Cubs, it had been 108 years.  I was rooting for them just because of that history.

And what a nail biter of a game.  Trying to explain baseball to a french person is somewhat like trying to teach Chinese in a day.  The french are Futbol fans.  Futbol is fast and lively.  People who don’t understand baseball say it is like watching paint dry!  So I go without baseball in Paris.

 

IMG_5283.JPGThe game was so unpredictable, so closely matched and, in my opinion, so overly managed by Joe Maddon, that the Chicago Cubs won in spite of him.  Not that this is news to anyone.  Everyone in the world must know that “Wait till next year” came this year.  The Chicago Cubs are 2016 World Champions–although the word world is a bit euphemistic.  It was thrilling, it was worse than a horror film.  At one point, I changed the channel, I thought my stomach would never survive the back and forth of scores between the two teams.  But the Cubs had God on their side Wednesday.  There was a seventeen minute rain delay and in that time, the Cubs held a team meeting without any of the coaches and boosted themselves back on board as winners.

 

360-worldseries-largeHorizontal375.jpgExcitement and joy are contagious.  I’ve been to Wrigley Field once in my life.  But I had no trouble jumping on the bandwagon of exhilaration and felt so grateful that these moments allowed me to forget my trip and appreciate that I got to watch the game.  And what a game!!!!!

http://m.cubs.mlb.com/news/article/208017164/cubs-to-have-world-series-parade-on-friday/

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