To Paris, With Glove

This insane notion gained credence when the next ball was hit slightly to my left. I was prepared at this juncture to let it pass untouched into left field, but Jarman, behind me at shortstop, yelled, "Your ball." Miraculously, it found its way into my glove. I was prepared to throw the runner out with one of my lightning pegs when our starting second baseman, Jerry McGrath, called out to me. I thought at first he was urging me to go for a double play, although even in my rattled state I knew there was no runner on first. McGrath, it seems, was merely congratulating me for my successful catch. But this charitable gesture served no purpose other than to delay my throw long enough for the runner to arrive safely. "Base hit," I cried out miserably to our official scorer, Stephanie Salter, the San Francisco Examiner baseball writer. "E-5," she wrote on her scorecard.

There can be no describing my elation when on successive plays, our leftfielder, Tom Shess, the editor of San Francisco Magazine, misjudged a fly ball into a home run and Jarman first bobbled a ground ball, then threw five feet over the head of Steve Strauss, our first baseman. Not all of the errors would be mine. We were, in fact, clearly in disarray, and Le Moulin base runners, some confused in their direction, were dashing by unchecked. Moose was apoplectic. "Can't anyone catch a ball out there?" he shouted from the mound, slapping tweed cap against khakied thigh. Apparently, no one could, for Le Moulin scored 14 times in its half of the inning to take a comfortable lead.

We returned to our supporters on the sidelines feigning amused disinterest. I, personally, was totally devastated, and I thought I detected telltale signs of embarrassment in the faces of my teammates, despite the jocular front we were putting up. All of us had spent our youths showing off in front of girls—or trying to—and now we were making fools of ourselves before them, playing against foreigners who didn't even know what they were doing. Dorenbush, a round-faced boulevardier whose wit is celebrated almost daily in San Francisco newspaper columns, commented dryly, "I think we need a new third baseman." He was joshing, I'm sure, but his words cut through me like a scalpel.

The rest of the game remains a little vague for spectators and participants alike. Salter stopped calling errors after we reached 16 in the first two innings. We did not ask for that kind of charity, it should be understood, but we gratefully accepted it. Our first baseman, Strauss, had only one putout all day, and that was at home plate on what I might humbly describe as a perfect relay throw from me. Well, it was not really a relay throw, because our outfielder missed the cutoff man by 20 feet, and the ball was rolling toward the ditch when I finally retrieved it and threw home to Strauss, who was covering the plate for some reason, to nail the runner, a Frenchman, who seemed uncertain whether home plate was his proper destination.

We had a terrible collision at second base when the burly Sullivan ran over the valetudinary Igoe in quest of a popup. Igoe was, naturally, kayoed and bloodied, but we have grown so accustomed to seeing him prostrate that we were prepared to continue the game over his possibly dead body. True to form, he revived and, for good measure, singled in the next inning, protesting that he could not see the pitch, only hear it. Moose removed himself after the second inning and brought in Dave Bush from la cage du taureau. Bush, a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle , held Le Moulin to either six or eight runs the rest of the way, which was not far, because the game was called by mutual agreement after four innings and 2� hours. The end may have been hastened when Moose imposed a rule unfamiliar to either side in an effort to prevent Spurrier from substituting some late-arriving Marines. "No one under 40 can be substituted," our manager shouted, perceiving that the oldest of the Leathernecks was no more than 22.

We rallied from the early deficit and won the game by a score of 40-20 or 40-22. Allen, who went 5 for 5 and actually caught a fly ball or two, was named our Most Valuable Player, amid much grumping from Bush, the ace fireman. It was the start of a big week for Allen. Two days later, back home in Manhattan, he apprehended an armed robber fleeing a holdup of a Madison Avenue boutique. We read of his exploit in the New York newspapers while awaiting a change of planes in Kennedy airport on the way home. WALL STREET EXECUTIVE AIDS IN GUNMAN'S CAPTURE, The Times blandly headlined his feat. The story made no mention of his even more heroic performance with Les Lapins Sauvages in the Bois de Boulogne.

I redeemed myself somewhat from that disastrous first inning by catching a popup on the lip of the ditch, which, with the assist at the plate, raised my fielding average to .400 for the game, .200 below my batting average. One of my pop-ups fell unattended at shortstop, another dropped behind second base, and a third fell at the feet of the Englishman with the glove on his throwing hand. Another ground ball did go through me at some point in the action, but scorer Salter sagely called it "too hot to handle," even though it was hit on the handle of the bat. Moose was declared the winning pitcher, because we went ahead while he was still on the mound, and Bush was awarded a save.

The postgame party was held at Le Moulin, although the restaurant's chef, Gerard Coustal, a former Maxim's cook, stood on his dignity and refused to participate in the preparation of the barbecued chicken we were served. There has been a restaurant on the site of Le Moulin at 25 rue Royale for 150 years, and it is easy to see why. Twenty-five rue Royale is actually removed from the main drag in a small alley that calls to mind the Paris of, well, 150 years ago. Children and dogs play there, and women call to each other from the windows of tiny apartments in the upper stories. We sang and danced and drank champagne and good Bordeaux wine there for nearly six hours after the game. Sullivan traded T shirts with a Frenchman and, toward the end of the long day, Les Lapins cheered the vanquished foes: "Le Moulin! Le Moulin! Vive Le Moulin!" Franco-American relations were, all in all, well served, even though we slaughtered them.

As we passed through customs on the weary way home, an agent at Kennedy looked curiously at Brennan, who, though dressed to the nines in a snappy beige suit and high heels, was carrying an aluminum bat. "And what, Madam," he inquired, "was the purpose of your trip to France?" "Softball, of course," she replied with just a suggestion of hauteur.

About two weeks later, a number of Les Lapins alumni were sitting at the bar in the Square after lunch when Moose, agitated as ever, approached. "I've talked to the boys at the Asian Wall Street Journal ," he said. "It's all set. Next year we play in Hong Kong for the championship of the Far East." And tomorrow the world.