Much like you, I slogged through this day encumbered by the grim assumption that, once again, I would not see the final outs of Dennis Martinez’s 1991 perfect game broadcast in French. Thankfully and mercifully, I was wrong:

The Constitution teaches us that Jesus spoke American and killed the dinosaurs. But French is okay, too.

Jeff Francoeur‘s crazy eyes have charmed, mesmerized, and terrified the masses for years. In (belated) recognition of Jeff Francoeur’s memorable 1000th hit, here is their NotGraphs debut:

This picture, courtesy of Minda Haas, was taken at the Royals’ off-season Fan Fest. It is perhaps the most chilling photo of Frenchy’s soul-windows yet. What could possibly be going through his mind?

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Note: as a number of reader-commenters have suggested here, it’s very possible that the basepaths at the pictured stadium are only 60 feet long, therefore negating all of the inspired work you find in this post. This, once again, reveals why “facts” are harmful and ought to be ignored.

A couple days ago, in response to a piece I wrote that waxed poignant on the pleasures of baseball and its capacity to constantly generate data of all sorts, reader/commenter/modern man Danmay noted that, perhaps stranger than one club hitting over half of a league’s homers is a club averaging almost a triple per game.

I can reveal now that the team hitting all those triples are the Lions of Savigny (or, Savigny-sur-Orge to be precise, a suburb of Paris), a club in the French Elite division (treated with awe-inducing prose here). I can also now reveal that, owing to the new technology of “drawing red lines on images from Google Maps,” it’s possible to determine if, in fact, the dimensions of Savigny’s home park, Stade Jean Moulin (whose dimensions are absent from internet), might influence the Lions’ triple totals.

But first, a test. Regard, below, an image of very famous Fenway Park (also courtesy Google Maps). Because we know (a) that home to first at Fenway Park is 90 feet and (b) that home to the left-field wall at Fenway is just over 300 feet, we can test our method to see if it works.

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The author wouldn’t mind faire-ing a couple of bises with the French First Lady.

If there’s anything more annoying than a young, childless person spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer, it’s to hear that same young, childless person complain about spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer.

Because, it’s a fact, reader: the South of France is an exercise in charm. The women are almost uniformly beautiful*; the weather is warm and dry; the vin is equal parts delicious and affordable; and the picturesque, winding rues are absurd in their picturesque-ness and winding-osity. Moreoever, an inability to understand the native language means that one is free from accidentally overhearing inane conversations that might interfere with the traveler’s illusions about this land of milk and fine honeys.

*Led, notably, by First Lady-cum-supermodel-cum-heiress-cum-classically-trained-musician Carla Bruni.

For the baseballing enthusiast, however, there’s a small sable cloud attached to the vast expanse of silver lining that is this wonderland of sophistication and perpetual drunkeness — namely, the difficulty in ever watching even a second of live baseball.

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Bon to the jour, bespectacled readership. I am Carson Cistulli, and this is FranceGraphs.

In our most recent — and, not incidentally, only other — edition of FranceGraphs, we looked at the slight, but significant, differences between the French and American versions of FanGraphs. Today, we cast a gaze at the French baseball league, the Championnat de France de baseball Élite — or what we’ll call the Elite division, for short.

French baseball, as with French (and other European kinds of) soccer, utilizes a promotion/relegation system of which the eight-team Elite division is merely the top. Below this is the 18-team National 1 division and 24-team National 2 division, the latter of which is composed of winners from numerous regional leagues.

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Although people are used to the front office of the Kansas City Royals being on the cutting edge of, well, pretty much everything, it was still a bit of a surprise to read that they going to take entries from the “social media” to have the chance to interview General Manager Dayton Moore and a few others during the Royals’ Annual FanFest. The winners were announced last week, and it was nice to see that a fair number of respected members of the Royals’ Nerdosphere were invited.

If you ask me, even more exciting than the list people asking the questions is the list of people said to be answering them. Dayton Moore is one of them, of course, as is manager Ned Yost. But there were also a couple of players. One of them is probably the only Royals position player who could be considered close to being something like a “star,” Billy Butler. The other player picked to be part of this interview (conducted, remember, by a group of people generally considered to play close attention to non-superficial stats, who prefer performance over reputation, who don’t just buy the team’s fluff stories) will be…

…and this is not a joke….

Jeff Francouer.

No, I am not kidding.

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