Matt Vautour: Fenway Franks and Moneyball - What a French sportswriter saw at his first Red Sox game

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2 days ago

BOSTON — From his seat high in Fenway Park's right field bleachers, Azad Rosay leaned forward, focused on the action he was only beginning to understand as the ball sailed off Pete Alonso's bat in the top of the first inning.
Jarren Duran barehanded the carom off the wall, whirled and threw a strike to David Hamilton at second, who slapped the tag on the runner.
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Azad turned to me, looking excited.
'People said this was going to be boring,' he said. 'There's more going on than I thought there was going to be.'
Coming to the park that night, we had related concerns. Azad had never seen a baseball game before. Not even on TV. He'd been warned that the game was going to be slow. I was worried he'd think that baseball was boring.
We were both pleasantly surprised.
Azad is a part-time basketball blogger and podcaster who lives in France. He writes about the Celtics in English for the CelticsBlog and podcasts about the entire NBA in French for The Dreamcast Show. The growing number of fans in both countries, who are interested in X-and-O breakdowns and analytics, like his work.
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I'd never met him until April 23 when we were eating at the same table in the media room before Game 2 of the Celtics-Magic series. Sportswriters are usually curmudgeons, so his enthusiastic energy and his French accent stood out.
A native of Grenoble in the French Alps, Azad was in Massachusetts, staying with relatives to cover the Celtics playoff run. Someone asked him what else he hoped to in Boston while he was here.
He said he wanted to go to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, but knew nothing about baseball.
'Since I'm a big sports fan, people said 'you should go watch a game.' The Red Sox are a historic franchise,' he said. 'It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when you come from Europe. You never know when you could be back.'
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I saw an opportunity, too. What would baseball and its unique and complicated rules look like to a sports fan who had never seen it?
'I'll take you to the game if you let me write about it,' I said.
Azad liked the idea. We decided to pick a game based on how quickly the Celtics eliminated the Knicks (oops).
The Celtics' collapse in six games meant Azad's trip was getting cut short. So with no Game 7 on Monday, May 19, we decided to go to Red Sox-Mets that night instead.
You don't have to love baseball to enjoy a late spring night at Fenway Park when the weather is warm and the sun is setting behind third base. Those nights are like sitting at an outdoor bar.
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But May 19 was cloudy, cold and windy, the type of night when the demand for hot chocolate at the Dunkin' under the right field grandstand is much greater than for the helmet sundaes just across the concourse.
Baseball would have to sell itself, and that worried me a little.
What if he hated it? What if he was bored? What if the popular criticisms of our former national pastime stood out?
But as Azad walked up the ramp from the dark tunnel and was greeted by Fenway Park's sea of green, his pace slowed as his eyes surveyed the scene in front of him. He smiled, took out his phone and snapped a picture to capture the moment.
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That was a good sign.
I bought two standing room tickets. Anytime the game-time temperature is below 65 degrees, there are lots of open seats. My plan was to bounce around, sitting in different sections so he could see the game and Fenway Park from lots of different angles. If someone showed up for the seats we were sitting in, we'd find new ones.
Azad was on board with the plan and we started with two seats in the loge boxes between home and first base during the pregame.
The pregame plan was to discover if Azad had picked up anything about baseball in his first 29 years. American ex-pats brought the sport to France before even World War I, but it hasn't caught on.
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I asked some basic questions. Azad knew what a home run was and that the MLB championship was decided by the World Series.
He knew there was a pitcher, but wasn't sure who that was.
'I know there are some players who throw balls and some players who use a bat to tap the ball,' he said. 'I know you can do a home run and keep running.'
The only current major leaguer he knew was Shohei Ohtani. His knowledge of former players was only slightly larger — Billy Beane, Jason Giambi, Scott Hatteberg and David Ortiz.
That list gives away that Azad had seen 'Moneyball.' At first, it seemed odd that he'd intentionally picked a movie about the inner machinations of a sport he knew nothing about. But for a guy who sees basketball, at least partially, through an analytical lens, 'Moneyball' wasn't advanced baseball, but a starting point. Azad not only saw the movie but liked it enough to have watched it several times, including the day before his Fenway trip as preparation.
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From the film, he knew the Red Sox had gone a long time between championships and that when they eventually won, they did so with a team that used their version of Moneyball philosophies.
'Billy Beane ended the curse,' Azad said matter-of-factly, oversimplifying the epilogue text at the end of the movie.
We spent part of the pregame in those first base seats and the rest atop the Green Monster for Mets batting practice.
Before going up to the right field roof for a beer, the national anthem and the first pitch, we stopped in the bar/museum tucked one flight up behind the right field bleachers. Azad studied the locker replications and then was immediately drawn to the Fenway Park replica in the back. The intricate model that's about 24-by-24 inches around and nine inches high has players on the field, making it perfect for asking baseball questions.
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The game immediately made way more sense to Azad as soon as he realized the batter and pitcher were adversaries.
'I didn't expect that getting on first base would be so difficult,' he said. 'It's not just about a guy sending the ball and another guy trying to hit it with a stick. There's a matchup between the pitcher and the hitter.'
Calling the officials 'umpires' was a source of amusement.
'Umpire? That sounds like Star Wars,' he said, chuckling and later referred to the guy calling balls and strikes as 'Darth Vader.'
After we each grabbed an obligatory Fenway Frank (he opted for mustard/I'm a barbecue sauce guy) in the big concourse, we took the stairs up to the right field roof and bought beers.
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We spent an inning in the bleachers, one on the right field roof, two in the pavilion boxes next to the press box and the rest of the game in the second row of loge boxes on the third baseline.
Azad leaned in and paid attention from the first pitch and reacted when Francisco Lindor hit the game's fifth pitch in the air for a lazy fly out. Alonso's ill-advised attempt to stretch his single to a double came two plays later.
The Red Sox scored twice in the bottom of the first. After Duran doubled, Azad, a novice Billy Beane disciple, appreciated Rafael Devers' ability to 'get on base' with a walk. The early action continued as both players moved up on a wild pitch and eventually scored.
Azad asked smart questions and caught on quickly. Basketball and 'Moneyball' were the tentpoles for his questions and many of my explanations.
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I explained to Azad that the game's devotion to analytics had evolved from and in some ways away from Beane's core Moneyball principles. Home runs and all the factors that contribute to them (launch angle, exit velocity, etc.) have changed the approach of many hitters.
'Trying for home runs is like shooting a lot of 3-pointers in basketball,' he said.
He took new pictures at each new spot, admiring the park.
'It's beautiful. I love that you can see the city and the sky,' he said, motioning toward the Prudential Tower lit up beyond right field. 'There's a vibe that you know you're somewhere special.'
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He was surprised to learn that ballparks didn't have uniform dimensions.
'Home runs are not always the same?'
But his appreciation of the evening went beyond the venue. He liked the strategy.
'I like how much power the defense has,' he said, noting that it doesn't really happen in sports where the offense has the ball. He asked about defensive positioning when Trevor Story lined up directly behind second base and then was impressed when a ball was hit right to him.
I explained the idea of a double play and why the second baseman and shortstop were playing back in the sixth. He spent the rest of the game looking for them.
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When we moved to our seats off of third base for the final innings, it gave us a great look at the pitcher and batter up close. Azad got into a rhythm of watching the pitch, then looking for the velocity on the scoreboard. He was perplexed at why a camera or a computer didn't determine balls and strikes.
'It surprises me that it is just evaluated by the umpire guy behind the catcher, who says if it's good or not,' he said. 'It's based so much on human decisions.'
In the bottom of the eighth, I pointed out Aroldis Chapman warming up in the bullpen and I explained the concept of a closer.
'What a great job,' he said, admiring the nature of a guy whose job it was to come in, shut down the opponent and end a game. 'I close.'
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Chapman did his job, earning the save in the 3-1 win.
He loved that the home team doesn't bat in the bottom of the ninth if they're winning.
'It's like a mic drop.'
As the traffic-beating fans departed in the eighth, thinning the Monday night crowd, Azad was surprised to see them go. He was in for all nine innings.
'If I was watching on TV, I don't think I would have been hooked, but I can see why people love baseball,' he said. 'Like they said in Moneyball: 'How can you not be romantic about baseball?''
Read the original article on MassLive.