SÉNART, France — The world’s greatest athletes recently competed on sports’ greatest stage as dozens of other competitors were anonymously toiling a short distance away in one of their sport’s ultimate backwaters.
A handful of Americans and other diamond globetrotters are among these long-shot dreamers and admitted hangers-on in a most unlikely baseball setting — the meadows of France, a few long balls away from where the Olympics just wrapped and captured the national imagination.
“I wasn’t ready to hang it up,” catcher and former Las Vegas resident Yodai Nakamura told NBC News after a recent game for his Les Templiers de Sénart (roughly translated as the Sénart Knights), who play their home games about 30 miles south of the Arc de Triomphe. “I had no idea baseball was played here [before signing].”
Most baseball fans were probably stunned to learn their sport even existed in France before the San Francisco Giants added relief pitcher Spencer Bivens to their 26-man roster on June 16.
Bivens’ arrival in San Francisco brought to light his incredible journey to the bigs, which came with a detour to France, a nation better known for its soccer, basketball, tennis, rugby, cycling, swimming or just about any other sport not named
The great American pastime found in the meadows of France?
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