The American Baseball Missionary Society Mission to France!

[robin_buckeye]

Moonlight,
As I was looking at your pictures it looked like you have a pretty good variety of things. Please don't be shy about letting us know if their are a few difficult to find items still needed. I think I can speak for the other memebers of the forum -- we will do our best to see if we can dig up anything you need to get your club moving forward.

[Moonlight Graham]

You're right! I have already pretty much everything I need to get started. Even my dad is helping! He is making real nice batting tees for the club and he should be done by the end of next week. The only things I don't have yet are safety helmets, but these my school will have to buy. Safety is an important part of the activity and the school has to get involved in that aspect, and I know I can get helmets for a respectable price from sports catalogues.

But there's one thing you could help me with. I need large posters, interesting images, colour photos, pictures of either modern day or past baseball heroes the kids could refer to as models. As I told you, baseball is nowhere to be found here. You have to look for it to find it: search the web, buy specialized magazines, that sort of things. Kids need pictures to dream about baseball. What I want is to re-create a whole culture, establish the right breeding ground, and I need illustrated references for that. For now I'm focusing on the game itself since the weather outside is still okay for that. But when the rain and freezing temperatures will force us to stay in class, we'll spend more time on the history of baseball, on how the American and National Leagues are organized, we'll talk about the World Series and all the clubs in the USA, (did you say "Geography"?), about some of the best known players so far, we'll sing "Take me out the ball game" and perhaps play baseball video games. And I would like to pin posters to the walls of my classroom to create the right atmosphere. That would be just perfect!

So if you have something that looks like a poster, I'm very interested!! Please email me and I'll give you my mailing address.
And I'll take old magazines too!

[Moonlight Graham]

I have one question regarding the gloves I received and which delighted the kids like you expected. One of my colleagues said modern day gloves were certainly lighter than those you gave me. She found them very heavy. They're absolutely perfect to me really, but as I have very little experience, I didn't know what to say, so I turn to you. Is that true? Have baseball gloves evolved so much over the past twenty years or so in terms of weight?

[Cowboy7130]

Moonlight - a very perceptive group of students you have, there! Yes, I believe that as gloves have evolved, they have gotten lighter. That is by design, of course!

Early gloves used thicker, heavier padding in the palm and finger areas, because there was little or no "pocket" in which to catch a ball. As the size of the gloves evolved, so did the pockets. Now, a player rarely catches a ball in the palm of his hand, so there is less padding there. With advancing technologies, glove padding has evolved, so that lighter, thinner materials can do a better job of dispersing the impact of the ball than the old, heavy wool felt.

I also think the leather has changed. Glove leather used to be stiffer and heavier, in my opinion. Now, the leather seems thinner, lighter and more flexible. That is not necessarily a bad thing, however. New tanning and finishing processes can make a 4 oz. piece of leather as strong as a 6 oz. piece. Glove construction may do as much for the shape and form of the glove as the stiffness of the leather used to do. In other words, a modern glove does not have to be constructed of leather heavy, stiff and thick enough to support its own form in the glove.

Just my opinions ... free and worth every penny!

[Moonlight Graham]

Dadaaah ! Here's the very first team photo of the Sens Dodgers, France, greatly helped and supported by the Vintage Baseball Glove Forum !



The kids seem to love the game as much as I hoped they would, they're always asking for more, but we're still learning to throw and catch properly. I'm using the Baffled Parent's Guide to Coaching Tee Ball for help and the pratice sessions are going rather smoothly I think. Last time, I added a kind of gamelike format to have them feel the thrill of the game and we had so much fun we all felt really sorry when we had to part to go back to class.

So I would like to thank you all once again. Now thanks to Tom and Weasley the kids have also American pen-pals from California and Connecticut and an exchange scheme may eventually take place next year with a team from Davis, CA. You gave me a lot to think about and an entirely new project for at least one of my classes. So again, THANK YOU!

I'll keep you posted as the Dodgers improve their skills. One of them has already such an amazing arm for his age !

I thought you might wonder what baseball sounded like in France, so here's some vocabulary for you to look up and start studying French through baseball:

[vintagebrett]

Thanks for posting the picture. It's great to see the kids enjoying the equipment.

[Cowboy7130]

Way to go, Moonlight! Looks like you are on your way!

[stockbuddy]

Moonlight, Thanks for sharing the pics. Great looking bunch of kids. Very pleased you have got the team together. Hopefully they will enjoy baseball as much as some of have as we grew up. It is a great game.

Best to you.
Dave

[Moonlight Graham]

This is a wonderful thing to introduce something entirely new to a group of kids. Some of the kids who joined the team had only heard of baseball through the other members of the team (there are now 12 players on the team!). In any other words, they were not prejudiced in any way before they first put a glove on. They're not here to become the best in the game, as they would in football or rugby. All I see for now is that they just want to learn and enjoy the game. We're having a lot of fun together on Fridays. And I see they're getting more and more interested in every detail. I spent quite some time on the equipment, describing a bat, a glove, a baseball, and it's great to see some are taking all this pretty seriously, cherishing the glove they chose as the greatest toy they've ever had. I even had to extend the session! This is simply wonderful.
More pictures coming next week, these days the weather is perfectly awful around here. So I'll wait until the sun is back to show you how good they're all becoming at the game.