Baseball in French, Lesson 7: La Victoire Protégée

Welcome to Baseball in French, Lesson 7. Previous lessons can be found here.

 

Today's term is la victoire protégée.

 

In English, that translates to "protected victory". What's the baseball translation?

Save.

Here's Jeff Reardon, master of protecting victories, on his 1983 O-Pee-Chee card. 

 

 

 

 

The term has even more of an effect when you pair it with the previous lesson's French term for blown save: le sabotage. 

 

Instead of being sabotaged by the opposing hitter, the pitcher protects the victory. Pretty cool.

Now there's nothing wrong with the English-language term, "save". It's direct. To the point. If you're the relief pitcher, you've saved the game for your team. But taken together with the opposite outcome, "blown save", it's just not very exciting.

Additionally, with "blown save" you're kind of blaming your pitcher all the time (i.e., he blew it), even if he was dotting the corners and the other team happened to do an even better job making contact and getting hits. The French version, le sabotage, puts the negative on the opposing hitter. He sabotaged your attempt to seal the victory for your team. That description keeps you in noble stead. There's something nice about that, I suppose. It's more respectful. (Even if you threw a meatball right over the middle of the plate.)

 

As for Mr. Reardon, he protected a victory for his team 367 times across his 16-year career, which lands him at 12th on the all-time list as of this writing. He amassed 877 strikeouts over that time, which doesn't sound like much, but is actually not too shabby for a guy who was a reliever from the start. While with Montreal in 1985, he led the majors in saves with 41. He's a 4x All-Star and won the World Series with Minnesota in 1987, picking up 2 saves in the ALCS and one more in the World Series. Three very important protected victories there.

What do you readers think? Do you go with the more noble, medieval "sabotage" and "protected victory", or is the straightforward "save" and "blown save" good enough for you?

Leave your thoughts in the comment section, and thanks for reading!