The Return

New club with a famous name. Meet its founders.

BTVF: Introduce us to the three founders of Stade Français and their history in French baseball?

Vincent Danna started playing baseball in the late 1980s by helping create the Duffy Ducks club in Saint-Etienne. He picked up the sport again in the late 2010s with the Paris Patriots and then at Ranelagh in Paris, where he held various roles. Vincent is driven by a passion for passing on his knowledge. For him, baseball is a game before it’s a sport.

Julien Lemeille discovered baseball in 1988 in the western Paris suburbs thanks to an international environment, and has since regretted the lack of infrastructure that forces him to travel long distances to play! A father of three children (6U, 12U, and 15U) who play for two excellent developmental clubs, the Wallabies de Louviers and the PUC, Julien is very active on the fields of various competitions and is a promising scorer. He is particularly committed to coaching young teams.

With the goal of addressing the lack of baseball opportunities in the western Paris suburbs, Vincent and Julien met with various actors and partners from the associative, sports, financial, and political worlds to better understand the environment and build a strategy.

Fairly quickly, Jean-Christophe Tiné decided to join the adventure. Jean-Christophe has been involved in baseball since 1987 and has played for several clubs (Sénart, which he co-founded and where he played, coached, and managed, Brévannes, Saint-Cyr-l’Ecole, Munich and Grünwald in the German Bundesliga, PUC, and more recently Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche). Jean-Christophe has held several federal positions, notably as General Secretary of the FFBS under Didier Seminet’s first presidency (he convinced MLB to include the French national team in the World Baseball Classic) and on the Federal Regulation Commission and the Federal Ethics Committee, which he currently chairs. He is also a member of the Selection Committee for the Hall of Fame, and if you’re at all interested in the history of our sport, you’ll know he is also the author of the blog Forgotten History of an Unknown Sport.

A turnkey project was proposed in June to the Sports Department of Stade Français and immediately convinced Matthieu Tanret, General Manager, who has trusted and supported the founding team from day one.

It was decided to expand this team and set up a sports council made up of experienced members from all disciplines. Several players then joined the ranks, including Francisco Morata, a long-time player in various Île-de-France clubs, coach, and former president of the Becrews club, and Gilbert Lejeune, a giant of French baseball who has created, directed, and helped establish many clubs, an international umpire, and a trainer. Recruitment continues, of course (open to enthusiasts), to build a multidisciplinary and complementary team.

BTVF: What are the goals of this club in terms of number of members, teams, and coaching?

The goals of Stade Français baseball are manifold.

– Reviving the baseball section of this pioneering French baseball club (since 1883) with a stellar record (French champions in 1954 and runners-up in 1955). This goal has already been achieved, and we are very proud of it!

– Youth development: this is the raison d’être or DNA of Stade Français; education through sport is central. We have a strong desire to train and pass on our knowledge, and we focus our strategy on youth, training, and development. Stade Français has a long history as a training club, and the creation of a baseball/softball school is among our medium-term goals. Thus, for young people (girls and boys, beginners and advanced), we offer all categories from U6 to U18 and want to focus on B5, which allows us to quickly instill the fundamentals.

– Creating value: the geographic area we serve allows us to attract new players and create infrastructure without harming existing clubs. Our location is in the western Paris suburbs on the Bagatelle playing fields (16th arrondissement) to attract new members who cannot or do not want to train in the east (Vincennes, Pershing, and Mortemart) or in the large Paris suburbs clubs that are too far from their homes. The potential for new players is estimated at 1,500 in this area, which has a strong US culture. We have decided to create new infrastructure to be free in our development, which will benefit other actors. This will help, we hope, to rebalance the east and west of the capital.

– Coaching and officiating will be key factors: we are recruiting coaches (we currently have 7 on our roster, and more will join us), we have set up a “sports council” that includes Stade Français members and a few qualified personalities outside the club. We have set up a “refereeing” cell with Gilbert Lejeune: we will train referees with the various authorities.

– International: we want to integrate players of different nationalities (especially expats) who are numerous in the western Paris suburbs: Americans, Japanese, Koreans, etc. Creating bridges and connections with these great baseball nations. To this end, we are trying to establish diplomatic ties with some embassies. In parallel, we have become ambassadors in France for the ‘Sandlot Revolution’ (a baseball movement in the USA and Canada that brings together more than 200 clubs). For 2025, we are working on various exchange projects: bringing Sandlot clubs to Paris to promote baseball, sending young players to the USA for training, etc.

– Contributing, on our scale, to improving the visibility and reputation of baseball: everyone can feel in the media that the collective work, carried out by all the actors (federation, leagues, clubs, etc.), is beginning to bear fruit. The drafting of French players in the minor leagues, the emergence of world-famous superstars, and the upcoming participation in the 2028 Olympics obviously help to give visibility. We are happy to be part of this virtuous circle and try to communicate as best we can to make our sport known to a wider audience. Our ambition is that the media and social network coverage will benefit all baseball actors.

The enthusiasm generated around our communication and our open baseball days organized at Bagatelle gives us some confidence: in the first year, depending on the number of registrations (between 50 and 100), our ambitious but achievable goal is to field 2 youth teams and 1 senior team in the baseball championship, and several others in B5 and softball. We believe that B5 is an important development lever, in addition to allowing players with little experience to quickly acquire techniques and tactics. Then, we will need to recruit more, have good sporting results, climb the ladder one by one, qualify our young players in the French Cup, in Little League France, and beyond, and then play in the national league in a few years. The road will be long, we know, but we have confidence in our disruptive development policy and strategy.

BTVF: What are the advantages of joining the structure of a multi-sport organization?

Joining a club like Stade Français, which has around 13,000 members spread across 22 sections, is above all a stroke of luck. Certainly, baseball was played there, but that was more than 60 years ago, and everything needs to be rebuilt. We have to prove ourselves and convince the Stade Français management, who have trusted us, of the relevance of our approach on a daily basis.

When we talk about Stade Français, we obviously associate it with its glorious image and its countless titles in all disciplines. We are very proud to join this mythical and prestigious club and we must be up to the task.

The main advantage is to join a very professional organization and a very structured governance: each section can count on the support of the management team (board of directors, specialized offices by skills, steering, advice, representation, influence, outreach, partner and sponsor research, etc.) and administrative team, whose hundred employees contribute daily to assisting the sections on various administrative aspects (affiliations, license issuance, accounting, communication, management, shop, etc.). Together, we are stronger. The advantage this provides is invaluable and allows us to focus on development and sports.

Ultimately, Stade Français is a united and supportive big family, whose members share great values: “Once a Stadiste, always a Stadiste,” as the saying goes.

We are really very happy to have joined Stade Français and to be able to benefit from all its knowledge and experience.

BTVF: The fields will be in Bagatelle Park. Can you introduce them to us and explain what they could become in the future?

We have long been developing this project to create two baseball and softball fields on the Bagatelle playing fields with a vision for several years, in partnership with our main partner, the 16th arrondissement city hall (special thanks to Ali Oubaali, the city’s sports deputy mayor, who believed in our project).

Two football fields will therefore be transformed and adapted (leveling the field, mowing the grass, marking the lines) into baseball/softball fields, adaptable in size according to age categories, disciplines, and levels.

We are very happy because this is the first time since the creation of Pershing that baseball fields have been created in Paris. The little historical nod is that the practice of baseball in France dates back to the 19th century in the Bois de Boulogne. We are, in a way, returning to our roots.

However, the Bagatelle playing fields are a particularly protected site (classified, any notable modification must go before the Commission des Sites): it is therefore a question of proposing an “intelligent” and eco-responsible sports infrastructure project (the first in Europe), of surrounding ourselves with the right partners, to gradually improve these baseball fields so that they meet the standards in the long term. The idea is to make it a kind of Parisian “Central Park.”

For the time being, we are very satisfied. The natural setting is exceptional, and we will be able to play in departmental and regional championships there in the first instance.

We sincerely hope that our project will attract new players and clubs, organize exhibition matches and national, even international, competitions, to contribute, at our level, to the current dynamism of French baseball.