“I’m not skipping steps. I’ve been told never to skip steps my whole life, but it didn’t stop me from running up the stairs.”
Victor Wembanyama said that early in his career, long before he opened his third NBA season with the calm certainty of someone who already knows the next level is waiting. Those words echo now not just across basketball, but across any sport still learning how to grow — especially baseball, still looking for a foothold in France.
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When Major League Baseball’s Paris Series collapsed in 2025 after organizers failed to secure a local promoter, it wasn’t just a scheduling miss. It was a symbolic one. France, a nation that has produced champions in nearly every other sport, is still waiting for its baseball moment.
And yet, in a poetic way, it may already have its ambassador.
Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 phenom from Le Chesnay, embodies everything baseball hopes to become: patient, elegant, global, and endlessly detailed. He speaks fluent English and French, reads constantly, studies like a scientist, and carries himself like an artist who knows every performance is part of a larger story.
“Maybe I turned down a shot I could make with my eyes closed,” he said, “but that was to get one of my teammates a shot he could make in his sleep.”
That kind of generosity — that quiet discipline — is baseball. It’s the same instinct that tells a hitter to take the walk, a shortstop to eat the throw, or a pitcher to trust his defense.
Basketball gives Wembanyama the luxury of visible dominance. Players enter the paint, see him waiting, and rethink everything. Baseball doesn’t have that kind of geometry — no 7-foot defender to erase a hit just by being there — but it shares the same emotional tension: the long breath before the pitch, the silence before the swing. Wembanyama understands that space better than anyone in modern sports.
And he’s already crossed the diamond once. When he threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium in 2023, the ball looked comically small in his hand. The image went viral, but the moment was real: a French teenager standing on American soil, commanding a baseball crowd without saying a word.
Now, Wembanyama’s home court sits just a few freeway exits from baseball’s crossroads. He plays his NBA games in San Antonio — home of the Double-A San Antonio Missions, a San Diego Padres affiliate, and a minor league club that actually held a “Victor Night” last May. Fans named Victor or Victoria got free tickets and French fries. If you brought a poodle or a French bulldog, you got in, too. It was a wink to France, a nod to their new hometown giant, and maybe the first time a minor league team turned fandom for a global basketball star into a baseball event.
That’s where this all gets interesting.
San Antonio sits in Texas — the state whose MLB team, the Rangers, just won the 2023 World Series but remains the only club without a Pride Night. It’s a reminder that baseball still has cultural gaps to close, even in its reigning territory. And Wembanyama — multilingual, worldly, and measured — represents something bigger: the kind of inclusive globalism the sport keeps trying to reach.
If MLB wants to relaunch in France, it doesn’t need a marketing plan — it needs a translator. Someone who can make a fastball feel like art and competition feel like conversation.
Baseball in France has been quietly resilient. The French Division 1 league has endured through decades of neglect, building competitive clubs in Rouen, Montpellier, and Sénart. The national team continues to fight for its place in Europe and beyond, and its credibility rose in 2019 when Bruce Bochy — French-born and already a three-time World Series champion — agreed to manage France in the World Baseball Classic qualifiers. Bochy’s arrival didn’t suddenly change the standings; it changed the tone. His presence validated a century of small victories and slow steps — the same kind of foundation Wembanyama talks about when he reminds younger players not to skip any.
Team France coverage from World Baseball Network: reporter Jeff Duda has chronicled real momentum. Seventeen-year-old Jordan Ouanyou signed with the Cincinnati Reds after starring at the U18 Euros, becoming the latest French-developed position player to step into affiliated ball. The 2025 European Championship preview paints a deeper, more competitive continent — Spain defending, the Netherlands reloading, Britain rising — with France drawn into a heavyweight group but capable of punching above its weight when the staff stacks strikes. At U23 level, France brings one of its best young cores yet, led by shortstop Mathis Meurant — the first born-and-raised French player at a Power conference D1 program — alongside power arms like Mathis Nayral and Ben Couvreur. It’s the picture of a system taking the right reps, again and again, until timing meets opportunity.
That patience matters. Because baseball, like Wembanyama’s game, rewards timing. Every pause has a purpose. Every inch of progress counts.
The global calendar is opening again. The 2026 World Baseball Classic will set the stage for an Olympic return in Los Angeles two years later, with Dodger Stadium expected to host baseball as a full medal event. That means 2027 could become the perfect moment for MLB to reboot in Paris — this time with intention, partnership, and poetry.
France doesn’t need a promotional gimmick. It needs someone who can connect the dots — a star fluent in both ambition and humility, one who knows that mastery takes time. Victor Wembanyama already lives that truth. He can talk about rhythm and repetition, about the beauty of failure, about turning craft into confidence.
Paris missed its baseball debut in 2025, but the stage is still there. The next time MLB steps onto French soil, it should feel like an exchange, not an experiment. It should sound like France — layered, patient, joyful.
Baseball doesn’t need a miracle in France. It needs an invitation — and an ambassadeur who already knows how to run up the stairs.
