ROUEN, FRANCE — It is with the weight of the season on his chiseled shoulders that pitcher Owen Ozanich trots out of the visitor-side bullpen, late on a Saturday afternoon in October, and makes his way to the mound in one of France’s prettiest ballparks, Terrain Pierre Roland, in the Norman city of Rouen, France.
His team, the Montpellier Barracudas, holds a narrow 1-0 lead going into the bottom of the ninth inning but trails the Rouen Huskies, the reigning champs, two games to none in a best-of-five semifinal series.
Win, and the Barracudas live to see another day. Lose, and their quest for a league title — their first since 1995 — comes to an abrupt end.
Ozanich, 32, takes a few warm-up throws, adjusts his cap, and then assumes his long-practiced stance: shoulders perpendicular to the plate, chest out, head down. Around him the autumn sun casts long shadows across the diamond. Rouen’s first batter, a bear of a man nicknamed Balou, steps up to the plate.
The slugger takes the first pitch, a fastball, for a strike. Ozanich throws the next one inside, and Balou bites but breaks his bat in the effort. Strike two. He swings at the third pitch too, this time chopping the ball for an easy play at third base.
The Montpellier shortstop makes a nifty grab for out number two. Rouen’s third batter pops out to center field. Just seven pitches, and it’s over. Ozanich makes a discreet fist pump, but otherwise, his reaction is subdued.
“It’s good because it went fast,” he says shortly afterward, his mind already onto the next game.
Learning the game
The weekend in Rouen is a homecoming of sorts for Ozanich, who spent eight highly successful seasons with the Huskies before moving to Montpellier, at the opposite end of the country.
His real hometown, however, is farther away still — in the Green Mountain State — where as a boy he never imagined that baseball would one day take him overseas, or that he’d build a reputation as one of France’s all-time greats.
Ozanich was born in France but spent the bulk of his childhood in South Burlington, introduced to baseball by his father, a State Department officer stationed for years near the border in St. Albans. Ozanich played Little League and excelled. Later he pitched and played shortstop for the South Burlington High School team that went undefeated in 2007 and won a state championship.
That was his senior year and the following autumn, the hometown hero moved just up the road to study at the University of Vermont, where he joined the school’s Division 1 team as a walk-on. It was a fateful decision, given what happened one year later, when the school dropped the bombshell announcement that, for budgetary reasons, it would ax both the baseball and softball programs.
“It was really disappointing, especially being a Vermonter,” Ozanich recalls. “I think there were two or three Vermonters on the team, and it was tough. It’s tough for anybody, but especially if it’s your home state.”
The Catamounts still had the opportunity to play one last season, but it was disorienting, knowing that the end was nigh. Some of the players opted to transfer. Ozanich, whose numbers slipped that final year, chose to stay at UVM, even if doing so meant the effective end of his baseball career.
A twist of fate
As graduation approached in the spring of 2011, the former South Burlington High star contemplated an entirely different trajectory: a possible job with Delta Airlines.
But an unsolicited phone call from a city he’d never even heard of — Rouen — suddenly put baseball back on the table.
The Huskies, intrigued by his status as a dual French-American citizen, invited Ozanich to join them for a summer. They hinted that he might join the French national team. There wouldn’t be much money involved — a couple of hundred euros a month, plus housing. But for the Vermonter, it was the adventure and, more importantly, the chance to get back on a baseball field that made the offer too good to refuse.
At the same time, Ozanich had little idea what to expect. Baseball is about the last thing people associate with France. Even in the country, it’s “confidential,” as they say here — hidden from view.
Yet, scattered around France are about 200 clubs, the best of which participate in what’s known as the D1, an 11-team semipro league that also attracts a number of foreign “imports,” often with experience in the U.S. minor leagues.
For those players, France is often a last-stop destination, a place to extend careers for a final season or two before hanging it up for good. For the American imports in particular — guys like Ozanich, who arrive as recent college graduates — the D1 is often a one-and-done experience. It’s a chance to spend a fun-filled summer playing weekend games, with plenty of free time in between to travel around Europe, before heading home to get “real” jobs.
Ozanich arrived imagining a similar scenario. But that was 11 years ago, and his decision to stay — and his drive to succeed — make his unusual baseball trajectory all the more remarkable.
New horizons
Soft-spoken but affable, Ozanich knows just about everyone in French baseball. It helps that he speaks three languages: English and French, and also Spanish, which he studied a bit in Vermont but mostly picked up through friends and teammates from Latin America.
Single, with no children, he also likes traveling — Ozanich is planning a trip soon to the country of Georgia. And he loves spending time at the beach. That’s one of the benefits of his move to Montpellier, in late 2019. The southern city, where he lives full time, is just 10 kilometers from the Mediterranean. In the summer; he’s there every chance he gets.
But as a paid employee of the Barracudas club, Ozanich also works extremely hard. He helps coach the club’s U-15 team and trains kids in what’s known as the Pôle Espoir, a baseball academy in Montpellier for middle-school and early high school-age kids. Days off are few and far between.
The pitcher also makes a concerted effort to stay in shape, even during the off-season. But it’s on game days that he’s at his most serious. He keeps the chitchat to a minimum, his focus razor-sharp.
“I take it seriously because I love the game,” Ozanich says. “I was a big baseball fan before I was any good at playing, and I’ll probably be a baseball fan after I’m done playing too. But also, my dad instilled a good work ethic and always told me that if you’re going to do something, you may as well do it well.”
That first summer in France, Ozanich did just that, impressing his coaches in Rouen and on the French national team. And it was through the latter that he found yet another baseball opportunity: playing winter baseball in Australia.
The pitcher ended up playing two seasons in Adelaide while returning to France in the summers to pitch in Rouen, where he won seven D1 titles in eight years, and for Team France as its primary starter. Ozanich left Rouen after the 2018 season to play in the Italian pro league. A nasty leg injury cut that season short. He joined the Barracudas shortly afterward.
“His reputation is that he’s been the best French pitcher for years,” says Montpellier head coach Jean-Michel Mayeur. “In the 1990s, there were a few different pitchers who held that mantle, that of being the ace in the French national team’s rotation, but since 2011 Owen has been the No. 1 guy.”
Great expectations
Ozanich is also among the all-time D1 leaders in wins, with nearly 100, and in 2015 threw the only perfect game in league history. Three years later, he came within one out of doing it again — in the finals. And so far this year, he has the league’s best-earned run average, at 0.86.
But with the Barracudas still fighting for a shot at the finals, numbers are the last thing on Ozanich’s mind. Fifteen hours after his dramatic save in the third game of the series, the team again takes the field in Rouen, this time on a chilly Sunday morning.
All the Vermonter wants is another win.
The Barracudas feel good about their chances. Their starting pitcher, a lefty from Venezuela, is one of the league’s best. Montpellier’s lineup, though, struggles at the plate, and in the bottom of the eighth, Rouen scores a run to go up 2-1.
Ozanich comes on in relief. It takes him just one pitch to get the final out. But in the top of the ninth, the Barracudas again come up short. The final batter, a French player in his teens, strikes out looking. The Rouen players rush to the mound to celebrate.
On the long van ride back to Montpellier, Ozanich is quiet, lost for several hours in his headphones. He’s disappointed but admits that it will feel good to finally rest a bit. A month earlier, he’d helped lead the Barracudas to a major tournament win. Shortly afterward, he pitched a pair of games for Team France. His arm has been sore for weeks, and at 32, it takes the pitcher a bit longer these days to recover.
But age and experience have also changed his perspective on things. “I’m just trying to enjoy each day and each time I go out onto the field and each game. And I think that’s what I’ve done the most in Montpellier,” Ozanich says.
“I just feel like there’s a lot more out there than just the numbers,” he adds. “Yeah, I’m proud of my accomplishments, but I’m more proud of the relationships and friendships that I built along the way.”
