What he built was a baseball field with minor league pretensions but major league dimensions, with lockers, lights and artificial turf, and a concession stand that sells hot dogs that are tasty even if they come smeared with mayonnaise and stuffed into hollowed-out baguettes.

The home team, the Montigny Cougars, is one of the better teams in France -- not that it has a lot of competition. And though the field would be the envy of almost any town in America, it stands more as a monument to the enthusiasm of a rural mayor who went on to become a senator than to any love for the boys of summer.

Thirty years ago, Montigny-le-Bretonneux was a village 20 miles southwest of Paris, and Nicolas About was its only doctor. Over two decades, the village welcomed 2,000 new residents a year, mostly couples with young children.

"It gave a lot of work to the doctor I was and the mayor I became," says About (pronounced A-boo), now a prominent lawmaker with what has to be the best office in Paris, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens.

At first, the only sports and culture the village had were soccer, boules and beer. The people wanted more. So About gave them more soccer and facilities for boules, a national sport akin to lawn bowling but done with small steel balls on sandy surfaces. He also introduced new activities such as judo, fencing and his favorite, handball.

Then one day he had the idea to start something altogether new. He'd seen people elsewhere in France with gloves throwing balls to one another. They had bats.

Baseball, he thought, why not baseball?

It was the late 1980s, and America's pastime was newly in vogue in France. Teens favored the American jerseys and caps even if the rules of the game were arcane. About raised the idea of building a field in his budding suburb, and immediately a few pioneers started a club.

"They understood they had to help me because it was a kind of cultural revolution," About recalls.

But there was no cry of "Vive le baseball!"

"They said no one wanted it, no one was asking for it," says About, 60, a tall, heavyset man with De Gaulle-esque features, gray hair and smiling eyes. Though he is not sporty himself -- he plays a decent game of handball but that's it -- he is canny about what a community and children need to grow.

And so he persisted with baseball not because he knew anything about the game or had even seen it played across the Atlantic. He just knew it was distinctive -- and it symbolized "the idea of the American dream."

But baseball, which was introduced here in 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower was built, has never really caught on in France and is played only at the amateur level. The national baseball federation has about 9,000 members, and France usually ranks below Italy, the Netherlands, Britain and Germany in quality of play and at competitions.

It's still not a game children play in the garden or during a barbecue. As is regularly noted, if you hand a French child a baseball, he'll immediately drop and try to kick it. (Of course, that's how the 1962 Mets played, and they won a World Series a few years later.)

On a typical spring weekend when the Cougars are on the field, there are only a few dozen spectators in the stands, and often the strapping players mix with the desultory crowd, wandering over to the snack bar for a square of vanilla flan or a waffle delicately sprinkled with sugar.

"Compared with soccer, where every little town has its own beautiful field," says Sylvain Hervieux, 34, who plays for one of the best elite baseball teams in France, "baseball has few fields, and finding a good one is always a problem." (Hervieux is typical of French players with multiple roles, including presiding over a local club, teaching gym and coaching a high school varsity team.)

Montigny's mayor knew instinctively that to build interest in the sport he needed a field. Determined to keep the local youths active, he persuaded a quasi-governmental agency charged with building green spaces in new suburbs not to bother sprinkling his town with lots of little patches of grass but to "gather them all in one place and make them a baseball field, and not to make it grass but artificial turf."

"All at once I had a new service for my youths, which didn't cost me a dime to build, and I didn't have to cut the grass," About says with a chuckle.