So I read
this post from Shysterball this morning and J9 recently tagged me in one of those facebook random things about you notes, so I thought it might be a good idea to try this. If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the idea is to take that facebook 25 random things bit and apply it to your experiences/thoughts about baseball. Since I haven't written about baseball here in a while (mostly due to the Mets' lackluster offseason) this will be a nice change of pace:
1. Obviously, I am a big Mets fan, although I can't exactly pinpoint when this became the case. I don't think it was a conscious decision, just the result of my dad taking me to so many Mets games over the years because the tickets were cheaper and Shea was easier to get to. I don't like to think about it, but if I had grown up in the Bonx or Manhattan instead of Brooklyn I might have been a Yankees fan. Wait, no. I have too much integrity for that.
2. Actually, there might be another reason I became a Mets fan besides the obvious geographical convenience. My dad grew up in Indiana as a Tigers fan (and somewhat Indians fan--I guess he liked whoever Rocky Colavito was playing for)during the 1950s. Therefore, like most God-fearing human beings he hated the Yankees and had to follow the Mets when he and my mother moved to New York in the early 70s (he came to NY in 1973, just in time to see the Ya Gotta Believe! Mets make a run to the World Series).
3. During a family trip to see one of my dad's friends who lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, we went to Dyersville--home of the Field of Dreams. I was about 8 or 9 I think and there was supposed to be an old-timers game. Well, the game was rained out but it was still a memorable day. As we were walking towards the corn behind the outfield grass, a guy with a microphone and a camera walked up and started interviewing me and my sister about baseball. If I recall correctly I think I told him I liked fielding better than hitting and he told us that we were going to be on some TV station in Wisconsin (I think). Later that day there was an autograph session in some big barn thing by the field and I met
Mudcat Grant. I remember being really shy and intimidated and that he asked me if I was a "Bubba." I couldn't really understand his accent and when my dad told me what he asked me I had no idea what a "Bubba" was. I still have no idea.
4. Anyone who knows me well knows that my favorite player of all-time is Cal Ripken Jr. Well, because of my love for Cal I was a big Orioles fan as a kid, which meant that Jeffrey Maier hit me harder than your average Yankee ill-wisher. I really hate that kid.
5. From the more about Cal Ripken files:
The first time I saw Cal Ripken was in the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore meaning it must have been 1991 when I was four years old. I remember being frightened because the upper deck was insanely steep, and that I asked my dad who "that tall man" was. I wasn't much interested in the game, only in the guy who, even from afar, seemed to tower over everyone on the infield. That man was of course Cal Ripken Jr.
In grade school, our librarian (and later gym teacher when P.S. 261 phased out the library in favor of more gym--who needs books when we can just play dodgeball!) Mr. Gelband would have us do a report every year on a famous/historical figure. I remember one year I was
Wild Bill Hickok. The idea was to read a book about that person and then dress up as them a present a report to the class as that person. Most people did someone like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Abe Lincoln, etc. Well one year, I think 4th grade probably, I read Cal Ripken's autobiography (the one with a bunch of photographs, I don't remember what it was called), and put on an Orioles t-shirt and hat to give my report. I had a buzz cut back then and really light blonde hair, so I probably pulled off the balding thing pretty well.
6. As a youngster, most of our family road trips revolved around going to see baseball games and I have therefore been to more big league stadiums and minor league games than just about anyone my age I know. Like when Muggs told me she was from Frederick, I was like "Oh, home of the Frederick Keys" and I have actually been there. Or when she talked about an uncle in Hagerstown, I can relate that to the fact that I have sat on a hill behind left field at a Hagerstown Suns game. Anyway, here are the MLB stadiums where I've seen a game: Shea, Yankee Stadium, The Vet, Citizens Bank Park, Memorial Stadium (Baltimore), Camden Yards(I went to the first ever game-an exhibition against the Mets), RFK, Nationals Stadium, Tropicana Field, Three Rivers, PNC Park, Wrigley, Cellular One/New Comiskey (whatever it's called), Miller Park, Municipal Stadium (Cleveland), Jacobs Field, Tiger Stadium, Comerica. Pretty good for 22 and never really travelled much west of the Mississippi.
7. When I was 7, we finally made the jump up from teeball to live pitching in the 78th Precinct league. To ease the change the team's coach would pitch to the players for half the year with players getting to pitch in the second half of the season. I was a decent hitter but without much pop and even though our coach's son was my size or smaller (and I was a small kid) he was smacking extra base hits like crazy off his dad for the first half of the year. Well, when kids started pitching and his daddy wasn't grooving him slowballs at his belt he couldn't hit shit and I had the highest average on the team against "live" pitching.
8. I was a kind of little league journeyman, hopping from team to team every couple of years. From the ages of 5-15 I played for 78th Precinct, the Bonnies, Grace of Gravesend, Amity, Bergen Beach, and then back to the Bonnies (never did go over to St. Columba...or the Latin Souls for that matter). This of course was due to the fact that my dad inevitably had some sort of falling out or disagreement with whoever I was playing for. It was generally to get me somewhere where I had a chance to play more (although at least one of them was due to a personal injustice my dad felt we had suffered) and it was pretty frustrating at the time. Now it kinda cracks me up.
9. The first and only homerun I remember hitting was at Marine Park when I was 8 and playing for the Bonnies against Bergen Beach (which was NOT a good team). I was a good shortstop and hitting in the 8-hole all year (to give you an idea of my hitting ability) and I had just recently bought a new TPX bat that was black with red and gold lettering. I was a singles hitter mostly and everyone knew it (since we played the same 4 or 5 teams several times), so the outfield was playing pretty shallow. Well, I finally connected on a high fastball and sent it over the centerfielder's head and it kept rolling and rolling. Man, I loved that bat.
10. I have had some pretty bad injuries playing baseball. When I was 8 or 9 (Bonnies) I got a concussion in practice. We were practicing throwing down to second on steals and I was covering second when one of my teammates came barrelling in without sliding. He was wearing a helmet, I was not and helmet-to-head collisions usually wind up bad for your head. Later when I was 9 I fractured a growth plate in my right shoulder from overthrowing. When you pitch the day after a practice that featured steady long-tossing you better be older than 9. I missed the rest of that season and my fastball was never the same again.
My worst, or at least most immediately awful-looking, injury from baseball was when I was 11. Once again it was at practice, and we were practicing pickoff throws to second. I was a second baseman on that team and when I went to cover second for the throw the sun was directly in my eyes and I couldn't see the ball coming. Unfortunately, the pitcher making the throw was Tommy Costa, the hardest throwing 11 year old I've ever seen, and the ball hit me directly in the face and broke my nose. I didn't realize what happened until I looked down and saw the glove I had been holding to my face was filled with blood. I had a shiner on both eyes for weeks.
11. The worst seats I have ever had at a game were at old Tigers Stadium. My great aunt, Auntie Nan, took me and my sister to a day game and got cheap seats behind the left field wall. The view directly in front of me was a post supporting the upper level. I appreciate the effort though, Auntie Nan.
12. The best team I ever played for was the 10-year old Our Lady of Grace (Gravesend) team. I played right field, because the middle infield positions were already held by players who had been with Grace for a few years (remember, I was a journeyman) and hit second. I hit .480 that year (and probably with a Bonds-ian OBP) and we won our league and the Babe Ruth League qualifying tournament with a remarkable run after losing our first game in a double-elimination tournament. We went to a Babe Ruth League World Series in Frederick, MD (home of the Keys!) facing off against teams from all over the mid-Atlantic and northeast. Standing on a mound of dirt watiting for our coach's speech after the second game we lost (to a team from Buffalo, I think), i.e. the one that eliminated us from the series, is the only time I remember crying after a baseball game.
13. I attended
Doc Gooden's no-hitter. I went with my dad and a former coach and teammate. I went to see Griffey and I got to see a former Met great throw a no-hitter...for the Yankees. Still waiting on that Mets no-hitter--Ollie, Johan, somebody?
14. The first time I ever got drunk was in the spring of my freshman year in high school. The next day was the first time I ever played baseball hungover or even had a hangover for that matter. I hit four doubles over the course of a double-header. So, yeah, I understand how David Wells threw a perfect game hungover.
15. I was at Shea in 1999 when Robin Ventura hit a grand slam in
both games of a double-header, the only time it's been done in MLB history. The dark secret, of course, is that he hit the first one in the first inning of game one and we were just pulling into the parking lot so I only heard it on the radio. I usually just tell people I was there for both.
16. That '99 Mets team is my favorite team ever. My favorite Met ever is Edgardo Alfonzo, followed by Jose Reyes (clearly I have a soft spot for middle infielders). Maybe my favorite baseball memory is sitting in my parents bed with my mom and dad watching Ventura's "grand single" soar through the raindrops at Shea.
17. I was at the
Todd Pratt game. My dad's friend Richie got 4 tickets and my dad drove me and my sister out to the game. We went in while he stayed in the parking lot listening to it on the radio. We sat with Richie and his girlfriend Peg in the last row of the Loge in fair territory by the left-field foul pole. We couldn't see pop-ups and we had to strain our necks down to either side for most of the game. But goddamn if we didn't have a great view of that ball going off Steve Finley's glove. And we went fuckin nuts.
18. My dad taught me and my sister to keep score when we were very young, and we both still do it pretty frequently when we're at a game. However, I've learned that the Trott method of scoring differs slightly from the more popular method: on fly outs rather than putting F8 or F7, etc. we put the number with a circle around it (a circled number with a line under it is a line out).
19. When I was 12 I learned how to throw a curveball, and let me tell you, I threw a wicked fucking curveball. I never blew my fastball past people at that point (see #10), but I kept hitters off balance with a mix of pitches. This was the age when kids were just starting to throw curves and nobody knew how to hit them, so I was a pretty effective pitcher. As I got older and kids learned to adjust to the curve, though, that lack of great velocity did me in.
20. I was at the
Jeter-Mr. November game and I was probably the only one in the stdaium rooting for the Diamondbacks. 9/11 or no, I was sticking to my principles. Later in that series I broke my World History textbook in half when I threw it on the floor after Soriano hit that go-ahead homer in game 7. That game 4 and that series were outstanding.
21. My dad got two season tickets down the third base line for the inaugural season of the Brooklyn Cyclones. That team, that season, that setting was totally electric that year. I caught a couple of t-shirts thrown into the crowd over the course of the season, and I thought Party Marty was awesome. Only later did I find out that he was a jerk (except that I found that out from my friend Timmy, who, in Party Marty's defense, had just run out onto the field uninvivted for the singing of Happy Birthday even though it wan't his birthday and he was a good 6 years older than everyone else out there).
22. I am pretty sabermetrically-oriented as a baseball fan, but have only become that way over the last few years. I remember my dad telling me a number of years ago that the most important baseball stat, in his opinion, was RBIs and it made total sense to me at the time. Of course, as my knowledge of the game has progressed I now find myself disagreeing with my dad about baseball more and more frequently. I bought him Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends and I don't think he got the point. We do seem to agree on our generally positive regard for Tim Marchman and on the fact that Omar Minaya is not very good at his job.
23. I have gone to one baseball game by myself:
this one. It was during the summer of 2006 when I was temping at the Pfizer gym and I really wanted to go to a game, but couldn't get anyone to go with me. I went anyway and got a $5 box down the right field line in the upper deck, but moved down closer to the infield in the first row of the mezzanine. Before the game started an usher came to check the tickets of a group of guys a section over from me who had done the same thing and made them leave, but he left me alone because I was by myself. Reyes hit for the cycle, Jose Valentin hit a homer to put the Mets ahead in the 7th (he hit lefty against a lefty which was pretty cool), and then Billy Wagner blew what had been an awesome game in the 9th. I think I might try going to a game by myself again some time soon.
24. I took batting lessons for several years from a man named Mel Zitter out at the batting cages in Funstation USA on Victory Blvd. in Staten Island. Mel had been one of Manny Ramirez' coaches when Manny was a kid in Washington Heights and played for Youth Service (a team I played against most of my childhood). Mel never missed an opportunity to remind you that he had coached Manny and he always sort of bothered me. The longish drive combined with Mel's annoyingness and the fact that my hitting wasn't really improving made me dread those lessons. One of my happiest afternoons is when my dad's vanagon ran out of gas getting off the Staten Island Expressway and we missed the lesson.
Addendum: It was while taking a batting lesson from Mel that a film crew from Channel 7 Eyewitness News taped me taking swings in the cage (while still wearing my Catholic scool khakis) and played it during a report about the dangers of aluminum bats in high school baseball. My parents have a tape of that somewhere.
25. I quit playing baseball after the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school. I had played JV the year before, but I didn't make the varsity my junior year and I was really disheartened. I mean REALLY disheartened. I decided on the day I didn't see myself on the roster posted outside Coach Duffel's office that I was done playing baseball. It took me a few months to tell my dad, and he was so mad we didn't speak for several weeks. Baseball had consumed my life, but I had been so focused on playing it that I didn't really like it that much at that point. It felt like it had become a burden and more my father's hobby than my own. I sometimes regret quitting, not knowing if I did so on my own terms. But now I think I like baseball more. It's something to enjoy in my spare time, something I still get wrapped up in but can also ignore or follow as I please. It's still the thing that best connects me and my father. And anyway I wasn't really THAT good.
Bonus Fact: Boyce and I spent the better part of an hour smoking cigarettes with Cliff Floyd's little brother Julius during a game at PNC Park a couple years ago. Boyce won a trip to Pittsburgh from a text trivia thing at Shea, and I think I freaked Julius out when I asked if his family called his brother Cornelius.
