Turning 20… Sox Style!
On September 26, 2003, I turned 20 years old and I had decided to do so “Sox Style.” This of course meant traveling to another state for the weekend since the team was away, but I thought, “I need a little adventure in my life!”
So after failing a Chemistry test that morning (happy birthday, me…) and sitting through Geology that afternoon, I finally left the Western Illinois campus at 2:30. (Well, actually I left the Macomb BP station at 2:30, but close enough… anyhoo…) I drove for three and half hours in and out of torrential rain (no lie!) before I finally made it to Aunt Pat’s house, where I was spending Friday night. --Let me tell ya, it’s a little scary when the radio DJs are telling you to seek shelter if you’re in specific counties and you aren’t exactly sure how that pertains to you because you’re on an interstate in the middle of who-knows-where!-- Once there, I was treated to dinner and cake. Mmmm….
Because I hadn’t seen her, or much of any extended family member, since July, it didn’t seem nearly as important as usual to check the Sox score for the game that was already underway in Kansas City, even with my personal favorite, Jon Garland, taking the hill. I had intended to read the paper the next morning, but in getting ready for the next leg of my journey and finishing up my visit, I forgot. So instead, I flipped through the radio for what seemed to be forever before finding a station that took a break from the college football action to tell the baseball scores. When I finally heard the end result, I was really excited. What an excellent birthday present- 11-2, Sox! Thanks, guys!
I drove on to KCI Airport to pick up Christine. She flew in from DC to go to the game with me. What a pal! We finally made it to the hotel. Well, first I missed the exit and got back on going the wrong way but I rectified that pretty quick, and then we had to fill up at the station next to the hotel because I was close to fumes. There we met some fellow Sox fans who were looking for something to do around the ballpark. Here’s a hint- there is nothing.
After calling home and freshening up, we finally got to walk across the street to the ballpark. The idea was to get there as early as possible so we could see batting practice. We don’t normally get to see that at the home games. When we got there, they were still stretching but soon they broke up and practice began.
We eventually decided to head over to where our seats were and watch from the railing. We were in the last section down the third baseline. The pitchers were hanging out over there. Well, Jon wasn’t over there anymore. He somehow got suckered into standing behind the screen collecting the balls hit into the field. Oh well for me. But Christine got lucky because unbeknownst to us, we were standing a couple of people over from someone that Mark Buehrle knew. He’s her favorite. The guy got his attention so Mark walked over and talked to him for about 10 minutes. He was probably 3 feet from us (well, not directly, the field is lower than the stands but whatever). We were trying not to listen to their conversation because we felt like we were eavesdropping. We did hear when they first started talking that someone they knew mutually had called Mark at four am and that when Mark finally talked to the guy he asked him “What are you doing calling me at four in the morning!?” --Note to Christine: Don’t call Mark at 4 am… He doesn’t like it and he will not answer. =)--
The guy asked if his son could take a picture with Mark, and they passed the kid (he was probably 11 or 12) over the railing so they could stand together on the warning track. After the picture was taken, Mark invited the kid to go back and shag balls with him. The look on the kid’s face was so cute! He was so excited and he looked back at his dad at first like “Can I really??” He was introduced to some of the other guys out there and Danny Wright even played a little catch with him. Let me tell you, that kid made a catch on a pop fly that left some of the pros in awe. He saw it, gauged it, and timed it perfectly!
Now, that whole time that Mark was standing over there, we could easily have said hi or snuck a picture of him, but we didn’t feel right doing so. We know that they are still just people and we don’t like to bother them when they’re doing their own thing. However, Christine noted that he had very nice teeth- straight and white. I didn’t really notice, but that’s not my job.
While Mark was chatting, I was observing Birthday Boy Jon Garland, not that he was doing much anyway. Apparently the cool thing to do when you’re bored is to toss your glove in the air and then attempt to catch it. And Jon wasn’t the only one I saw do it.
I’m sure some more small things happened (like Danny doing a “Scully roll” to make a catch or Mark making a throw that completely missed the bullpen catcher who made a face like “You are a starting pitcher, right??”) or we made comments about something but I can’t remember them all.
At some point, the guys got called in and we took our seats. Eventually, the game started and there was nobody sitting in the front row of the section across the aisle. Our seats we right on the aisle so we just slipped over and down. There were a couple of little boys sitting there so we just joined them. They were really cute. They weren’t really rooting for either team; they just thought it was cool to be there. When Maggs came up to bat, the group of Sox fans that were in the front of our “real” section started the O-E-O chant. (They got heckled a little from the Royals fans.) We laughed because the boys joined and then one of them said, “I don’t even know what that means!”
As it turned out, sitting down there was a great idea because the last Royals batter in the bottom of the first hit a fly ball out to Carlos Lee in left. When he’s at home, he throws them out to the fans, but he doesn’t do that on the road (unless it’s a mock throw to tease the Royals or Cubs fans who like to get on his case a little). Well, we all know that Christine has a big mouth. She also really likes Carlos so she was cheering for him because of the good catch. He obviously heard her and kind of stopped for a second, looked up, saw her (in her Sox shirt and visor) and tossed her the ball!! Luckily, it was only me around her because she bobbled it a little and dropped it. She wasn’t expecting it, plus she was holding on to the birthday card.
What birthday card, you ask? The original plan behind the card was to have Christine stand there with it and ask the players to sign it for me. We really wanted to see how they’d react to signing a birthday card and we wanted Jon to sign it because, well he is my favorite, but also because his birthday is the day after mine and we wanted to see if he’d say anything. (For instance, “You guys should come celebrate with us tonight.” >=) ) But Mark was the only one who ever came over. Of course, it’s not like we were very aggressive about it, either. Besides, no offense to him but I’ve already got a ball that he signed. So, anyway, we didn’t get the card signed. Well, somewhere in joking around pre-game, we decided to sign it ourselves and attempt to get it to Jon. Trust me, it’s not something I would normally do but neither was driving to another state to see a baseball game. It was an unusual weekend for me!
Well, how to go about getting it to him is what stumped us. A batboy ran something out to the bullpen, which was near our section, but he ran back too fast for us to even try to get his attention. The other option was to catch the pitching coach, Don Cooper, as he was walking back to the dugout from watching the starting pitcher, Bartolo Colon, warm up. That didn’t happen, either. They weren’t walking close enough and we decided not to bother. She was still holding it when Carlos tossed her the ball.
Well, right after that, an usher came to tell us we couldn’t sit there anymore because the people who had those seats had come. We didn’t really care, though. Our seats weren’t that far back as it was and Christine had gotten a ball from Carlos. We were content.
A few innings after that, I’m not sure exactly when, we saw Kelly Wunsch come from the dugout to go to the bullpen (where he probably should have already been, and who knows why he wasn’t) during a break in the action. We went back and forth and finally decided to try and get him to take the card. Now, as was already pointed out, Christine has a loud mouth. Good thing. She went to the railing and called for him. It was kind of funny to watch because she would yell to him, and he couldn’t quite hear over the crowd so he would yell back, and she yelled again about the card, and he still couldn’t understand so he looked to see if he had time to go to the wall. He walked over and she yelled to ask if he could give the card to Garland and he said sure and took it. Kelly seems like the kind of guy who would actually give it to him, but at first we weren’t sure. (It wasn’t a big deal if Jon didn’t actually get it. We just did it for a lark.) He went in and sat down in the bullpen and we saw him set it down. But then, after getting comfortable, he picked it up, read it (She had left the envelope in the hotel room. We found it amusing that he read it.), and put it in his jacket pocket. So with a little luck, Jon may have gotten a birthday card from us. Not that we’ll ever know but oh well.
The rest of the game went on pretty uneventful- except for the 19-3 killing of the Royals! That was really cool! What made it seem even cooler was that the Sox had no homeruns that game. So there it was. Our night was complete, or so we thought. And what a night it had been. It had been quite an adventure in getting there but it was well worth it.
We went back to the room and dropped of the “precious” a.k.a. the Carlos ball. (That’s a Lord of the Rings reference for those of you who didn’t get it, which would include me if my brother and friends weren’t so into it.) Christine called my mom (yeah, I know, that’s kinda weird) and her brother to tell them about the ball. We didn’t spend much time hanging around there, though, because we were both starving from not eating since that morning so we decided to drive to Denny’s. We probably could have walked but it was across a big intersection and it was dark and late. Did I mention that it was dark and I was driving in unfamiliar territory? I thought you had to turn to get to Denny’s. Turns out I was wrong. Turning takes you back to the Interstate. Whoops! My bad. It was no sweat- we just waited until we could get off and get back on in the other direction. We laughed, as we usually do when we get “misplaced,” instead of freaking out. (We laughed for, like, five minutes straight when we ended up downtown trying to get home from the All-State Arena. Don’t ask.) At any rate, we eventually made it to Denny’s. We were standing there waiting to be called to our table when, in a very accusatory way, Christine went “Emily!!” to which I replied very defensively “What!?” Through clenched teeth: “Isn’t that Joe Crede??” Very confused, I asked “Where??” and began looking around. I thought she meant on a shirt or a TV. “Over there!” I glanced over in the direction she indicated and saw him kneeling on the bench talking to someone at the table on the other side of the divider wall. I looked away very quickly so as not to draw attention and went “Mm hmm!” His wife was standing there waiting for him and I knew if he didn’t see us, she might. Plus, I didn’t want to look like crazed, staring fans. He had had a really great game that night and we probably could’ve gone up to him (or her) to say congrats (or congrats on the upcoming November birth of their baby), but again, we felt as if we’d be bothering them. Luckily, our table was called not long after that and we went to sit down. As we did, they left. What’s really crazy is the fact that we were so amused not by the fact that we saw him but because we saw him in a Denny’s. I don’t want to come off sounding like Denny’s is not good enough or something, but let’s face it- it’s Denny’s. We were there because it was 9:30 at night, we were starving, and there was nothing else around. That and room service is waaay out of our college student budgets.
We went back to the hotel, watched some West Wing (I swear, I just happened to find it channel-surfing! We’re not that obsessed!), and recounted our night. The joke for the weekend became “You know what?” “What?” “We saw Joe Crede in Denny’s!”
The next day, we woke up around 9. I told her I wanted to go back. She told me that it would be fun but I was crazy. However, after realizing that we were at Kauffman Stadium and not USCF where they have Upper Deck restrictions, she agreed that we could just buy the $5 Upper Deck tickets and go watch batting practice until we had to leave for the airport. She really wanted to get Carlos to sign her ball for her. I just wanted to go back. I like being at the park, and I like seeing the guys, especially when they’re just hanging out with each other and being weird. (For instance, some of the pitchers were messing around and playing catch. One guy set up as the catcher for another one. Well, this other pitcher, Scott Schoeneweis decided they needed a batting target so he came over and took his stance, complete with air-bat. We thought it was kinda funny.) Unfortunately, because it was an early afternoon game and the last of the season, the Royals had planned their autograph/run the bases day for that day. That meant we wouldn’t be seeing a batting practice. A few of the guys came out but not many and not for that long. We left empty handed, but I figured that it was a better way to spend the day than we would’ve otherwise. Check out was at 11 and we didn’t have to leave for the airport until 12:30. What could we have possibly done!? As has been pointed out, there is nothing to do around there.
So, here is the only down point of the weekend, which I think is pretty good considering we had an entire weekend in which something could’ve gone completely wrong. When we got back to where the car was parked in the hotel lot, Christine realized that the Carlos ball was gone. She had been keeping it in the front pouch on her hooded sweatshirt. We ran back to look for it. She knew she had it when we left the park, so we assume that somewhere along the two big hills we had to climb to get to the street, it rolled out without either of us noticing. The whole parking lot is on a slight incline, plus other people were heading in as we were heading out at the crosswalk. Someone easily could have picked it up. They wouldn’t have known that it was game-used because, frankly, it just looked like regular dirty ball, but it would’ve been a free ball to play with. So that put a little damper on things and I felt bad, but Christine came to terms with it eventually. And she’s right, at least it wasn’t signed (we actually have Carlos’s signature on our “autograph balls” from his Hawkinson Ford appearance) and she had taken a picture with her digital camera of herself holding it on Saturday night.
On the five-hour drive back to school (Yeah, that sucked- five hours on a two-lane highway across virtually the entire state of Missouri. And don’t forget that little piece of Iowa that lies between Illinois and Missouri. That’s fun, too. I was in three different states in a matter of 15 minutes!), I heard Esteban Loaiza get his 21st win while taking the AL lead for strikeouts. That only added to the grand allure of the weekend. That and the rainbow I saw while driving. A sign, perhaps?
So all in all, it was a great weekend and I wish I could do it over again. I don’t find myself saying, “That was a great weekend!!” all too much, but this definitely qualifies. That was a great weekend!!
I wish to close with a saying near and dear to all Sox Fans:
“That’s a White Sox Winner!”