A cool baseball story
[I apologize for the lack of posts in July. As you all are pretty well aware, it has been a ridiculously slow summer for hockey/Red Wings news, leaving me with a handful of baseball subjects I could talk about but laziness quickly takes over. I love baseball—it's right up there with hockey in terms of my favorite sports—so I figure I can pass the time by writing about another sport I love.]
In today's Detroit Free Press, I came across a very cool article in the sports section briefly profiling some people who were fortunate enough to catch a foul ball at Comerica Park on July 22.
The reason I link to it, besides the fact that it's a unique project that tackled an aspect of the game that I love (a likely once in a lifetime opportunity to catch a foul ball at a game), is that it reminded me of the time I got a foul ball at a Tigers game.
I was sitting down the third base line on May 30, 2003, a game in which the Tigers lost to the New York Yankees 6-0. Bobby Higginson was at the plate. (Remember him? The guy who Detroit management paid $11,850,000 in 2003 for an OPS+ of 88 and a .320 OBP? He now is a partner in a limo company located in Michigan. Brings me back to the dark days of Tigers baseball.) He hit a high fly ball toward my section, and just happened to be coming right at me. Unfortunately, I didn't catch it on the fly (I was nine or ten, give me a break), but it landed right behind me, and a Japanese man, who didn't speak English, picked it up and handed it to me.
After the game, a security guard probably risked losing his job by stopping Higginson as he was pulling out of the garage in his Jaguar, and asked him if he could sign the ball. He did, "casually" rolling down his passenger window and without saying a word, signed the souvenir. Then he drove off in his career 113 OPS+ lore.
It was incredible luck I guess, considering the attendance that day was 28,003, that I was able to walk out of the stadium with a foul ball. The Elias Sports Bureau says that there are around 5o foul balls every game, so to be one of the approximately 50 fans that snagged one that day is certainly something I will remember for a long time.
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