Estonut wrote:Hopefully, you'll see this in time to ruin your weekend (+)
I doubt if you saw the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien tonight (Friday), but there was a guest who would have made you cry...
Zack Hample made the following claims:
* Over the last 20 years, he has snagged 4,352 baseballs at 46 major league stadiums.
* He expects to catch at least 1 every time he goes to a game.
* He has been to 628 consecutive games with at least 1 ball snagged.
* He counts HRs, foul balls, BP balls and balls tossed to him by players.
* For the latter, he raises his voice an octave and asks nicely.
* He has found that foreign-born players respond better to requests in their native language, so he has learned how to ask "could you throw me a ball, please" in over 30 different languages.
* Conan drilled further into that one and asked specifically about the languages. Of course, he knew the Spanish and Japanese phrases. He has learned it in Turkish, too. When Conan mentioned that there are NO Turkish ballplayers yet, he said, no, but he'll be ready for the first one...
* A clip of the interview is linked below. At 4:53 remaining, they show a montage of 4 catches in New York.
* He got 32 balls in one game in KC.
* At the end, he looked directly into the camera and said, "lb13, you're a slacker!"
I only made up one of the above-listed claims...
http://www.tonightshowwithconanobrien.c ... 9/1165472/
Yeah, I've heard about this guy, and he's probably the guy who had the article on Page 2 that I conveniently ignored. Yawn!
I could probably fill a few Sterilite totes with baseballs too if I hounded the players to throw baseballs to me. I haven't done that since I was a kid, and it never worked then (I got my first ball, completely by accident, when I was 19). That's the kind of thing little kids and cute chicks do, and I say good for them if they can get a ball thrown to them. That may be fun if it were my first souvenir, or I was about NINE.....
What keeps me coming to BP every game I go me is to catch the balls that get hit. It's a thrill that never gets old, and it happens rare enough to keep it exciting when it happens. I go to between 15-20 games a year, and my personal record, which I set this year, is 10 balls. There was one year (1999) I only got one. Hell, I made off with 4 of them in the 2 games I attended in Cleveland and felt like a greedy bastard....
I can still recall the stories behind how I got most of the 74 balls I have gotten since 1995. That kinda makes them more special too. My guess is after a couple hundred balls, let alone a couple thousand, they all start to run together..... yawn!
So with apologies to Zach, I can still proudly claim to have:
71 balls from batting practice, of which about 25 were clean catches and about 5 of which were tossed from a player (Hey, I'm not gonna back away if they do throw me one). They have come from 7 different Major League stadiums....
1 warm-up ball tossed into the stands by centerfielder Brian Jordan just prior to what has to be the most nightmarish 9th inning in Cardinals history... blowing a 6 run lead to a team that lost 108 games that season.....
1 game ball thrown to me by Jose Guillen in Kansas City last year after he caught an inning ending popup by Mariners legend Matt Tuiasosopo....
1 real, live homerun ball, Scott Rolen's 29th homerun of the 2004 season, which I was able to scoop out of some trash in front of me in the bleachers....
Still haven't gotten a foul ball (Though I did have one from Jose Vidro go off my glove once) and I'm still hoping sometime before I die to actually catch a homerun ball. And of course, I can't think of that without dredging up images of
this......
lb13
--Bob
).