wildyams

My Dad took me to see the Angels play the Red Sox tonight at Angels Stadium, and it was my first baseball game as a fan since I was probably 13 or 14 or so. It was the first time I'd seen the Red Sox play in person since I was about maybe 5 or so. Naturally my last baseball game was in 1997, but I was working as a vendor for that one at Dodger Stadium, as I had for about the previous seven years. Tonight was a fun time, in spite of the fact that the Red Sox got absolutely hammered by the Angels 8-3.

A rather remarkable thing happened at the game tonight though. In the 5th inning, with the Red Sox losing 5-0, Johnny Damon (Boston's lead-off hitter) hit a home run almost EXACTLY to where I was sitting. It was a line-drive home run, so the ball was really moving when it got to us. It was going so fast that for a split second I thought "I can reach out and catch it" before immediately thinking "if I do I will break my hand" so instead I put my hands up to my face to make sure it didn't bounce off someone and into me. My Dad was sitting right next to me and he would have been hit in the face with the ball if the woman next to him hadn't reached out with her glove to try to catch it (my Dad didn't have a glove either). The woman, who was a fellow Sox fan, got her glove on the ball, but it bounced off the glove and went under the seats in the row behind us, where a young boy picked it up (should make a nice souvenir for the kid). What was odd was that the woman who almost caught the ball told us (and the guy she was with verified this) that before the game she said she was gonna bring her glove because she wanted to catch a Johnny Damon home run, because Damon is her favorite player. She was so upset about almost having this exact thing come true that she got up after the play and we didn't see her again for the next inning. She was a cool lady though, but you could tell she was bummed she missed her shot.

Anyway, what was almost as weird was the next time Johnny Damon came up to bat, she made sure to get her glove ready, and sure enough, Damon hit another home run, once again almost right at us. This time it ended up going about maybe 20 seats away from us, and maybe 4 rows back (although this distance technically put it in the bullpen, but it was the equivalent distance from us). 2 batters after Damon hit that second homer, David Ortiz hit the Red Sox's 3rd homer of the game, but that only put the Sox behind 8-3 in the bottom of the 8th inning, and that was where it stayed. What's really cool is that I looked online and they have a video clip of Johnny Damon's two home runs, and you can actually see me in it. If you look at this clip at about the 15 second mark, when the ball goes into the crowd you can see me in the light blue shirt with the bald head turning around to look down to see where the ball went. Pretty cool, huh?