(Part I...Baseball is Baseball)

Part II of The Baseball Fantasy Camp

The Set-Up

So far nothing good in my life has started with a call from someone’s wife.  Occasionally there's some innocuous question like “Can I talk to your wife?”, but mostly stuff you don’t want to hear like, “HAVE YOU SEEN MY HUSBAND??”. 

This time was different. 

Lynda Weatherby, my buddy Whitey’s wife, called me at my office.  That was shocking, since I knew she wasn’t looking for my wife, or her husband.  It was a call completely out of context, like seeing a movie star in a grocery store and realizing they’re all, for the most part, short.  I asked her more than once if she’d dialed right. 

She had a proposition.  She wanted to know if I would go to fantasy baseball camp with her husband and some of our mutual friends.  She said it would be all expenses paid, so I said I’d do whatever I could to help.

She was planning six days in October (which, incidentally is the same way they described the Cuban Missile Crisis) in Arizona at The Hendu Fantasy Baseball Camp.  Whitey went to one of these camps in 1999.  This time it was his 40^th birthday and she wanted to surprise him with another camp, friends included.  Some wives make a tee time or buy the big screen TV…Lynda sends people to Arizona. 

Baseball camp, lets see.  I’d thrown a few random snowballs, and played catch with my six-year son and the neighbor kids a few times since the early 90’s.  My arm was somewhere between fresh and atrophied.  It had to stand up to five games in four day (hell, the pros don’t play five games in four days, do they??!!).  It didn’t take long to realize I was not ready.

To pull off the birthday surprise there was secrecy and planning; a conference call broke the news to Whitey around March.  There was paper-work and travel plans, and constant e-mail contact, and signing waivers…oh yes there was signing waivers.  October came before we knew it.  

 

Travel

At the Jamestown Airport about an hour early, I play Quick Draw (New York State tax on dumb people).  Of the four keno numbers I pick, three come in and I should be raking a tidy profit from my $2 bet except that the waitress didn’t put my numbers in because she’s too busy (which is odd because I am the only person in the bar).  I know this is a harbinger of my trip.  I rip up the ticket, and go hide in a corner with my egg salad and day-old pickle.

For some reason the FAA, but not me could explain, I have to fly from Jamestown, New York to Bradford, PA (25 miles by car) before I can get to Pittsburgh, the hub for USAir.  As always on the shuttle there’s plenty of chop.  I look out at the southwestern New York/eastern Pennsylvania countryside as we drop out of the clouds on the approach to Bradford (a ten minute hump).  The country-side looks a lot like TV news footage of places where small planes are always crashing.

In Pittsburgh I have time; a two hour layover, which is one of the prices you pay for flying out of Chautauqua County Airport…the other price you pay (or in this case Lynda pays) is money.  I sit down at a Quaker Steak and Lube and have a Blue Moon draft.  There is very little going on at the Quaker Steak and Lube in the Pittsburgh Airport on a Wednesday at 2:30 in the afternoon; a soccer match on the TV, one or two patrons wondering what they’re doing there, and plenty of second–hand smoke.

I spend a little time in my journal.  My trip journals feature an amazing amount of detail from airports and cab rides, only sketchy, sporadic reporting from the actual trip.  Maybe I lose interest or consciousness after I arrive at my destination. 

A couple items from the airport that made it to the notebook:

• -I’m sitting at the Quaker Steak & Lube reading anything that’s put in front of me.  Up on the wall is this sign:  These are the Michael Jordan of wings!  Ever had a Quaker Steak and Lube wing?  Must be the baseball Michael Jordan.

• -A guy who looks just like my buddy Pork sat down next to me.  I asked him if he knew he looked like my buddy Pork.  He seemed uninterested, so I pressed it a little, and he got up and left.

• -Remind me never to wear a sport-coat with jeans…the sport coat doesn’t appreciate it and is embarrassed to be part of the outfit…the jeans are indifferent and confused by the attention.

More from the plane:

• -My flight boarded at 6pm, which by coincidence is exactly the same time it was supposed to leave the runway.  I guess we’ll make it up in the air.

• -Who was the last person who used his or her seat cushion for a floatation device, and how did that work out?

• -Why do you have to stow your tray table and bring your seat up for take-offs and landing?

• -I didn’t get the head-set for the movie.  It was “Bewitched”.  What do you think is the number of movies produced today that you need the sound for?  1 in 5?  More?

• -The White Sox won the World Series and they are my 7 year old son’s favorite team for reasons no one knows.  I want very much to make him understand that it isn’t always this easy, but it’d ruin the mood I’m sure.

• -As Brandon Lidge loses another World Series game I wonder if he’ll become the Calvin Shiraldi or Donnie Moore of our generation…or maybe Mitch Williams.  Maybe I’ll ask Hendu.

Part III Coming soon...