The things you do for a baseball bat

Dear non-existent reader:

My apologies for being so slow (or pathetic, whichever you prefer) in updating this blog you don't read. But the last few weeks have been busy, so I'm trying to write this thing up before heading to the airport--again--to catch a plane. This trip is on short notice, as opposed to the one the missus and I took a few weeks ago. That trip was to Cooperstown, New York. And we because of a baseball bat.

Let me explain. This is not a regular bat; it's a bat that was made by the Cooperstown Bat Company, in Cooperstown (duh), and has a imprint of Doubleday Field, the legendary home of the first baseball game. I've had the bat for about two years now, after I bought it. When I did, it was already more than a regular bat--it had a few autographs on it. To be precise, it had the signatures of Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, Don Drysdale, Duke Snider, Eddie Mathews, Tom Seaver and Willie McCovey on it. (Note: I also got Craig Biggio, the former Astro, to sign the bat. I think it's a safe bet he'll be ranked with these other guys come 2013.)

They're all Hall of Famers, in case you didn't know. The National Baseball Hall of Fame, of course, is in Cooperstown, N.Y.

In April, we found out that there was going to be a baseball alumni game at Doubleday Field in mid-to-late June. Scraping up nickels and dimes that have been a little bit more available to be scraped this year as opposed to the past, the Missus and I decided to fly up and go to the game.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions of our lives.

For one thing, Cooperstown is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. It looks like God touched the land and put the town there--at least, five or six months out of the year. They also had signs indicating snowmobile crossings, which made me quite happy to live where I do. But when you've been dealing with a week of 100-degree-plus days, there's something to be said for 72 degrees and occasional afternoon showers in June.

A view of the lake, one block from the Hall of Fame

The exterior of the Hall itself

We arrived on Saturday, the 20th, with the game on the 21st. We weren't sure how many people were going to show up for this thing and expected maybe a couple thousand. Our bad; there were about 7,000 people who showed up. There were five Hall of Famers playing in the game: Brooks Robinson, Bob Feller (at age 90!), Ferguson Jenkins, Paul Molitor an Phil Niekro. So we took the bat. Yes, from Houston to upstate New York.

I've always hated trying to get autographs, no matter how much I enjoy having them, because I feel like two-bit scum trying to fight through a line, butt past a kid and stand there like I'm entitled. I hate the jerkoffs that are there plainly to get something to sell even more, and there were hordes of them. But I still got close with the bat for Brooks Robinson's signature. (Note: For me, this is a big deal. I've met Brooksie before, have his autograph and all that--but this is the best third baseman of ALL F-ING TIME. That's the Orioles fan in me talking.) But it looked like I was gonna be out of luck, as he was heading in the other direction.

Then two things happened: one, a guy from Austin (!) let me get up to the fence separating fans from legends and the Missus grabbed the bat.

"Nobody says no to a lady," she said, elbowing an eight-year-old in the head to get him out of the way.

"Mr. Robinson, sir, will you please sign this?" My wife asks with her suthun belle charm.

"Sure, honey," Brooskie replies.

The bat wobbles a bit, and Brooks says, "Darlin, you're gonna have to hold it real still or neither of us are gonna be happy with this."

The Missus says, "Oh, I'm so sorry! I'll do my best."

Brooksie smiles and says, "It's ok, Darlin, it's my fault."

BROOKS ROBINSON CALLED MY WIFE DARLIN. TWICE. He has, of course, made a fan for life right then and there, and I'm not talking about me. And the bat is signed by one more HOFer. The wife asks me if I got a picture of the magical moment. Alas, I had not, which means I probably lost a fan. Typical.

To my frustration, Paul Molitor and Phil Niekro walk away from the autograph line right before signing the bat. Molitor actually looks at it, ponders, then turns and goes away. That's annoying, but it's life.

The start of the game is the best part. Molitor, leading off for his team, takes his hacks against Feller.

"These guys have faced off before," I say to my wife. Several guys look around at me like I'm on crack.

"Where?" some guy says incredulously.

"On my computer game," I respond, getting a chuckle out of the guy. It truly is an amazing moment, and you wonder how one of baseball's best over power pitchers would have done against such a good contact hitter.

Feller vs. Molitor. Check out the beautiful background.

Outside of this one at-bat, the game was a relative disappointment. I spent an hour in an autograph line that didn't move until I gave up out of frustration and so I didn't kill some jerk from New York City in front of his kid on Father's Day. But all in all, who cared? It was a great day with great weather and a celebration of baseball.

We were walking down the street after the game when we saw that Fergie Jenkins was doing an autograph signing at one of the stores. It was the Cooperstown Bat Company--the place where the bat came from to begin with! The cost for an autograph? A $20 donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Done, or so I thought.

I asked the guy outside (the manager of the store), if the bat was fair play. He said sure, $20 for anything. I stayed in line for five minutes, got up to the guy taking the "donations," and he said, "Oh, no. Fergie won't sign anything signed by anyone else for $20. That's $75."

Before I could completely lose my mind and embarass myself by pummeling this guy to death with an autographed bat in front of a Hall of Famer, my wife miraculously appears beside me.

"If that's $75, you'd better go tell the guy outside, because he said it was $20," she said. "And I doubt my husband would be the only pissed off person in this line. And I can tell he's getting to be very pissed off."

The guy pauses. "He said $20? Then it's $20." Done, again.

11 Hall of Famers on the bat.

The next day, we hit the Hall itself. What an experience! If you love baseball, this is a place you gotta see. The stuff in there will simply take your breath away.

Babe Ruth's real locker. Babe Ruth's real jersey. Really.

There was so much awesome stuff at the HOF that I'll probably just post another blog with pictures. It's too much to talk about here. By the time we got home Tuesday, though, I was already excited about something else: it was four days until we met Cal Ripken.

Cal's been, for lack of a better term, one of my heroes since I was about eight years old. Unlike most sports-related heroes, Cal hasn't shown himself to be a complete and utter scumbag over the past quarter-century; indeed, he's universally regarded as one of the classiest celebrities of any kind anywhere. With the Tristar memorabilia show coming to town, I figured it would be, maybe, the only time I'd have a chance to get him to sign the well-traveled bat. So I shelled out a lot of money (how much I won't say, except it's as much as two high-end tires for the Honda) to pay for the right to get that autograph.

As part of the deal was something that I didn't put much into at the time--you got to have a picture with Cal "with your own camera." Since, as you know from above, I don't like paying for autographs, I had no idea what that meant. I did some reading and figured out that picture taking at these memorabilia shows is a hell of a racket. A lot of other hall of famers, including guys I like, charge between $100 and $150 for the "privilege" of having your picture taken with them. Then you get to buy the print, blah blah blah. What a gyp. Cal was doing that for free, which probably meant a "savings" of $120 or so (if you would have paid for it, which I wasn't gonna do).

So, me and the missus got in line and waited for Cal to sign the bat. When he did, the Missus, who is much more with it than I, got a picture of it.

Cal with the bat. If you look close, you can see the signatures of Willie McCovey, Johnny Bench and Craig Biggio.

After we got the bat signed, we got in another line to get our picture taken with Cal. There was some drama with that (I'll let Momma Pug handle that story), I got to meet The Man.


I thought the picture thing was pretty cool. But can you imagine what it would mean to a little kid? What a great thing (even if you are paying a lot for the privilege, even though all of it went to the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation).

And guess who was signing autographs next to Cal? Paul Molitor. As we walked past, I stopped and said, "See this bat? This time I've decided you're not signing it."

He looked at me like I was from Neptune and asked, "Should I know that bat?"

"Yeah," I replied. "You walked away from it at Doubleday Field last Sunday."

"Oops," Molitor said.

Yeah, oops. Another 15 seconds and I'd have had 14 Hall of Famers on that doggone bat. But I'm pretty happy with the ones that I've got. Another 20 signatures or so and I'll sell it and pay for my kids' college.