i've been sucked back in...

for those of you who don't know, i'm a tulsa, ok native. in tulsa, they have a aa farm team for the texas rangers--the tulsa drillers. when i was probably in 6th or 7th grade, my dad bought a billboard in the outfield for the business he owned. with the billboard came four box seat tickets right above the home team dugout. my dad has never been remotely interested in team sports but he viewed the tickets as a freebie and he's never passed up something free. consequently, we went to a lot of baseball games. and it being aa ball, there are a lot of guys barely out of high school or college--late teens early 20's. and to a boy-crazy middle-school girl, sitting above the dug out was a little bit of heaven.

the guys playing ball were mostly really nice guys. they'd talk to me and explain the game to me. i'd only played part of a season of softball, so i was a little clueless. but thanks to those ball players, at one time, i could keep score and calculate an era or batting average. and in the process, i really fell in love with baseball. even though, i grew up and started dating real boys instead of daydreaming about baseball players, i've always been fond of baseball. i followed the texas rangers (parent club of tulsa) and the aaa club for the rangers where tulsa players moved onto conveniently located in oklahoma city.

when i moved to san diego, i tried to engage with the hometown padres, but i just couldn't connect. i was an al girl. i missed dh's and pinch hitters who were more likely to pull out a big play than the ones i'd seen in the national league. i'd been to a couple games a season most years since i'd moved out here, but just never really connected. about a month ago, a dad of one of my small group girls got us tix to go to a game. two of my girls play softball and the third thought a pads game would be fun. the seats were amazing. they were on a special deck of mostly season ticket holders called the toyota terrace. we were just a few rows back, about at 3rd. and the game we saw was awesome.

the pads were playing the reds. it was tied going into the bottom of the 9th and the pads won it with a bases loaded, no outs walk to kevin kouzmanoff. i could not believe i'd just seen a major league game won on a bases loaded walk in the bottom of the ninth. it was also the game where kevin kouzmanoff came alive. he went 3 for 3 with 2 rbi's. and just like that, i was sucked back in. to the point, that i've been checking box scores, watching the games on the local sd network that shows them all, tracking the pads standing in the nl west (currently 1 up on the d-backs and 2 on the dodgers after beating them tonite in 12).

so as you can tell, i've been sucked back into a little baseball obsession.