SMT’S YANKEE BASEBALL ADVENTURE

            My friend Patrick Netter attended a Yankee baseball fantasy camp in Florida in 2006 called “Heroes in Pinstripes” and when he got back, he told me about it and said that with my love for baseball, I simply had to participate this year. I’d heard about baseball fantasy camps for years and as much as I love the game and have played it in one form or another practically all my life, the idea of spending a week playing “fantasy” ball never really appealed to me most probably because of the time and cost that one would have to put into this venture and because I was still actively playing enough sports to satisfy my need for competition.

          I was a Yankee fan as a child, having spent my first 12 years in Westchester County, N.Y.. When I moved my family to Wisconsin three years ago, I got in touch with one of my boyhood idols, former Yankee shortstop, 1957 AL Rookie of the Year and baseball Game of the Week announcer Tony Kubek, who I found out lived in Appleton. We have since become friends and knowing that he was going to be one of the coaches at the camp helped me make my decision to give this a go. So after a few hours in one of the local batting cages and some help from a neighbor, who hit me ground balls for two days, I packed up and headed down to Jupiter, Florida this last Oct. 28^th to play 18 innings of baseball for five straight days at the Roger Dean Stadium complex, which is the spring training location for the Florida Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals. The Yankees’ current spring training location in Tampa is being renovated, hence the relocation. Like riding a bike, baseball comes back to you if you can still run, throw, catch and hit. Besides singing and performing, those have always been some of my very favorite things to do and I’ve played more innings of fast-pitch softball than I care to remember or admit to.

        Some of the coaches who were at “Heroes in Pinstripes” to sign autographs, tell stories and “manage” their respective teams (of which there were eight all told, split among 105 players) were Yogi Berra, Don Larsen, Tony Kubek, Johnny Blanchard, Goose Gossage, Bob Turley, Frank Howard, Bucky Dent, Mickey Rivers, Moose Skowron, Mel Stottlemyre and Tom Tresh. Many of these guys were heroes of mine when I was a kid and they proved to be gracious, entertaining and hopefully, long time friends of mine.

   To relate everything that happened in a week would take up more time and space than I have here but suffice to say, it was a great experience and I was fortunate enough to win the camp MVP at the awards banquet. The coaches were either very impressed with my skills or perhaps they were more impressed with my memory of knowing which ones to buy drinks for at night. No matter, as the song says “no, they can’t take that away from me.” Suffice to say, I had a terrific time.

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