Baseballisms

What is Holding Him On?

The adventures of Frank and Joe have taken us through a game at Yankee Stadium, Veterans Stadium for a doubleheader game, out to the home of the Big Red Machine, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinatti and now on to the final leg Three Rivers Stadium.

My ticket stub, which is now embedded forever in my brother Kevin’s bar, tells me that the Pittsburgh Pirates were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers on that particular day. Baseball-Reference.com tells me that Rick Reuschel beat Fernando Valenzuela 6-0 with the help of Bobby Bonnilla’s 3 for 4, one homer, five RBI day.  The Pirates lead off hitter that day was none other than Barry Bonds.

However, I have no recollection whatsoever of that game or day.  I’m sorry, it was the tail end of a long intensive road trip that was a memory of a lifetime - except for this particular game.

We stopped off in Atlantic City on the final leg home to meet up with some other friends.  I was down to the last of my cash and ended up at a roulette table for the first time in my life, and started putting chips down on reds, blacks, odds, evens and any other table combination that seemed to work.  It allowed me to get back all of the money that I had spent that entire trip!

For a kid just out of college is there a better definition of heaven?  Beer, Baseball and winning back your money gambling!

It was a great experience that we had hoped to reproduce for many years to come.  Frank and I talked about a California swing, a Chicago midwest trip, and any other combination we could have dreamt up.  Alas, life gets in the way some times and we never made any more baseball road trips (we still had a few concert road trips in us though - Bruce!!).

The tale is the definition of a Baseballism … we know that there are tons of stories like this out there just waiting to be told.  How about sharing them here with us!?!  What better way to pass the winter doldrums waiting for pitchers and catchers than talking about how baseball has impacted your life.

If you have a story you would like to share, please visit our Upload page. We look forward to receiving it!

What is a Short Hop?

Tell us in the Comments.

If you have a Baseball story that you would like to share, please visit our Upload page. We look forward to receiving it!

Our night carousing the bars somewhere along Broad Street in Philadelphia, and closing the Irish Bar at our hotel unfortunately resulted in Frank’s inability to contribute to the driving efforts on our way to Cincinnati.

A quick check of Mapquest today estimates the 570 mile drive at a whopping 9 hours and 26 minutes total time.  That’s a heck of a driving day for one guy stuffed into a small car that was topping off with fast food wrappers while his buddy reclined in the passenger seat.  But we are on our third leg after visiting Yankee Stadium and Veterans Stadium.

We made it to Riverfront Stadium in time to see the Reds beat the Houston Astros 6 - 4. Some interesting tidbits from looking over the box score (and certainly not using the memory banks) .. is that a .208 hitter batted third and went 1 for 4 with an RBI named Terry Francona! And some famous Reds names like Dave Concepcion, Dave Parker, Barry Larkin, Rod Oester, Nick Esasky, Paul O’Neill and John Franco all appeared in that rain delayed game.

We ended up after the game visiting the press box for some sweets and seeing the most famous Reds player of all zooming out of the parking lot in his white porsche.

Check out the latest video entry in the Baseballapalooza saga:

If you have a story you would like to share, please visit our Upload page. We look forward to receiving it!

What does Back to Back mean?

Tell us in the Comments.

If you have a Baseball story that you would like to share, please visit our Upload page. We look forward to receiving it!