How i came to be the baseball fan I am

Baseball.  It really is the greatest sport there is.  No other sport has the stories behind the players that baseball seems to have.  Maybe that's wishful thinking.  Maybe that's just me not thinking about it critically.  I don't know, but I stick by my statement.  In a day and age where players from other sports are behaving badly at a seemingly record pace, baseball seems to skirt by those very same problems (outside steroids I guess, but that's a different story for a different day) while at the same time maintaining the same characters everyone knows and loves.

This is my first ever blogpost.  Most of these are going to consist of two things.  Baseball happenings overall (some days it will be Brewers stuff, sorry about that I'll always be a Brewers lover at heart.....much to the chagrin of my wife!).  I try to be as objective as I can and I always try to look at things from a statistical standpoint.  The other is Fantasy baseball.  This is my first year ever doing fantasy baseball and I can tell you that i am thoroughly addicted to it already.  Fantasy football doesn't even come remotely close to comparing.

I became a Brewers fan March 10, 1981.  I didn't know it at the time but the Brewers were actually a good team back then.  My parents, for whatever reason, loved baseball.   They went to games, listened to games on the radio, and watched them on TV when they could.  This is where it all started for me.  From birth I was a baseball fan because my parents were baseball fans.

The earliest game I can remember attending was probably 1987.  It was the year the Brewers went on their 13 game winning streak to start the year,  Paul Molitor had a 39 game hitting streak and it was the only time a Brewer threw a no-no (Juan Nieves, ahh that stupid diving catch by Robin Yount that should have been a routine flyball).  My first memory of going to a game was in the bleacher seats at the old County Stadium.  Seats were super cheap at the time, maybe $5 for a marquee game.  I don't remember who they played, but I remember Teddy Higuera was the pitcher.  At that early age of 6 I was already keeping track of the games stats and keeping a normal score of the game.  My mom loves mentioning this game because an old, drunk man asked me halfway through the game how many strikeouts Higuera had and I was able to tell him in a very matter-of-fact manner.

The next few years we went to a lot of Brewers games.  My mom was the president of the Tom Trebelhorn fanclub so we would get free tickets all of the time, and we would get to meet the players a lot as well.  She would get players to come out to West Bend (where we lived at the time) to do signings for little kids at the outlet mall and stuff like that.  Looking back at it, it's rare to have that kind of opportunity to be around major league baseball players like that anymore.  It used to be common, now not so much.  Players at County Stadium used to have to park outside in their own lot.  This meant that they had to walk to their cars after the game to get home or to their hotel.  This was the opportunity to get their signature on stuff, really anything you had on you at the time.  After every game kids would line up on the path that the players took to get as many autographs as their parents would let them stay for.    This kind of thing does not happen anymore, at least not that I've seen or heard about.

The other benefit to having my mother be the president of the Managers fanclub is baseballs.  You know those ones that 40 year old men will punch a little kid in the face for?  we used to get those by the garbage bag full.  And we used them.......all of them, to play just random baseball games with our friends in the "baseball field" (a loose term for what it was, it basically was an unfarmed piece of land in front of a cornfield that we made into our own baseball field).  That was my childhood, going to baseball games with my parents (mostly my mom) and playing baseball (in the fall we would switch it up to football sometimes)

I played little league when I was a kid as well.  West Bend has a really weird system set up for their Little League.  There were two separate leagues, Little League, and the "Minor Leagues" with tryouts so the "best of the best" would get into Little League.  I found out later that the tryouts were kind of a hoax, mostly meant to get all of the sons of the rich kids into a place of "higher status" even though they stunk at actually playing baseball.  I made it into Little League only because they believed I was the son of a Pastor in town (which I was not).

After I moved to a different town I still played, but not for that much longer.  It's actually one of the biggest regrets of my life, giving up playing baseball before high school.  I'm not even sure why I did anymore.

Anyways, that's how the seed was planted in me to be what I am today (at least baseball wise).  I promise later posts will be less sentimental (some might be, but I try not to be) and more factual and/or statistical analysis.