Yesterday I celebrated the tenth anniversary of one of the greatest moments of my life. It was April 24, 2006, that I for the first and only time in said life actually caught a foul ball at a professional baseball game. “Caught” is a bit misleading, but let me explain.

It was a Monday, and like most Mondays one doesn’t expect many memorable things to occur. I was working at the time at a place called Wing Zone, also known as “The Wing Zone,” also known as that place in North Carolina where Mike worked. This was the brief period in my life during which I lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in fact had only about 10 days left on my stint. I wanted to see all I could in Dixie before I left, and one of the ways I’d planned to do that was to undertake what I called the “North Carolina Minor League Baseball Fantasy Tour.” There are probably a hundred minor league stadiums in that part of the world and my goal was to see them all.

That Monday morning (yes, morning), the Greensboro Grasshoppers were hosting the Hickory Crawdads at 11 a.m. The Grasshoppers are the single-A farm team of the Miami (then Florida) Marlins, and the stadium, First Horizon Park (now called Yadkin Bank Park) was in only its second year of existence. The Grasshoppers had been part of the Marlins franchise since 2003, having previously been affiliated with the New York Yankees (and others). Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, even Don Mattingly going back a bit…they all played in Greensboro. I was in good company.

Speaking of company, I spent the morning with several thousand school children, as morning start times tend to draw. Who doesn’t love a field trip to the ballpark? I’m sure I was mistaken for either a chaperone or a student several times. No, just some guy at the park.

I had an aisle seat along the third base side, and I couldn’t say a thing about the game except that the weather was pleasant and my experience was as well. I would guess maybe the second or third inning provided me with my memorable moment.

A foul pop to left came like the proverbial dying quail towards my section, bouncing weakly before literally rolling my way. Barely moving an inch I picked up the ball at my feet, the ball having passed through several sets of grimy little kid fingers along its way. I put the ball in my pocket and said not a word, made not a commotion.

An unwritten rule of ballparks is that if one is an adult, he must give foul balls to the nearest child, regardless of familiarity or kinship. I would have gladly abided by this code but for one thing.

I was surrounded.

There was no child around me… there were hundreds. Nay, thousands.

What would be a good way for me to make all but one of them hate me? And no doubt any one of them would lose the ball before he or she reached his bus back to school.

So I sat on the ball, saying nothing. Who picked up the ball? I gestured. Where did it go? I implied.

Ha. I sat on the thing for two hours before… while walking to my car after the game I took out my prize. I examined it. Beautiful.

OFFICIAL BALL

SOUTH ATLANTIC LEAGUE

Classic.

I wrote on it “Greensboro, N.C., 4/24/06” and it has sat on one shelf or another at several different places I’ve lived over the past decade. It’s one of those worthless possessions one treasures nonetheless.

To think I was going to let some kid have it.