I got Dodgers superstar Matt Kemp to autograph a baseball for my son during a road-trip to Atlanta last weekend.
My 7-year-old son Marshall will think I’m a god when I fly back to Southern California and present him with the ball in September, when I complete my US Army Reserve training time in Alabama.
God it’s fun to be an autograph slut.
I don’t work every weekend while on active duty, so I took advantage of a free weekend on Fort Rucker to drive up to Atlanta and catch the Los Angeles Dodgers during a weekend home stand with the Braves.
To my surprise, I found it easier to get autographs from the Dodgers in Atlanta than in Los Angeles. Considering 90 percent of the 40,000 fans were swooning for the Braves, it seems obvious in retrospect.
On Saturday, I got outfield stud Andre Ethier to sign a baseball for Marshall. Ethier was a class act all weekend, going out of his way to sign autographs for every Dodger fan who leaned and strained over railings to get one.
On Sunday, I got one from Kemp, whom my son worships. (For the record, I grew up a fan of the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds of the 1970s; my son doesn’t get the concept that I could like any team other than the Dodgers. Anyway, in my current roster of baseball teams, the Dodgers, because my son bleeds Dodger blue, are now among my favorite teams to follow.)
Chasing autographs never gets old as one gets older. I had just as much fun last weekend as I did when I was a kid chasing any autograph I could growing up near Des Moines, Iowa. In the 1970s, our local minor-league team was known as the Iowa Oaks. They later changed their name to the Iowa Cubs when they became their AAA farm team.
On another baseball topic, a mathematical improbability occurred last weekend: I’ve been to seven major league games this year – two each in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and one in Los Angeles – and the home team lost each of those games.
My son, who can recite every game the Dodgers played this year, now dreads the idea that I will be attending his birthday party – a Dodgers game in LA.
