Chapter 20 – “Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.” (Bob Lemon)

Feb 7 Saturday Evening: After all the fun at the ballpark with the Pros, they gave up an unearned run in game 7 (will fill you in on details in a bit) Patti and I headed back to hotel to get some rest for the upcoming nights festivities. At about 6 we went downstairs to the cocktail party the Camp had for us and paid guests. Met up with Brent and his family and friend


Did I tell you that this was a first class organized event. Great job by everyone in the Sox organization. Patti became close email pen pals with Brian. Wow!

We were able to mill around with the Pros and campers re-living the Pros game and the events of the week. Got a good picture of my buddy Brent with his manager Bill Lee.

Hey Lee, here’s a picture of Rick Wise. Sorry did not get his autograph. Got Joe Castiglone to autograph on a picture. What a great time and to be honest I was ready to call it a day. I was tired and sore. I really did have a great time and experience but it was time to move on.

They sat us with our teammates which was pretty cool in that it allowed us to socialize one more time as a team. Eppee, our skipper, brought his wife and Lou was stag. He said he was going back to Boston for two days; listen to EEI on Tuesday 2-6to hear if he says anything about the camp. Then he comes back with his wife on Wednesday for a couple of weeks with Comcast to follow Spring Training.

After dinner they had the Awards ceremony. No hardware for this old boy, however one of teammates, Benny, got the “Mr. Personality” Award. Benny is about 70 or so, one of two on our team. He was a great guy and participated in the camp the way it should have been, having fun just like a kid.


Afterwards, Patti and I took some pictures of the World Series Trophy.

Eppee let us style with his WS rings from 04 and 07 (Cookie, one of our teammates was watched very closely by Eppees wife - he look pretty comfortable with those rings on).

The drinks kept flowing at the open bar for an hour after the dinner. Lou and Patti hit it off bigtime.

As it turns out, Lou made the error at second in the 7th game that caused the first unearned run. Patti said he was lucky that she didn’t see it or she would have given him a load about making that error at second base. No matter, once she found out she gave it to him anyway.

We were really lucky to have Chad Epperson and Lou as our manager and coach. They were great with us.
They had the right personalities to go with ours. I will have another blog posting about the team tomorrow.

We went into the bar afterwards and to be honest I was exhausted and a little drunk. We sat around for another drink and then retired for the evening. Let me just say that it was a great experience for me. It taught me a lot about what I can and cannot do. It also showed me that the things I can’t do are not that far out of reach if you want it bad and willing to work hard.

Patti and I left Sunday morning to come back to the condo and we rested by the pool most of the day. Will check in tomorrow with a new posting once I recover fully from the week.