I Miss Skip and Pete - Page 2

3. January 2009. This is my top non-baseball experience. I stop in at a Barnes & Noble in New York City without realizing that Jimmy Carter is there to sign his new book. I buy the book and stand in a line that stretches around the block. It was about 20 degrees and windy. My eyes were too frozen to read, so after an hour or so, I turned around to talk to the chatty blonde behind me. It was Renee Zellweger. I got to chat with Renee Zellweger for an hour. Apparently, though, I didn’t make much of an impression. Renee (I can call her that now) mentioned her Jimmy Carter experience in a USA Today interview and listed all the people she got to talk to in line ... except for me. Ow.

I've got something of a passion for listing and ranking things (I am a baseball fan), so I had to figure out which of these experiences was the biggest for me. All things considered, I should go with #3, right? When else am I going to meet a president and a movie star on the same night?

But to be totally honest, none of the three events listed above top my list. It's event #4:

4. On two separate occasions, I got to run around the bases at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati.

How does a trip around the bases of a six-year-old park rival the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet a Nobel Prize-winner and an Oscar-winner on the same night? Because, somehow, getting that close to baseball meant more to me than getting even closer to a former President. As much as I may have crushed on Renee "Roxie Hart" Zellweger in the past, it can't compare to the way I've felt about baseball since I was four years old. No, the most amazing that that's happened to me in recent years was that I, a common, ordinary fan and undistinguished Internet blogger, got to reach out and touch baseball.

And unfortunately, that experience seems more distant and improbable now than my evening with Jimmy and Renee.

In my role as Internet blogger, I spend a lot of time writing about what is wrong with baseball. But several times I've asked myself this hypothetical question: what one thing, more than anything else, is wrong with baseball? I could never come up with just one answer. Oh, I could come up with a few things, such as drug use and publicly-funded stadiums and the DHL Hometown Heroes. But I couldn't come up with anything big enough to answer such a big question. But the answer was there. I just needed to reflect on my time on a Cincinnati baseball diamond to put it into words.

Article Author: Aaron Whitehead

Aaron, 27, lives in southern Kentucky and works at the local community college. He spends his spare time working in the theatre and cheering for the Braves ... against his better judgment.

Visit Aaron Whitehead's author page — Aaron Whitehead's Blog