the great Babe Ruth
I was never really a baseball fan when I was a kid, but I collected the cards because the guys in my kindergarten class were all baseball fans. One of the kids had a birthday and instead of letting us give him presents he gave everybody baseball cards. He might not have given the girls in our class baseball cards, but who knows really. I had never actually seen baseball cards before. I thought they were pretty slick. I opened up the two packages and had no idea what I was looking at really, but from the excitement of the other boys it seemed like the right thing to have those cards. To know the names of all these people on them. So I started getting baseball cards now and then. I thought it might be advantageous to memorize the stats on the back, but it seemed like too much work. Instead I looked at the teams the players had been on. For the most part, it was never worth spending the time to look at the cards of the guys that never stayed with one team for very long. I mean, even if they were really good, it would still take a long time for the whole team to figure out how to play really well together. Everybody knows that though. That’s all they talk about on sports center. I went to a few baseball games I guess. There was one game that we had seats real close to home base and afterwards one of the players signed a baseball for me. I wasn’t excited at all. It was just like the baseball cards. It was something to watch him write his signature on the ball though. I started practicing my own signature a lot after that. A girl asked me for my signature once. I was a drummer in some band and we had played a show for about 25 people in some little town in Kentucky. A girl asked if she could have one of my drum sticks and she wanted me to sign it but there wasn’t a pen anywhere. I wonder if the great Babe Ruth carried a pen with him to the games.
