Baseball and Coffee

Baseball and Coffee

I remember my own chance at a foul ball.

I can recall my own brush with baseball fame, that is, the time I almost caught a foul ball at a major league baseball game. It was at the Angels ballpark in Anaheim, California. It was in the early 1990s, during the years I lived in Huntington Beach and worked at Mitsubishi Electric in Cypress.
 
A vendor had given the director of my technology group four tickets to an Angel’s game. The game was scheduled for a weekend during the day. The seats weren’t the best, but parking was included, as well as admission to the private bar and restaurant inside the park. When he couldn’t go, he offered them up to the top manager on his staff, Anna Reale. Anna, who was my boss, asked me if I wanted to go with her, and I accepted. Two friends of Anna’s, Becky and Tom, rounded out the foursome.
 
Anna was a young and shapely Italian woman, intelligent and warm, good-looking, with long cascading locks of brown hair. She also had the famous temper that Italians are wont to display. She was a good boss and fun to be around, and I enjoyed working for her. She had come over from Europe as a child on the Queen Mary’s last trip across the Atlantic, and the permanent memory of that adventure was now a hotel and moored in Long Beach.
 
On the day of the game, I picked up Anna at her house and drove down Katella Avenue, finally making my way to the park. We left the car in the VIP parking area and headed for the bar; her friends planned to meet us later at our seats. Anna and I enjoyed a small but expensive lunch in the private lounge and then headed for the elevator.
 
The seats were in the upper deck, not far up from the rail, and about eight chairs in from the aisle. Walking in, we found our numbers and sat down with Anna sitting to my right. We were on the third-base side, a little behind the catcher. Becky and Tom showed up and we did the introductions. Becky sat down to the right of Anna, and Tom next to her. The seats around us were vacant.
 
After a few innings, Anna and I went for a bathroom break and stopped at a concession stand where we bought two coffees and returned with them to our seats. I was sitting there holding the coffee in my right hand when the batter launched a towering fly ball into the air; the ball slowly stopped at the top of the arc and began falling back towards us in our seats.
 
This was it, the four of us stood up in anticipation of the ball’s arrival. It was streaking down towards us and growing larger by the millisecond. The girls yelled and I stuck up my left arm and reached for the ball with my hand while Tom did the same from his side of the group. The ball struck both our hands with a thud and dropped to the cement beneath our seats.
 
How exciting! One of us was going to own the ball as there was no one else seated around our section to compete for it; it all hinged on what way it rolled. Alas, it rolled towards Tom, and he reached down and then held the ball up above his head triumphantly, receiving a scattered round of applause from the fans in the park. Damn, I was close. I had touched it in flight; it was almost mine.
 
I pumped my fist into the air to celebrate with Tom. Anna gazed at me with a strange look on her face. “You spilled your coffee down my butt,” she said. She half turned around and, sure enough, just where the shapely hips flared-out beneath the unbelted waist of her jeans, a dark wet stain ran straight down the seam on the seat of her pants, became darker and wider, and eventually disappeared beneath the curve of her ass. My gaze traveled from the stain on her pants up to her eyes, and then to the almost-empty coffee cup in my right hand; I started to laugh.
 
“Sorry,” I said.

“You bastard,” she answered, swatting my arm and twisting around to see how bad it really was, and it was bad. "I'm gonna kill you." I could not have poured coffee into those pants any more perfectly with a funnel, the symmetric vertical stain testified to that.

That was the end of the issue, though, and after her initial display of anger, everything settled down. We watched the rest of the game with her friends there in the upper deck. Anna was a good sport about the whole thing and we both had an enjoyable day.

The contest that afternoon was a memorable one. It was the closest I ever came to catching a ball during a major league game and it was the only time I ever touched one.

Sitting here now, I can still feel the ball hit my hand, as fresh as if it happened today.



Laudizen King
Los Angeles
October 2008