By all accounts, this
year’s SoxFest has been a sold-out success.
Fans are either drinking GM Rick Hahn’s Kool-Aid, or they believe his
rebuild will work. It’s January, so I’ll
go with option number two.
Clare was ten when she
went to her first fan fest. As I recall,
she wanted to kill the guy who kept soft tossing her balls in the batting cage;
even then, she had a thing for fastballs; how much do you think Jerry Manual’s
autograph is worth now? The next time we
went, it was either junior or senior year high school; we posed for pictures in
front of the 2005 World Series trophy, and Clare made sure to have one taken
with Gordon Beckham (oh, how the young and the talented did fall). Then it was one more time in college so she
could pose next to Aaron Rowand for a picture.
That may have been when
we bumped into Moose Skowron, who proceeded to give my daughter batting tips;
he advised Clare to take the ball up the middle, even if it meant knocking the
pitcher’s head off, although he used a few more adjectives in saying it. And I got Minnie Minoso’s autograph on a
special ball that already had the signatures of such White Sox luminaries Luke
Appling, Walt Williams, Bill Veeck and Billy Pierce on it. Fans acted like it was an audience with the
Pope, but I’m pretty sure Minnie has better career stats than Francis.
Maybe if the lines
weren’t so long, I’d want to go again, or if only Minoso, Williams, Pierce and
Skowrown were still around. Maybe with a
grandchild….
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