One Heck Of A Baseball Fan

I know YES showed footage of the same guy in the stands today signing his autograph on balls and papers to other fans… really? This is just a fan but are people that desperate to get someone’s autograph?

Anyone wanna calculate the odds of this happening? I can say I have been a fair share of baseball games and I did catch a batting practice homerun but nothing during a game, nevermind on back-to-back days.

I took a further look into this guy (Zack Hample) online and turns out he is quite famous regarding his ball-getting ability at baseball games. Too bad he had to get all sophisticated over the ball-catching otherwise it would have been quite a feat.

Here are some of his stats:

• 7 balls at this game

• 481 balls in 62 games this season = 7.8 balls per game.

• 558 consecutive games with at least one ball

• 124 consecutive games at Yankee Stadium with at least one ball

• 11 game balls this season (not counting game-used balls that get tossed into the crowd)

• 3 game home run balls this season (all of which were caught on a fly at Yankee Stadium)

• 122 lifetime game balls (115 foul balls, 6 home runs, 1 ground-rule double)

• 20 lifetime game balls at Yankee Stadium

• 3,758 total balls

Baseball Season Goal

Well we are a month into the season and here is where I stand on my (revised) goal. There is a constant update on the left sidebar about the Yankees and Blue Jays but I just thought I’d give you guys an update so far with yesterday being a month gone by.

For the Yankees I have caught all 29 games so far and here are some random stats. 23 (79.3%) of those games I have caught on the YES Network which at times I agree can be a bit painful to watch but maybe they are growing on me since I am such a fan of their team. I caught 2 (6.9%) games on radio (one when our apartment had no TV and the other one was the night I was driving down to DC with my roommates for the Cherry Blossom Festival), caught 2 games on ESPN (one vs. the Jays in the opening series for the season and one against the Red Sox in Fenway), there was one (3.45%) that I watched on MLB.TV from Silver Spring, Maryland which is quite unique since I live here and don’t often get a chance to go out of the viewing area during the season and just the other day against the Indians there was a game on TBS. I don’t remember if that game was blacked out on TBS and I watched it on YES but I have it on TBS in my sheet.

For the Blue Jays, it had started off real well when I had watched 8 of the first 9 games but since then it has only been 11 out of 19 games. Overall percentage is down to 67.86% and I still have 62 more games of theirs to catch to reach the goal. Obviously MLB.TV has been the dominant viewing preference because they aren’t on tv much here but I did catch them twice on YES (7.14%) and once on ESPN (3.57%). They have to find ways to start scoring runs again in this tough AL East. I knew New York (even with their injuries), Boston and Tampa would be tough but Baltimore really surprised me this month. Two losses in a row for the Jays where they only scored 1 run on the Red Sox but on the other hand, only allowed 3 runs total in the two games. The pitching has been solid (Halladay with 4 straight complete games but only one win to show for it)… so the offense really needs to start picking this up soon.