Will ... and Grace

Hudson Valley and Lowell lineup on the baselines at Fenway Park, 8/9/08.

It might have slipped through the cracks, but Will Middlebrooks retired.

That news might seem unspectacular to you, but I was immediately transported to August, 2008.

I was at Fenway Park. Yes, I know. In theory, that's enemy territory. But when you're a baseball nut, it's Fenway Park.

Nirvana.

Sean Ford, the long-running, um, Voice of the Hudson Valley Renegades (a title he earned in a decade of games) invited me to Boston to call the Futures at Fenway game, as the Gades took on the Lowell Spinners.

I asked Harold if he wanted to come along as a producer, and he immediately accepted, and even got us a place to crash so that we could call Sunday's Gades/Spinners game in Lowell.

But Saturday was all about Fenway.

It was a good (and mostly great) weekend, tinged with some hurt.

You see, things were in the middle of a breakdown through '08. The Renegades were, in part, a way to keep my mind occupied and happy.

When I left for Boston that Saturday morning, I left my computer set up for a button to be pushed so that Sean (my son) could listen to his dad from one of the most prestigious places in all of sports.

I literally wanted him to listen for a minute. Long enough to hear my voice.

It was not to be.

Sean would not be home that day. To be clear, he never heard a word I said from Boston, and in fact didn't even speak to me until Sunday, when I found out he spent the night at another house.

A house he now lives in most of the time.

I had no idea, and had tried calling him a few times on Saturday night. Keep in mind, he was six at the time.

I was crestfallen. Absolutely lost. In fact, I didn't even want to go home Sunday night, and it was Harold who got me to go.

For the record, broadcast recordings weren't always immediately available to me. As I recall, I stumbled upon an archive months later and recorded it on my home computer.

I wrote about the experience in three parts, and it's interesting to see how I side-stepped the topic at the time (in Part 3):

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

That leads me back to Will Middlebrooks. The Red Sox prospect played third base in the Futures at Fenway game for Lowell.

I had the duty of opening the broadcast, as I normally did when Sean and I worked together. I was nervous, and had the concept of how surreal it all was in my mind when I did the opening.


Check this out on Chirbit

Middlebrooks was the leadoff hitter in the bottom of the 11th inning of the game, won by the Spinners 4-3 in 12 innings. Sean normally called the first three innings, with me taking the middle three, before he called the last three. Extra innings would be as we figured it out, and he gave me the 11th. Here's the bottom of the 11th inning:
As I said, the Spinners would win in the bottom of the 12th. The game-winning hit?

A Will Middlebrooks single.

Enjoy your retirement, and thanks for that memory.