The Futility Infielder

As I write this, I'm only a couple of hours away from departing for Milwaukee and the beginning of my wedding festivities, starting with a marriage license appointment this afternoon. Since it will be awhile before I get to post anything else here, I've decided to re-run what I wrote upon my engagement to Andra last summer. The following was originally published on August 2, 2004, three days after I popped the question.

Thursday was already shaping up to be a banner day by the time I walked out the door. Not only was I hotly anticipating the publication of my latest piece at Baseball Prospectus, in a matter of a few minutes I'd come up with another blog entry that ended up getting linked via Baseball Primer's Clutch Hits Baseball Think Factory's Newsblog. But all of that was small potatoes compared to what came later in the day.

At 6:30, my girlfriend Andra came home with the exciting news that she had been approved for a major promotion at work, an event which had been in the offing for several weeks and which at one stage found her the focal point of a nice little bidding war. After passing her background check and signing the appropriate paperwork, she's officially the Graphics Manager at Hanes New Ventures Causal Wear, a mere three years after dropping the curtain on a career in film production, and it's something of which she's deservedly proud.

Andra wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate, but I had made even bigger plans, and dinner was only a part of them. I'd spent all day sweating over those plans. In some way, I'd been waiting my entire life for them. My vision of the evening was going to trump hers, and for that I would make no apology.

At 8 PM, Andra walked out onto the lower roofdeck of our apartment, freshly showered after a quick swim, greeted by the sight of two wine glasses, a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, a plate of cheese and crackers, and a boyfriend grinning like a cat who'd just eaten a canary. She smiled at me and said something along the lines of, "Just what are you up to?"

I answered by pulling a small velvet box out of my pocket. "Honey, will you marry me?" I smiled, looking right into the beautiful blue eyes which had melted my cold, broken heart some three-and-a-half years ago. I showed her the diamond ring I had designed with the help of our friend Danielle, based on some preliminary specifications from Andra -- she had known this was all coming, she just had no idea when. "Of course," she replied, hugging me for an eternity before we shared a long, passionate kiss.

I don't even think she'd looked at the ring yet. Finally, after our smooch, she looked at it, a stunning concoction that had taken my breath away earlier that day upon picking it up from the jeweler, a 1-carat emerald cut centered around 40 tiny little diamonds embedded in a detailed platinum band. "It's perfect," she smiled, and kissed me for even longer than before.

• • •

As I'm fond of saying, the events inside a two-week period in the fall of 2000 are the reason for this site's existence. On October 26, in Shea Stadium, a frumpy but amiable reserve infielder named Luis Sojo delivered a single which drove in the World Series-clinching run for the New York Yankees and made Sojo a minor celebrity. Two days later, still quite heavy-hearted from a recent breakup, I went to a Halloween party in Brooklyn. Sweating quite a bit beneath a yellow Devo radiation suit, I chatted for the better part of an hour with the pink-wigged pal of my friend Brandi, who had invited us both along.

Six days after that party, on November 3, my pal Nick and I went to the Bradlee's on Union Square to meet Jim Bouton, the author of Ball Four, my all-time favorite book. Bouton was doing a signing to promote the 30th anniversary edition of his classic diary, and as the first to arrive, we had the honor and pleasure of talking to Jim about the book, baseball, and life in general for 45 minutes. Jim even listened intently to my still-unpublished treatise, "Graphic Design as a Form of Pitching."

Still abuzz after our conversation, Nick and I went for a Thai dinner and then headed for a quick drink before our scheduled connection with our friend Julie. We stumbled into a bar called Scratcher, and to our surprise, there was Julie, along with Brandi and the other gal from the Halloween party, this time wearing a winter cap instead of a pink wig. We sat down, and I somehow ended up next to that gal (whose name I couldn't quite remember) and ended up talking with her for hours. She listened to me blather about Bouton and Ball Four, and as it turned out, she knew a bit about baseball herself, having grown up in a rabid sports-fan family with a brother who'd worked for the Milwaukee Brewers and once got to be Bernie Brewer. She knew about Stormin' Gorman Thomas and Harvey's Wallbangers, and had even helped to film a series of Brewer promos starring Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, and Bob Uecker. We talked of several other things -- consumerism and capitalism, butter burgers and cheese curds, film and graphic design -- but much of the conversation revolved around baseball.

We left the bar together that night, much to the amazement of our friends. And except for a brief time-out early on, we've been together ever since. Last April, we moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, and besides the occasional dispute over the division of labor as it pertained to the bathroom's upkeep, it's been a dream come true, more laughs and hugs and fantastic meals and good times than I could have hoped.

• • •

To say that this blog would not be possible without the love and support of my gal Andra is a gross understatement, something on the order of saying, "Babe Ruth played baseball for the Yankees." This blog, this website, this whole enchilada of sharing my unquenchable passion for the game with thousands of readers each week would be downright inconceivable. Back when our relationship was in its shaky infancy, Andra was the one who pushed me to start doing this, who gave me the space to follow my muse, and who showed me how being true to that muse and investing in myself made me somebody that she could love all the more. For that I am eternally, incredibly, staggeringly grateful.

Andra is the one who told me it was acceptable to come home from a hard day's work in front of one computer and sit down in front of another one, crunching through numbers and clicking through links until I found something I wanted to share with the tens, hundreds, or thousands of eyeballs who might read what I thought about baseball on a given day. She's the one who suggested we go back to Milwaukee for the 2002 All-Star Game, and she's the one who demanded I tell Alex Belth "yes" in response to his invitation to attend the Winter Meetings in New Orleans.

Our relationship, of course, goes far beyond her support of my writing. We've gone through our ups and downs against the backdrop of major career changes, supporting each other emotionally and financially without ever looking back to wonder if we'd made the wrong moves. We've endured the terror of our city under siege, realizing that what mattered most to us was the other's safety and well-being. We've gone to the Louvre to appreciate the classic works of European art, and we've run around our little apartment like demented, giggling four-year-olds. We've enjoyed aquavit and pickled herring at fine restaurants as well as hot dogs and beer at no fewer than six ballparks. And we're only getting started.

For whatever predictions I may offer here -- the Yanks will win, the Tigers Pirates Devil Rays Diamondbacks will lose, and Enrique Wilson will never hit big-league pitching well enough to carry Luis Sojo's jockstrap -- I don't know what the future holds any more than you do. But I know I'll have Andra by my side, loving me with as much passion as I love her, and for that I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.