Book 17, Chapter 8 of My Life.

With the baseball season approaching I’ve realized how much I miss the sport, the competition, the team and the brotherhood we formed. I have been reminiscing of the memories I made with my team on and off the field.  One such memory sticks out.

We were heading home from losing in the second round of state by a walk off homerun. It was a three hour bus ride back to school. We were all disappointed in the result, knowing that we were one out away from beating the top seed. For the first 45 minutes to an hour no one said a word. Than when we stopped for dinner at Cici’s the mood changed. It had hit all six seniors, including me, that we just played our last high school baseball game. We had already lost and we didn’t want to sit on a quiet bus for two more hours. We decided to start the fun at Cici’s.

We went to the arcade area and made sure no employee was looking. We tilted this bouncy ball machine and dumped out about 40 bouncy balls. After we stuffed our pockets we got a few more teammates and went outside. Across the parking lot was a Wal-Mart. We decided to throw the balls at the Wal-Mart door and try and get some bouncy balls into the store. It was a lot more difficult than it sounds. You had to time the throw so that someone was walking through the automatic doors the same time your ball was too. We had thrown maybe 15 balls and made two through the door. A few throws later my teammate threw his second ball. It looked like the third ball was to land inside Wal-Mart. We weren’t sure if it made it through the doors but no one expected what was going to happen. The ball was thrown a little shorter than expected but it got two lucky bounces. The first bounce was off the hood of a Tahoe and then off that bounce it hit a gentleman walking into the store on the head. We all stopped, looked at each, and ran right back into Cici’s.

This event lead to jokes and a much better, relaxed feel on the ride back home. Little things like that were what defined my high school baseball team. This story might not seem amusing to some but it means a lot to me because even with losing my last baseball game, my teammates and I were able to look past that and spend the last two hours of the season the only way we knew how.