As a baseball fan growing up, I told myself that I would extremely happy if I could see baseball's Holy Grail, as I call it, by the time I was 25. To me, baseball's Holy Grail are the three greatest baseball stadium still standing (at least when I decided upon this): Wrigley, Old Yankee Stadium and Fenway.

Wrigley was scratched off the list when I was a little kid (and then kept getting scratched off as I got older and found out how cheap it was to fly from Omaha to Chicago) and Christi and I were lucky enough to see a great rivalry at the Old Yankee Stadium.

So the day after we closed on our house, we drove up to Boston to meet up with Jess and Dan to watch the Braves take on the Red Sox. After we got to the field early to watch some BP, we were greeted with a nice surprise. Jair Jurrjens and Buddy Carlyle were shagging fly balls in right field ... about 20 feet in front of us. Jess, being a lifetime Red Sox fan, tells us that one of her life goals is to get a major league baseball at a game (BP or live, it really doesn't matter). Seeing Buddy as close as possible, I thought this would be the absolute best time to do it. Heck, thanks to my sister-in-law, I know the name of the place where his son is learning to swim. I figured I had more leverage on him than anyone standing out there.

After yelling, "Omaha rules" to let him know we were from the area, we got no response. After waiting for another left handed hitter to get up to spray balls in the general area, we started to move towards a more drastic approach of, "Hey Buddy red shoes, you're awesome." Ponec once saw a picture of me playing high school ball wearing red shoes with a blue jersey and told me that's what people called Buddy. Not knowing if Buddy took to the nickname or not, we will never know as there was no response. Then, the very last hit of BP was a ball hit oppo landing at the base of the wall right were we were standing ...

Out of the nearly 10,000 or so people on hand for batting practice, we had to assume that we were the only ones who knew anything about him. With this, we thought just the smallest thing would let him look up and toss us a ball. So, there was Buddy, kneeling over and picking up our last chance, so I gave him mine, "Bellevue East rules! Go Chieftains!" He picked the ball up, turned in our general direction, spun back around to look at 2nd base and fired an absolute rocket back to the infield. If that doesn't get Buddy (or anyone for that matter) to throw a ball at you, I'm not sure what will.

Why did I spend this entire post talking about what happened in BP? Because only two other things happened that day.

1) When we were walking around downtown Boston, a hostess at a restaurant yelled something at me. "Hey you ... you look like that guy in that movie."

Wanted to just play the part, I didn't and said, "Me? What movie are you talking about?"

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You're look like that main guy."

"You mean Jason Segel? You've got to be kidding me. I look nothing like him. He's a lot taller than me."

"Yeah, and he has a fatter face."

"Thanks?"

(Up until that point, a handful of times I've gotten "You look like that guy from Empire Records," but I still haven't re-watched the movie to see who they are talking about.)

2) The Braves lost. Beckett shoved and shutout my team. Why spend an entire blog post talking about them losing when there were greater stories from the day?

+ Fenway Picture Gallery