One of my favorite baseball memories is from April '96 at County Stadium. A year after the season-ending strike, the Brewers were still working hard to get butts in seats. They had a promotion for cheap bleacher seats, and I think cheap beers. A bunch of my college buddies and I headed to Milwaukee for a day game--looking at the history, it had to have been a Sunday afternoon. During our tailgate, one of my buddies said he would do anything to shake Ken Griffey Jr.'s hand--and he was planning to hop the fence in center field to do it. Suitably lubricated before the game, cheap beers in the bleachers continued to flow. Come the seventh inning stretch, and there was Griffey, warming up in center field. Like the idiot 21 and 22-year olds that we were, we, of course, egged our boy on. "You're all talk." "If you're going to, now is the time." Sure enough, he walked down to the fence, took a hard look around, made the leap, and jogged over to Mr. Griffey, Jr. Griff turned around and graciously shook his hand. We were told that as he did so, Griff said to him, "you know you're in trouble, right?" And our boy acknowledged that was likely so.
Sure enough, as this was happening, the security guards were sprinting from two directions. Before they got there, our boy turned and put his hands behind his back so that the whole stadium could see he was ready for his arrest, and was quickly ushered off the field. Spent the rest of the afternoon in County Stadium's drunk tank, paid a pretty hefty fine (for a 22-year old college student), and we all had a story--and he had the handshake--to last a lifetime.
My best friend's dad had the game on the radio. When the old man talked with my friend about the game, dad brought it up, "did you see the idiot during the 7th inning stretch? They were talking about it on the radio." "Yeah, that was our boy." "You know, I wondered, would one of them have been dumb enough...?"
Assuming I remember the correct game, and I'm pretty sure I do, the Brewers won 16-9, which is funny, because I don't remember that at all. That would have been a ton of scoring. I guess we were all suitably lubricated, and the main event from our perspective was our idiot friend doing such a dumb thing.
