Results tagged ‘ mygameballs.com ’
Angels vs. A’s – Sept. 28, 2010 – Last night game and BP of the season
A little over a week ago I got back out to LA from Chicago. I have been to 7 games in that time and luckily for me they have all been thanks to FREE tickets. The Angels had a Mexican Heritage Fiesta this past weekend that gave me tickets for the last couple of games with BP this season as well.
| Date | Home Team | Visiting Team | Stadium | BP? | Attendance | # Balls | Comp Factor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 28, 2010 | Angels | Athletics | Angel Stadium of Anaheim | Yes | 43,000 | 3 | 129,000 |
| Sep 27, 2010 | Angels | Athletics | Angel Stadium of Anaheim | Yes | 40,414 | 1 | 40,414 |
| Sep 26, 2010 | Angels | White Sox | Angel Stadium of Anaheim | Yes | 42,686 | 1 | 42,686 |
| Sep 25, 2010 | Angels | White Sox | Angel Stadium of Anaheim | Yes | 40,758 | 5 | 203,790 |
| Sep 21, 2010 | Angels | Rangers | Angel Stadium of Anaheim | Yes | 41,707 | 1 | 41,707 |
| Sep 20, 2010 | Angels | Rangers | Angel Stadium of Anaheim | Yes | 41,404 | 3 | 124,212 |
Rays vs. Angels – May 12th, 2010 – 5 Balls & a few autographs
Today was a 4:05 afternoon game with the Rays at Angels Stadium. I am beginning to like these games because batting practice is relatively empty. Now if we could only get a team in that hits a ton of balls into the seats then it would be perfect. Oh yeah we also need the Angels to open the gates 2 hours before these games instead of just an hour and a half before.
Anyway, before the gates opened I was out by the Angels parking lot trying to get my Torii Hunter home run from 4/28 signed. While I was waiting I decided that I would start a team ball so as other guys came in and stopped I got them to sign the ball. Jason Bulger, Brian Stokes and a couple of other guys stopped and signed. Right around 1pm Torii Hunter pulled up and stopped to sign. I had Torii first sign the home run ball and then I asked him if I could sneak one more in and I got him to sign my 5000th ball caught at professional baseball games and he did.
Shortly after Hunter drove in Bobby Abreu came by and stopped to sign and I had him sign a copy of my book. I also asked about his brothers, Dennis and Nelson whom I had in my clubhouse when I worked for the Rockford Cubbies in 1997. He told me that Nelson was in the Domican and that Dennis was going to be playing for the Tijuana team in the Golden Baseball League. That will be pretty cool if the Tijuana team actually gets off the ground and plays a game.
That was all the excitement before the gates opened and once the gates opened I ran to my favorite spot and low and behold NO ONE WAS IN IT!! WoooHooo! I finally get to play My spot! Unfortuantely it wasn’t 2 good because early on there were two “WALL HUGGERS” that rolled around my glove as they went by and I did not get them. Hideki Matsui was in the last group of the Angels and he hit one that was headed right at 2 Rays pitchers stretching. As the ball got to them one pitcher moved his leg about 2 inches and it went right between his legs and rooled right to me for my first ball of the day. Shortly after that Lance Cormier was warming up with another pitcher and when they finished throwing I asked Lance nicely if I could get that ball and he tossed it to me.
Just after getting my 2nd ball of the day a cute little girl name Brianna that had climbed up beside me and her mom was there with her. There was a ball sitting near the warning track and George Hendrick was walking towards it. I yelled out to George and asked if we could get a ball for Brianna. George walked over and picked up the ball and headed towards us. He asked Brianna what her name was and then asked’ “I just have one question for ya, are you rooting for my team??” Brianna answered the question with the right answer which was “Yes”. George handed her the ball and she had a huge smile on her face.
Shortly after that Carlos Pena launched a fly ball right down the line near the foul pole. I was originally going to SNAP it because there was no one around me but at the last second a guy ran up beside me and I had to outreach him for the ball which was my 3rd of the day. He then says, “Man give me that ball for my nephew, he’s 7 and you’re like 40!” Ok, this is where I get a little irritated by idiots like that! First of all if you are going to ask me or even a player for a baseball you do not start the conversation with GIVE ME! There was no way in hell that I was going to give him anything after that, in fact I just ignored him. Second, if you want to get a ball for your nephew then bring him to the game. I can’t tell you how many times people try to get balls for kids that don’t really exist. If you want a ball for you admit it, be honest and try to get one on your own. If it doesn’t work out then NICELY ask me at the end of batting practice. Then I may or may not give you a ball if I have one!
Shortly after this John Jaso hit a “Wall hugger” that I finally made the right play on and scooped it up. That was my 4th and final ball of batting practice and so I said goodbye to my new friends from Ventura and headed up to meet up with the other ballhawks for our post BP meeting….. lol …. ok it is just where we share how many balls we got!
Now it was game time, for the first 5 innings I sat in the right field corner and there was nothing exciting going on. Ben Zobrist doubled into the corner and if he would have gotten the ball in the air it would have been right at me. In the 6th inning I was going to go over to left field but my friend and fellow ballhawk Rob sent me a text so I went and sat down by him for the rest of the game in the LF pavilion.
In to top of the 7th inning Torii Hunter threw the warm up ball about 2 sections to our right so I told Rob that in the top of the 8th I would get Abreu to throw me that innings warm up ball. The top of the eighth comes and as Bobby comes out I yelled at him and held up my glove. Bobby smiled and after about every other throw looked at me again. I am pretty sure he remembered me from our conversation about his brothers earlier. Anyway, as soon as they were done playing catch he tossed it right to me for my 5th ball of the day.
As the top of the 9th came around I headed to the Rays dugout to see if I could get the final out game ball or anything else. As the players were congratulating each other after the rays 4-3 win I watched for the player that had the game ball. Well since the catch was made against the left field wall I guess the player tossed it to a fan there because no one had a ball coming off the field. So there would be no more baseballs on this day!
I did however get something unexpected at the end of the day ….. A BEE STING!!!
Just as I was about to leave the dugout I felt something on my neck, it was a bug so I grabbed it and looked and saw it was a bee. OUCH! I could feel the stinger in my neck and like and idiot I picked at it. Thankfully somehow I got it out but my neck swelled up a little bit!
Anyway, overall and in spite of the bee sting I did have a good day today and so far this week I have grabbed 11 balls in 3 games! Not sure if I will get to anymore games this weekend however because tickets are full price 
Don’t forget if you are local to Anaheim and have extra tickets you want to donate to BASEBALLS 4 MADD just send me an email at jwitt@mlballhawk.com If you donate tickets for Angels or Dodger games you can get a receipt for the face value of the tickets to claim as a charitable contribution!!
NOTE: Hopefully soon I will again be able to take a camera to more games to take pictures 
Check out my new column on MyGameBalls.com
My new column is up on MyGameBalls.com (click below to view)
2010 Professional Ballhawk League – “Where it’s all about having FUN!”
First of all let me start by saying that this is not an attempt to “steal” Ballhawks away from the original Ballhawk League. As with minor league sports there is enough room for 2 leagues.
Eriks league concetrates on every ball you get no matter how you get it. The Professional Ballhawk League will base itself more on catching and chasing down balls than asking for them or using a device to get them. The PBL will use a point system, will have awards and even jerseys for the participants to wear if they choose to get one!
It will simply be a lot of fun! I encourage Ballhawks of all ages to sign up for BOTH Ballhawk Leagues next season. It will be fun to see how each league works itself out? Will the person with the most balls still win both leagues? Who knows!!
The following is from the 2010 Professional Ballhawk League MLBlog at http://ballhawkleague.mlblogs.com
If you are someone that takes a glove to a baseball game hoping to catch a baseball then you are eligible to play in the 2010 Professional Ballhawk League. There will be 2 divisions in the PBL. You will have the Veteran division that will consist of Veteran Ballhawks that have caught over 100 baseballs at Major League games and at least 1 game home run, foul ball or 3rd out ball caught. Then you will have the FAN Division which will consist of everyone else!
All participants must have a MyGameBalls.com profile to keep track of their 2010 Ballhawking Stats along with a MLBlog where there will write about each game that they attend and Ballhawk at
There will be awards for each division at the end of the season including Veteran and Rookie of the Year awards and the MVB (Most Valuable Ballhawk) aka Ballhawk of the Year!
To sign up please send an email to commissioner@ballhawkleague.com
7/28/09 – Indians vs. Angels – 2 Balls & 1 autograph
So tonight was 80′s night at Angel Stadium and they gave away Bobby Grich T-Shirts which meant a big crowd.
My day actually started a little after Noon when I got to the ballpark to get autographs. One of the first players that we saw was recently called up (like today) Andy Marte. Marte was cool and signed for everyone. When he go to me I figured I would just have him sign a ball and start a team ball. I handed him the ball with the side panel exposed and he took it.
However he must think he is going to be a Superstar cuz he just turned the ball and signed a full blown sweetspot signature. Well that’s the end of that ball, a pearl I caught a couple weeks back! UGH, oh well maybe it was a sign into the future!
Kerry Wood was one of the other players to come in the front and he pulled the oldest trick in the book (well at least in the past 10-12 years)
Wood pulled out his cell phone just after he got out of the car of the person that drove him to the park. He acted as if he was talking on the phone. He did sign for one small kid on his way in and then continued to act as if he was on his phone. When he got about 30 feet away from the park entrance he looked back and saw that no one was around him and then he closed up his phone and walked inside the park. One of the guys getting autographs said he even chuckled as he went into the stadium. OH WELL!
So after the Marte’ debacle I pretty much was hoping that Travis Hafner would come in the front and I didn’t really give a rats *** about getting any more autographs. For those of you that don’t know, Travis Hafner was a member of the 2000 Charlotte Rangers. That was the Texas Rangers class A Florida State league at that time. I was the clubhouse manager of that team and was hoping to get to talk to him. He didn’t come in the front!
At this point it was 3:45 and I had to goooooooooo ….. really bad! So instead of going to the nasty bathrooms in the parking lot I headed for the golden arches!
I got back to the stadium right around 4:30 and found myself a spot at the front of the line on the far right hand side of the gate. I ended up being about the 9th person into the park but that doesn’t really matter because I am sloooooow once I get inside anyway. In fact today someone beat me to my regular spot!
So I went a little farther down the wall to another opening where I could still easily lean over the wall to get any ball that came by. In the first group there were 2 lefties one of which was Hafner. The other lefty launched a fly ball that I new would not make the stands on the fly but I thought that it would hit the warning track. Since I thought if would just hit the warning track I ran back about 6 rows waiting for the bounce. It never came and I watched the ball hit the edge of the grass and then 1 hop my spot which would have been an EASY grab!
It was ok though because I thought I would still have plenty of opportunities. The next round of swings for Hafner helped me rack up that first ball. Hafner hit had line drive that hit about 30 feet to the left of where I was along the wall and ricocheted off towards me. I leaned over and made an easy grab!
The picture below is of the Scoreboard when they put Hafners picture up! It was 80′s night so each player had an 80′s themed picture. I also snapped a picture of Bobby Abreu’s picture!
Pretty entertaining pictures aren’t they!
Ok so on to the game and back to Andy Marte’. You already read about how he messed up a good baseball. Evidently he was going to fix that for me during the game. The bottom of the 2nd inning ended with a ground ball to second base. Marte’ pulled the ball out of his glove and on his way in flipped into the crowd. In the first inning he just tossed the 3rd out to a little kid but in this inning it was thrown about 7 rows up. I had found a seat in about the 9th row and as the ball sailed towards me I got up and went to where it was going. There was one other adult in front of me and all I could do was try to outreach him. As the ball came down I made the grab with a sno cone catch. I quickly opened and closed the glove to get the ball into the pocket and went back to my seat. There wasn’t a kid within 5 rows when I made the catch and the crowd was telling me to give it to the kid. Seriously, if there was a kid near me when I grabbed it I would have at least given them a BP ball I had but this was a gamer and I was keeping it! By the way the 3rd out was made by Kendry Morales and I have gotten quite a few balls off of his bat this season.
The game went into the 8th with the Angels down a run, they scored 4 to make it a three run game. It was time for Brian Fuentes to come in and hopefully not blow another game. About 5 batters into the inning there were runners on 1st and 3rd with 0 outs and 1 run in already making it 7- 5. Fuentes didn’t get much further and the score was 7-6 and the Angels again changed pitchers and brought in Bulger who got Pheralta to ground out to end the game!
Angels win 7-6 , 43,270 fans in attendance and I ended up with 2 balls and 1 autograph!
FUN TIMES!
By the way on MyGameBalls.com I posted in the forum about 3rd out balls. To me it should be a game ball and I did count it that way in my count on MyGameBalls.com. For the Ballhawk League unless there is a rule change it simple counts as a thrown ball.
If you have any thoughts on this check out the forum and make a comment!
On a side note I got to talk to Angels radio announcer Rory Markus about the piece they did with the lone survivor of the crash that killed Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart, Courtney Stewart and Henry Pearson. I also let him know about BASEBALLS 4 MADD and how I was catching baseballs to help MADD raise money to stop drunk driving. I hope that he will get the chance to check out my website and MLBlog and possilby help get the word out!
Orioles vs. Angels – Angel Stadium – 7/3/09 – 5 Balls
This entry is going to be somewhat of a cliff notes version since I am writing it about 4 days later. I went to my usual spot in the right field corner to start with and grabbed one ball during Angels BP that flew into the seats by the foul pole. Once the Orioles got on the field for BP I grabbed two balls that rolled up to the wall with me leaning over to grab them. The first was hit by Nick Markakis and the second by Matt Weiters.
I decided to head up to the right field pavilion seats because there were two of the Oriole pitchers were guarding the line like there was Gold rolling towards the wall. They would not let anything get by them. Once I was up in the right field seats most of the Orioles lefties were done. In the last 2 groups the only lefty was Felix Pie’. Finally Pie’ ripped a ball into the seats. I made one of my best catches of the season running across about a section and a half catching the ball just behind a family of 4 that were completely oblivious to what was going on.
At the end of the game I decided to try the Orioles bullpen instead of the dugouts because there were fireworks after the game and getting a good spot near the dugout would have been impossible. Just before the last out I noticed that one of the Orioles coaches, Alan Dunn, was down there and I figured he was the best shot for a ball. After the game he went to pick up the ball bag and I yelled at him and politely asked for a ball. He reached into the bag and tossed me a nice rubbed up ball. The cool thing about getting a ball from Alan was the fact that he was the pitching coach for the first minor league baseball team that I worked for when I was there. I was vending beer for the Rockford Cubbies in 1995/1996 seasons and Alan was always a cool guy who would talk to all of us before the games.
Another cool thing about the Orioles is that one of their coaches, Terry Crowley, was the person that threw me my first baseball ever at Anaheim Stadium. That was way back in 1978 and he actually gave me 2 baseballs so I could give one to my brother.
Below are my totals for the night and for the season.
Game Info from MyGameBalls.com (SN = Ballhawk)
Stats & Streaks from MyGameBalls.com
MyGameBalls.com – Stats for 2009 and Lifetime
As many of you know there is a new website for Ballhawks that helps us keep track of our insane hobby. Alan Schuster put together MyGameBalls.com and at first you had to have all the information on each ball caught for it to be counted. After many of the older Ballhawks that simply count the balls caught and don’t write down every detail asked him to create a way to post our stats without every ball being input. Mr. Schuster did just that and now all I have to do is adjust the totals to what I have caught at each stadium. So now my stats are updated and I am simply working on getting the totals adjusted for each stadium that I have caught baseballs at.
Here is what it looks like now:
myGameBalls.com – A new website for Ballhawks???
A couple of days ago I received an email as did a few of the ‘veteran” Ballhawks regarding a website that a guy has put together. His name is Alan Schuster and he is a software developer from the east coast.
“Dear John,
It is my pleasure to inform you of a new Ballhawking website, www.myGameBalls.com, that will bring together Ballhawks from around the country and provide a central location for Ballhawking stats. Because you are a leader in the Ballhawking community, your enthusiastic support of this endeavor will be crucial to the success of the site. My aim is to begin the launch of the site by contacting several “Elite” Ballhawks (Zach Hample, John Witt, Rockpile Ranter, Happy Youngster, and The Puck Collector) and asking them to create user profiles (completely free, with no obligation to supply personal information). My hope is that each of you will then publicize the new site on your blogs.”
So I went over to the site and signed up to try it out. It is actually kind of cool because for those of us that do not have the extensive logging as Zack Hample does it helps us keep track of the balls we catch and allows us to enter info on balls we have blogged about. On the other side of that if you don’t have the information to enter you really can’t put balls from the past in. I sent an email to Alan regarding this as well as a few other issues and this was his response:
“Thanks for the feedback, and congratulations, you are the first myGameBalls member! Your page looks great. Regarding the stats, there is a program that runs to calculate both season and lifetime stats. Currently, this calculation cannot be overridden manually. But I agree, the ability to override the stats would be a nice addition to the site, especially since there are probably many other people who are in a similar situation. Right now I am in the process of gathering feedback in preparation for the release of “myGameBalls 2.0″ (not sure when), so this will definitely be on my list. For now, just concentrate on padding your season stats. Good luck snagging this weekend!
Alan”
So I guess we just have to wait and see where it goes and what he does with it. For now I have entered what information on balls caught that I have. I will also be adding some info on as many of the game home runs that I have caught as I can.
It is a pretty cool thing and I know it will definitely help me with keeping track of things!
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