Zack Hample presentation

Last night, I was fortunate to attend a presentation at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington, Ohio by Zack Hample, ball hawk extrordinaire and author of 3 baseball books, including "The Baseball: Stunts, Scandals, and Secrets Beneath the Stitches", which I read and enjoyed immensely. He even autographed a baseball for me, here is the pictographic proof:

While I would love to take some of Zack's advice and get a bunch of balls, unfortunately, I kind of have 2 strikes against me. I can't go to a game 2 hours early (due to my wife wanting to go to games as well but not standing for going so early), I can't run from left field to right field on a whim (due to old age).

Zack signed my ball with the number 6309, which is his up to the minute count of his baseball collection. At first, I thought that this number of balls would take up multiple storage units, but then I did the math, because that is what I am good at.

A set of whole number factors that comes close to 6309 is 20 times 20 times 16, which is 6400. A standard Rawlings baseball box that stores one baseball is approximately 2 13/16" cubical, which means that if you stacked baseballs in their boxes in a layer of 20 by 20, making it 16 boxes high, the footprint of the stack on the floor would be 4'8" by 4'8", and the stack would be 3'9" tall.

The weight is another matter, however. At 5 ounces per, 6309 baseballs would weight about 1972 pounds. That is (almost) a ton of balls.

2012 videos

Here are the videos of my hijinks of the two TV games for Team Stargell at the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates Fantasy Camp. Thanks to Joe B. and his staff with the Pirates for sending me these videos.

Here is the video from Game 2:


Team Stargell Game 2 at Pirates Fantasy Camp 2012 from Brian Prescott on Vimeo.

And here is the video from Game 7 at McKechnie Field:


Team Stargell Game 7 at Pirates Fantasy Camp 2012 from Brian Prescott on Vimeo.

The game 7 video contains a clip of me trying to turn a double play that was included on the camp highlights DVD (unfortunately the ball was not hit hard enough to turn two). So while on the surface it is not as exciting as "The Catch" from last year, I think it shows some improvement in my fielding.

Only 194 days until the 2013 Pirates Fantasy Camp...

2012 Fantasy Camp DVD insert

Well, the Bucco bats have come to life in the past month or so, and they are in first place at the All-Star break. That hasn't happened in a while.

Just like last year, I made a DVD insert to jazz up the style of the 2012 Fantasy Camp DVDs. If you would like, you can download them from these links, depending on which flavor of word processing app you use:

Microsoft Word

OpenOffice.org 3.x

As with last year's insert, to print these out, you will most likely need to use legal paper, as the width of the insert is almost the size of a standard piece of letter paper, and most printers cannot print that close to the edge of the paper. Also, I would recommend using a paper cutter instead of scissors to trim it down, it makes much nicer edges. The printed page is designed for you to trim away some of the printed part, so do not trim right along the printed edge, go a little bit inside for starters.

Only 197 days until camp opens...

Reunion game

Well the 2012 Pirates Fantasy Camp is now officially and totally over, as the reunion game was last weekend. It was a glorious morning for baseball, and the team that I was on won our game, so I guess I wasn't totally winless from the 2012 camp. At the plate, I went 1 for 2. In my first at-bat, I swung at a pitch I should have laid off and hit a squibber down the first base line for the final out of the first inning, and in the third inning I hit a double that bounced and rolled to the wall in left field. In the field, I played 2 innings in right field without any chances, and I played 1 inning at third base and threw out the batter on a ground ball to end the game.

Only 240 days until the 2013 camp opens...