Tonight was an awesome night! I picked up 30 tickets for Caden’s baseball team to go to the St Paul Saints game for a fun team outing. I left work a little early to make sure I could get the tickets and still get home and get back to the ballpark before the gates opened.
Last season I sent a Pedro Hernandez 2013 Topps Heritage Update card to a person to get signed while Pedro was playing for the Rockies AAA team in Colorado Springs. It did not work out for him to get it signed for me so I hoped he would surface somewhere instead of going back to Valenzuela where he was born. As luck would have it, he signed with the St Paul Saints this off season. When he signed with the Saints, my friend Mark C (clubnuts on SCN) emailed me and asked if I could get his card signed for him. I told him I would get to a few games but made no promises.
I got tickets earlier this season to a game and brought the tickets hoping to get them signed but it rained like crazy and the players did not even come out to warm up so things did not work out. My luck changed tonight!
I dropped Caden and the tickets off with the coach and Cami and I headed down to CHS Field. We got there about 15 minutes before the gates opened and waited anxiously. Once they opened we headed right down to the end of the Saints dugout and waited. None of the players had their uniforms on (it was throw back jersey night to honor Larry Doby) so looking for number 19 was useless. While waiting, the Winnipeg second baseman tried to pretend to turn a double play but threw the ball on the ground like there was a first baseman there. There wasn’t! It rolled right in front of us but kicked off the corner of a fence and rolled just out of our reach. A grounds crew member was walking by and gave Cami the ball. She was pretty pumped. Cami had some generic baseball signature cards and was asking the Saints players to sign one for her. She ended up getting five signed! While the first guy signed for her, I asked him if Pedro was around. He told me he was and would be coming out later. A little while later I looked inside the dugout and saw a person sitting in there checking out something on his phone and talking with a couple players. I thought it looked like Pedro but was not sure so I was checking the photo roster on my phone and did not see anyone that looked closer to the person other than Pedro. I asked one of the other guys who signed for Cami if that was Pedro Hernandez on the bench and he said it was. I had locked in on my target! About five minutes later he got up to head to the locker room. I yelled for him and asked him if he would sign and he came over and signed for me. While signing, it was just him and Cami and I so we started talking. We chatted for about 10 minutes. He was an awesome guy! We chatted about the first time I tried to get him (the rainy day) and he remembered that game. He said the field was so wet they were trying to tell management they should not play because someone could get injured. I asked him how CHS Field compared to other fields. He commented that his least favorite was in Amarillo, Texas. I asked him if it was because they had 500 fans to a game (picking the number at random) and he laughed and said they would be lucky to have 500. It was more like 100! We chatted about a couple other things too. When I mentioned we have season tickets to the Twins his eyes lit up. I could tell he still is hoping to get to the Major League level again. Tonight, he hit a home run for me!
After that everything else was icing on the cake. Everyone had a blast at the game. The Saints killed the Goldeyes and at one point later in the game, Cami was in the grass berm above the bullpens and asked a player on the Winnipeg team if she could have a ball. Of course he tossed her one so she was really pumped to have two baseballs!
The only bummer of the whole night was that Amy had to go to Des Moines for work and missed out on all the fun.
Thanks Pedro for signing my cards and the awesome memory of chatting with you!