Ralph Kramden

I don't get a chance to attend many MLB games, but the one game I love to go to as often as I can is the "August weekday afternoon rescheduled April rainout game" at Fenway Park. There seems to be one of these games almost every year, and if the weather report is good, I'll play hookey from work, go to Fenway and stand in line for a same-day ticket (all Fenway games are "sold out", but they do sell a couple hundred same-day seats - a bit more with a rain-out game). This year's game came on August 17th. My wife and I went and stood in line for a couple of hours, made some friends, talked some baseball, talked about Boston with some visitors, got to the front of the line and got seats behind home plate in the last row of the grandstand. Very nice!

It turned out that today was the major league debut of Red Sox prospect Clay Buchholz, called up specially for this double-header start. Before the game, I was returning to my seat from a beer run and was walking up the aisle behind a cute girl with a "Buchholz" t-shirt. I remarked, "Wow, you really came prepared. Where did you get the t-shirt? Pawtucket?"

And the girl said "I got it made custom in Texas. I'm Clay's mom." So I met Clay's mom and sister and grandparents, just in from Texas, first visit to Fenway Park and to Boston. Absolutely wonderful people. They were thrilled and a bit awed to be here. Clay's mom was just going around the ballpark, looking around, taking pictures. I wished for this to be the first of many, many visits to Fenway for them.



Clay's first pitch was a ball. As were the next 5. He has a 94 MPH fastball that a batter must respect, but he's also got nasty off-speed stuff that he wasn't throwing them for strikes. Then he started locking in and throwing strikes. He got out of the inning with only one run scored (unearned), and the Sox put up 6 on John "Running Dog" Lackey. In the end, Clay did them proud: 6 IP, 8 H, 4 R, 3 ER, 2 BB, 5 K and a win.


Great game.