Chapter 8

Ted was now dating Amy exclusively. She was good company and a fine date. Because of that, he stopped going to the “Friday Nites” when they had their meetings. He enjoyed being with Amy and she seemed to enjoy being with him. The dates they had were equally divided between dinner dates and attending baseball games. Because her job had her spending considerable time on the water, she preferred not to go fishing that often even though she liked to fish.

He was developing serious feelings for her. They had not proceeded to the ultimate act of love-making but the kisses, cuddling, and petting they did were sufficient for Ted. He respected her for having those standards which in a way increased his feelings for her.

Ted attended several high school baseball games. He was at the last game of the season when Mark pitched a two-hit shutout. The radar gun indicated the speed of his fastball was at ninety-four miles per hour. Ted told Ken that Mark’s speed should further increase as he matures. This win clinched their first-place finish in conference play.

At the celebration afterward, Ken told Ted that Mark had received several offers from colleges and had narrowed his choices to the University of Florida, Mississippi State, and the University of Texas at Austin.

When he asked Ted which one he would recommend, Ted knew better than to favor any one of those schools and just said they were all fine schools. Ted said that Mark needs to decide what he wants to study and should base his decision on that. He said while Mark may have plans for making the big leagues who knows what can happen and he needs to have the education to fall back on if he isn’t successful or gets injured.

Charlie and his friends did come back to Ted’s home and did some successful fishing with Ted. The strong winds on one of the days they wanted to do the fishing had Ted call Charlie and cancel. Ted told him it wasn’t worth the risk and they were other days that they could do this.

Ted received a call from Ron at the local university reminding him of his commitment to be a speaker at their combined men and women baseball awards banquet. Ted had never done something like this and he spent some time thinking about what he would say. He made some notes about some of the superstitions certain players had along with some of the more comical incidents that had happened when he was playing.

He would also mention players who never made it to the majors and spent a few years in the minor leagues before they decided to wrap it up. Two of them because of the education they received had gone on to be successful, one in land development and the other after going back to law school as an attorney.

At the banquet, Ted was introduced by the master of ceremonies Terry Curtin, a baseball reporter for the local newspaper. The introduction was Terry reciting Ted’s baseball resume. Ted was a little nervous since he had never done this type of speaking to a large number of people. He started by thanking Terry for the introduction and said if he knew he was that good he still should be pitching which caused laughter.

Ted then went on to give his talk frequently referring to some notes he had written on three-by-five cards. He did get laughs when he mentioned a few of the funny things he had seen happen during his career. He was surprised when he ended his talk and realized he had gone some forty-five minutes in doing this talk. He did receive a nice round of applause when he ended his talk.

Ted watched the awards being presented to various individual men and women. He did have the thought of seeing how good some of these college-age women looked which caused him to wish he was back in school.

In mid-week after the college banquet, Ted received a phone call from Evan Gruber who was the Director of Communication for his old baseball team. Evan said that the team had a three-game series with the Rays starting Friday night. The regular television color man, Vince Crandall had a death in the family which prevented him from working these games. Evan asked Ted if he wanted to be the color man for these three games.

Again this was something Ted had never done. He told Evan he would give it a try and would be at Tropicana field two hours before the game started.

Ted thought about being the second banana on this broadcast team. The long-time television broadcaster for this baseball team was Harry Cashoe. Harry was not liked by the players because he was quick to point out the errors or mistakes players made and even inferred some of them didn’t belong in the major league and should be in the minors.

The players knew they made mistakes or were in a hitting slump without Harry saying anything and broadcasting it to a few million viewers. Behind Harry’s back, they referred to him derogatorily as “Nuts for brains.”

Ted was not going to criticize anyone and spent some time surfing the net looking at statistics and making notes to prepare himself for the game.

Doing the broadcasting was something different for Ted although when he did watch a game he did have thoughts about what was going on. Now he would be just expressing those thoughts. Ted let Harry do most of the commenting and would mention what pitches he would consider throwing in certain situations. He complimented the players on some plays that they made and didn’t say anything when an error by the second basement caused what turned out to be the winning run to score. He didn’t need to say anything as Harry did it all by himself. When Harry asked Ted to comment on that error, all Ted would say was that it was a tricky lined ball that took a funny bounce.

Evan saw Ted after the game and said he had watched the game on television and thought Ted did a fine job in filling for the regular broadcaster.

When the three-game series was over with the Rays winning two of the three games, Evan again spoke with Ted. He gave Ted a check for doing this and asked if the need occurred in the future would Ted want to be called on to fill in? Ted told him he would do it but only for a few games, two weeks at most. He said he was enjoying retirement and wasn’t looking to be working full-time. They shook hands and wished each other luck.

In walking out to his car, Ted was stopped by Bryan Sopper who had a similar position with the Rays that Evan had with his old team. He said he had listened to some of Ted’s comments and asked if he would be interested in doing that for the Rays. Ted gave him the same answer he gave Evan who said he would keep Ted in mind when they needed a backup.