Throwback Thursdays

I was late to the party, so to speak, when it came to posting “Throwback Thursday” photos on Facebook. 

“It’s a pain to take the laptop into the study and hook up the scanner and find a photo and scan it in…blah blah blah,” I always told myself. Still, I enjoyed seeing all the cool retro shots my friends were posting – from past vacations to childhood shots to all those fun memories from high school.

Then, one day, I was digging on my laptop. I can’t remember, now, what I was looking for, and I ran across a folder of team photos from every baseball team I coached – fall and spring, rec and travel – from 2000 to 2010.  “This is, after all, ‘Coach Jeff’s Blog,” I concluded. “What a perfect way to participate in Throwback Thursday!”

So starting a few weeks ago, I’ve been posting them – one a week – on my FB page I have received some nice feedback from Choppers fans and other friends alike.  Here’s the team photo I posted today (from Fall 2002). The players on this team were roughly seven years old.

 

Fun times; lots of great memories. 

For me, in particular, the joy of this process has been to relive all these great teams. It has given me a chance to think back to the 100+ young players who graced our roster(s) over the course of a decade. As such, I have had many “Oh, I remember him…” moments.

So often, I think about the Choppers when I think about my baseball coaching years and I remember their championship moment. What I fail to recall, at times, is how we got there.

This has been a great way to bring back memories of the early days. Such moments as:

• The young player who had the same name as a celebrity. I pointed this out to him and he didn’t know what I meant. Later, in the same conversation, he asked me if I knew there was a celebrity that had the same name as he did?
• Another player asked if he could bring his good luck rubber chicken into the dugout. We played well that night, so then ‘clucky’ became a regular fixture for the rest of that season.
• Then, there was the time (in the evening on 9/11) when one of my players, standing in the outfield, asked me to explain what it all meant. They don’t cover that kind of topic in the coaches training course.

Perhaps my favorite, fun, little kid memory centered around the time Paul, himself, got a base hit and was running in ‘slow motion.’ Later, when he returned to the dugout, I asked what he was doing with that turtle trot and he said he was running like that guy in ‘The Natural.’ You know, from the penultimate scene: Roy Hobbes hits the home run to send the Knights to the World Series.

PG was just recreating that moment.

And watching the movie clip, as I just finished doing, always brings chills. If you want to see just the payoff, scroll over to the 3:50 mark; or if you have 5+ minutes, just sit back and enjoy the action.

Consider it another throwback…video version.

 JG

Originally posted 3/6/2014