Extreme Niche Tweet:

When David Cone went 20-3 in '98 we hung a banner at Shea Stadium that said "HurriCone David Maximum Sustained Wins 17-3" and Tim McCarver read it on air and said "What a clever banner."

We used to have season tickets, four front row seats, upper deck...

...back when season tickets for a family for the year was the cost of a summer vacation...

My father would record each game on the same VCR we bought so I could watch Star Wars every damn day for a year until my grandfather said not today and so we went out to the yard and my five year old self got to watch that old man throw a real live curveball and it was one of…

…the coolest damn things I’d ever seen.

Would learn years later that he actually played minor league ball in something called Class C or Class D because there are always stories you don’t know about even the people closest to you.

But back to this morning’s topic: baseball.

Well, more baseball.

My father recorded each game so he could watch the pitches up close the next morning.

Why? Because more baseball that's why.

And so he woke me up the next day, positively delighted, to show me twenty seconds of an otherwise meaningless game, in which the announcer read his silly sign on air.

I don't know what happened after that. Perhaps it was a school day. Perhaps it was still summer vacation.

Those memories have faded.

But it's fifteen minutes until first pitch. The coffee is on. Up for hours already. My wife, still asleep in the other room. I will try to be quiet.

But perhaps I'll wake her up with with something silly of my own from an otherwise perfectly ordinary Thursday morning because between now and then there will be another small story to share.

She wakes up.

Me, in English, “He’s not perfect.”

Her, in Japanese, “人間だからね.”

To end this thread with someone else’s words. https://twitter.com/martinonyc/status/1387583089354973186