Baseball Season Countdown Linkup 1:

We’re about a month out from the Braves home opener this year against the New York Mets on April 10th in Atlanta, and as part of the MLB season countdown, I’m participating in the Around The Horn linkup from Kasey at the Bat and Jess Olson!

The idea of the Around the Horn linkup is that for every Thursday in March, we’ll be covering some of our favorites related to baseball and sharing them with you!

So this week’s topic….

Favorite Baseball Memory

Do I have to choose just one???  I’ve got too many baseball memories to choose just one favorite!

Between all the afternoons I spent in high school hanging out on the bleachers with my girl friends watching our friends games, to playing softball for so many years (softball still counts in this right?), to tailgating at the Ted for birthdays every year in college, spending 4th of July in Bean Town at a Red Sox Game (even if I was hating myself for the killer hangover the next morning), the list goes on…..

I’m not even sure I can include my Baseball Themed Bachelorette Party on this list because I can only remember half of it… would that still count?

But I’ve got three that probably tie for first place and they all tie back in to something that’s most important to me. Family.

So without further ado… My top three baseball memories are:

1.  That time I was maybe 8 or 9 or 10 years old  (I don’t know… I was young) and my family had a big pickup game on Easter that left me with a black eye.  Ouch.   I was the youngest grandchild and the only grand daughter on my Dad’s side of the family.  I was co-manning left field with my grandmother, and trying to impress my older cousins by catching one of their pop fly balls.  It went horribly wrong.  While I had my glove up, my hand eye coordination wasn’t quite at the level it needed to be, and I caught the ball with my face instead.  Classy, I know.  But I’ll never forget playing with my family!  And it didn’t stop me from playing softball when I was older and loving it!

2.  Along the lines of playing ball with my family….  my parents have been divorced all my life, so I visited my Dad’s house every other weekend. Sometimes we would grab his old military green canvas bag of baseballs, softballs, gloves and bats, and just goof around in the front yard with a make shift batting practice.  It was slightly annoying to then canvas the front yard (which was more like a huge field to me at that time) picking up all the balls we had just hit (it’s not like we had anyone fielding), but it’s something I still think about fondly today.

3.  Lastly, I have to say my all time favorite baseball memory would be when my Dad would pick us up on Friday afternoons and sometimes randomly take us straight to the baseball stadium downtown to watch the minor league Augusta Green Jackets play a Friday night game.  There were always boiled peanuts and cokes that were delicious.  It was always a surprise when we were actually going to see a game because my Dad is a man of little words, and while we didn’t talk much at the games, it always provided some quality bonding time growing up.

So that’s the full recap of my favorite baseball memories for this week’s Around the Horn Linkup.  What was your favorite baseball memory???

Don’t forget to come back Thursdays this month when we cover our favorite ballpark food, favorite player, favorite team and World Series predictions!!