Jennie Rox

We made a family trip this past Saturday out to Brockton to see the Brockton Rox play.  It’s one of the teams partially owned by Bill Murray and is a fun time if you love baseball.  You can’t beat $5 tickets and $2 hot dogs.  We didn’t go for just the baseball though.  On Deck Sports was there that night for the announcement of their new partnership with softball legend Jennie Finch.

Prior to the game, Jennie spoke to a large group of girls about softball.  She spoke about her training regimen and history with the game since she first started playing at 5 years old.  She told some great stories and made a lot of young girls very happy.  My daughter is only 3 years old at the moment, but so far she’s taken a liking to sports and hopefully she’ll have fun playing either baseball or softball once she gets older.

After the talk, Jennie was doing an autograph signing at the stadium.  That’s the reason that I was there.  I’ve been a fan of Jennie since she first burst upon the scene.  She was a phenomenon in sports and by her senior year of college, every single one of her games were broadcast on ESPN.  That was a huge deal back then.

They brought Finch out to the Pepsi All-Star Challenge one year.  It’s a yearly charity event where Major Leaguers come out and play softball for charity.  I went to the game one year and its a lot of fun.  Well, they had everyone come out and have an at-bat against Jennie Finch the year that she was there and one player made contact and that was only a weak foul tip.  Sure, she doesn’t throw 90 MPH, but with a shorter distance and that rising motion, it wasn’t anything that some of the best hitters in baseball could hit.

I just randomly happened to walk past the line as it was starting to form because we were taking my daughter to have her face painted.  I jumped into the autograph line and 5 feet away my wife and daughter jumped into the face painting line.  The only bad thing about this is that the line was starting to form while the talk was still going on and a lot of the girls who were huge fans got stuck at the end.  I just hope that they were all able to get autographs.  The front of the line had your typical autograph hounds.  They had their bats and other memorabilia ready to be signed.  Finch appeared at the big Shriner’s Card Show that I went to over the summer and the fee to get her autograph then was $50 if I remember correctly.  It’s no wonder that a good number of collectors showed up to get her autograph here.

We made our way to the exit after I got my autograph.  I had worked that day (6th in a row out of 10 in a row I will be working) and it was the second long day in a row after going to a Wheel of Fortune taping the previous day.  My daughter was starting to get restless as well.  She had been in line, but grew tired of that and so my wife took her down to the kids area where they had a giant inflatable slide.  It was a great day though because I got to add this card to my collection.  Allen & Ginter cards are beautiful to begin with, but they look even nicer with an autograph on them.  This came out really nicely and it capped off a great evening.

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