I love baseball and my wife's cooking

Greetings friends,

For those of you who know me, the title of this post may have come across as shocking to some. By stating that this title may be shocking, I am obviously referring to the "I love baseball" part, as I am quite open about my love for my wife's cooking. While we are on the topic, Amanda made an absolutely killer gourmet dinner tonight. It was some kind of fancy chicken and potatoes and a bunch of spices and stuff that made it really really good. She is an amazing cook and rarely follows a recipe.

Now let me continue this journey by further explaining the first part of my title. I played baseball as a kid up until I was 13 years old. I never once enjoyed it. I only did it because my dad is Derek Jeter, and frankly he is a bit pressuring (jk, I am just living up to my "liar" reputation that was so generously delivered by my wife on that last blog post). All in all, it was a good growing experience. Anyways, I have never been a fan of baseball. We even had season tickets to the Arizona Diamondbacks when we lived in Mesa. The games were fun because the stadium was so cool, but I was never terribly interested in the actual games. Skip ahead a few years and I am playing lacrosse in high school. Lacrosse and baseball are always fierce rivals (our team had shirts that said "lacrosse: what men do during boys baseball season"). Long story short, I have never had a good relationship with baseball. Everything changed for me on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011.

You see, I was on a business trip with my pops in Cleveland for a couple days last week. We have a project in construction in Akron and we were looking at some buildings in downtown Cleveland. Construction in Akron was on a pretty early schedule so we got everything done that we needed by about 3:30 pm, and then we headed in to Cleveland to meet with a couple brokers. We were finished looking at property by about 5:30 and figured that we might as well go to an Indians game since the stadium was right next to our hotel. I was excited because it is always fun going to any professional sports event, but I secretly wished it would have been a more lively professional sport. Guess where our seats were? Yep, front row. Right behind the dugout.

The Cleveland Indians were taking on the Tampa Bay Rays that night. Right in the first inning, Grady Sizemore, the first batter for the Indians, nailed a home run! The stadium erupted, I was high fiving all kinds of strangers, there were fireworks... I was hooked. The home team hitting a home run gave me the same rush that a sweet alley-oop or a buzzer beater in basketball gives me. I had no idea that I could get that same rush in... Baseball??!! The most boring sport in the world!?!? Needless to say, baseball is no longer the most boring sport in the world to me, it is far from it. The rest of the game was awesome. The Indians won in the bottom of the ninth when the bases were loaded with a full count and the pitcher threw.... a ball!!

Well, that was a long way to explain how my love for baseball was recently born. I wish we had a pro team here, but for now, the Bees will have to do (we are going to a game next week). Also I have been watching the clock all day waiting for 6:30 to come around so I could watch the Indians take on the Kansas City Royals on my computer. FYI, right now it is the top of the 6th and the Indians are winning 19-1. Oh yeah!!

In conclusion, you can think whatever you want about me, but I love baseball. And my wife's cooking.

Love,
Derek