This year, I went to Surprise, AZ outside of Phoenix to take in a few Rangers games and have the draft with my buddy Jason Schumacher and his eldest son, Jack, pictured below. I've known Jason for a little over 2o years, ever since I moved back to Texas in 7th grade, and we've been good friends since. We missed the other guys but had a great time watching Rangers BP, fielding drills and games at beautiful Surprise Stadium.
Jack was an autograph hound. He got 2 Josh Hamilton autographs, Derek Holland, Joe Nathan, Mike Adams, Yoshinori Tateyama, Mark Hamburger, Martin Perez, Ronald Guzman and two scrubs hoping to make the team, Brandon Snyder and Luis Hernandez. He was a little jackrabbit hopping around, finding the holes to get to the front of the line and get the autograph. Here he is with Tateyama and Nathan.
We got to see the Rangers play the Cubs, Reds, Giants and Angels. I think we lost every game but the one against the Giants, though Mark Hamburger did his best to blow a 4 run lead.
Back at the hotel, we found they had a nice little basketball court and after destroying a couple of teenage girls from neighboring apartment complex in a few games of rundown, we decided to show off our jumping prowess. You might have noticed that we are white. But we can still get rim.
Then we slept about 1 hour on Friday night in preparation for the draft Saturday morning. And my team stinks to show for it.
Also, during our break at the end of round 10, Schu decided he would fry up some bacon for Jack. Except he forgot to turn on the vent so smoke built up in the room and the fire alarm went off. It was so loud that Schu and I had to hold towels up to the alarms (it was 7am) to muffle them while Jack harassed the front desk to turn the alarms off, which they finally did about 15 minutes later.
