Now That’s a Real Ball Player

It’s weird how much we’ve grown to love Twitter now. Before this summer, it was safe to say we were all on the board of “what’s the point?” But now, it’s been our most successful stream of interacting with people from across the country.

Erica May, a Colorado State University grad, found us on Twitter by finding us in the “Similar to you” sidebar of the Twitter page. She noticed that we were coming into her current city of residence, Detroit, and instantly gave us a shout out mentioning that she would love to help out at our event in Detroit during the weekend! We were very excited to have more volunteers come out for an event with us, especially in Detroit. We were expecting anywhere between 50 and 100 kids at our event at Martin Road Park on Saturday, August 4th with Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Detroit.

Erica is no slouch at the game of baseball. She played college softball at the University of Missouri before transferring to Colorado State University. Having her expertise on Saturday was going to be great!

She also mentioned that her boyfriend, “Max,” played for the Detroit Tigers and was interested in helping as well. Being a big baseball fan and knowing the AL Central like the back of my hand, I instantly thought, “Max Scherzer.” Yes please.

And so became the first connection between a Major League Baseball player and a Biking for Baseball youth event. We have wanted this since we began this crazy journey, but it’s tough to actually reach the players. Going through the front office it’s a lot of “we have no players available” and they won’t provide us with individual contact information. The best and only way to reach out to players personally, is through Twitter. Crazy!

As you can tell, we were ECSTATIC to have Max and Erica come out to our event in Detroit. 

It was their Annual Summer Picnic in Detroit. Adam is a Big in Denver and knows all about how big the Annual Picnics are. This was gonna be a big one for us!

Because we were to have so many kids and volunteers, we were not going to be able to play a baseball game. We were going to focus on a series of clinics that were going to rotate everyone through. 

• Max Scherzer was going to run our ESPN highlight reel catches. Working with kids individually on catching with two hands and trying to make their best diving catch

• Erica May ran our HR Derby station. Teaching kids how to keep their eye on the ball and take a nice level swing.

• Steve ran the Pickle drill. Kids were trapped in between two bases as they tried to not get tagged out.
• Dave ran “It Takes Two.” A wiffle ball game that has the matches hustle to pick up balls strewn about in the infield and play catch with one another.
• Chase was at one of our new water balloon stations having matches play soft toss back to each other and not let the water balloons break.

• A few volunteers from Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Detroit helped run our new “500” station. Using a water balloon launcher, water balloons were launched into the air and whoever was able to get the water balloon broken in their hands, got 100 points! Most points at the end of the day won a prize from BBBS – Detroit!

Max and Erica were GREAT with the kids. Very personable and interactive, tons of fun, took lots of pictures with everyone that wanted one, extremely patient. Exactly what you would want from a MLB player. At the end of the event, BBBS – Detroit even presented Max with a ball signed from all of the attendees at the event! Cool!

Max had to jet for his MLB game that night, that we were going to, so we said our goodbyes to Max and kept conversing. But as we walked out of the field, there was Max, giving one of the stars of our event, Ben, one-on-one pitching lessons. Max was supposed to leave at 2:30 for his game, it was already 2:45, and he had stopped to give a pitching lesson to a kid that he had never met.

Little Ben left that day saying, “That was the BEST day of my life!”

You gotta be kidding me?! Max is AWESOME!! We really couldn’t have had a better experience with Max and Erica. They were great!

Thanks to LaRon and the WHOLE BBBS staff for making an incredible day at Martin Road Park for the Annual BBBS Picnic. The B4B team stayed after our clinic and even did some dancing with the staff members to the tune of the DJ’s beats. Seriously, what a group.