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Premature Fanpost Friday: Announcer Interactions

The classic duo, a few years before my in-booth acknowledgement.

With the return of Tom "Wimpy" Paciorek to the broadcast booth with the White Sox this weekend, I wanted to share a fun story about him that befits a fanpost.

If my buddy Todd Arbetter is out there in Colorado reading, he can provide additional detail to this. I'll see what I can remember.

Todd was a longtime University of Colorado student, and by that I mean he eventually ran the degrees table there, undergrad, masters, doctorate. He and I go all the way back to grammar school together.

Anyway, I was living in Kansas City, the closest spot to American League baseball for him. During the school year, I was in teaching creative writing to disinterested agribusiness majors at Kansas State, studying for my own masters, after TCU.

Todd liked to drive our interstate system, dubbing himself the Interstate Masochist for his tendency to, like, drive 1,000 miles all night or whatever. Genius mind in a trucker's body, I guess.

Anyhow, every so often Todd would drive straight east for a ballgame with me at Royals Stadium. Probably call that morning, pick me up in Manhattan or at my apartment in K.C., and head on to the ballpark. Happened at least twice, but I think more than that.

One game was in very late September. White Sox were whitewashed, like 9-0. I mean, literally, whitewashed: There was a blizzard toward the end of the game.

Another was the subject of my Wimpy tale.

We decided, as college folk are wont to do, to shoot for some cheap and free press at the Sox game in K.C. that night. So we hatched a plan to make a sign to hold up, something I have never done at a game, any game, before or since.

Despite my guest at the game being a scientific genius and myself, no slouch at the free press game, here's how we prepared ourselves:

Yes, that's it, we prepared no materials to carry out this plan. Come to think of it, we might have hatched the plan on the way to the game, which is normally a little late to create a sign that will get you on the Tee Vee.

But hey, we were nothing if not resourceful, and apparently aching for acknowledgement from the broadcast booth of Hawk and Wimpy.

So we got to the park and scavenged some discarded empty box/concession cardboard, then sweet-talked a nice gal in the gift store into letting us use her permanent marker. Of course, as clear interlopers (surely we had some forms of Sox gear on), we couldn't be trusted taking the marker out of the store, so I dropped right down on the floor of the crowded gift shop and started writing, K.C. fans stepping on me and Todd attempting to dictate something clever.

Here's what we came up with:

WIMPY! WE HAVE FOOD!

Which was actually a pretty good hook, because for those of you old enough to remember, Wimpy liked to talk about food during broadcasts. And Hawk pretty often teased him about it.

All we wanted was a little acknowledgement or wave, and we would have been happy.

But we got more. Much, much more. Well, not that much more, really.

We had some pretty decent seats, in the bowl maybe right off the first-base dugout. Definitely in the sight lines of the broadcast booth. And every half inning during the commercial break, we'd hold the sign up toward the booth.

If I recall, it wasn't working too well, and we were managing to annoy/confuse the fans around us.

But, maybe mid-game, we got a huge thumbs up from Wimpy! Thrills!

But that's not the end of the story.

As Todd told me later, he returned to Boulder and ran into a friend who had watched the game. News flash: We got on TV.

And not just that: Because ESPN's national game/regional games/just about every game was in a rain delay, the enticing early-1990s White Sox-Royals matchup became the national game. And when we were on TV, we went out to ESPN's national baseball audience.

Bullseye.

So, Wimpy's reaction, when the sign was shown on the broadcast, presumably upon return from a commercial break:

1. "Where's the food?" (Yes, we were promising food on our sign, but we weren't actually holding up a hamburger for him. A key gaffe in our plan, because knowing Wimpy, he might have come down from the booth between innings and claimed it.)

2. "How come I get all the lousy signs?"

[About 20 — holy crap — 20 years later, covering the White Sox in Seattle and with Wimpy in town to sub for Steve Stone, I caught up with him, he had something sassy to say about my formal attire, and we sat in the visiting clubhouse and chatted for like a half-hour. (I'm sure I thought I was cool-handing it when in reality I was a total fanboy.) I asked him, very tentatively, if I could get his number to check in during the season to get a take on the team or a situation, and he didn't hesitate. The little scrap of paper his wrote his number on? Bless his heart, he labeled it "Wimpy" at the top.]

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