Friends, family, the kindness of complete strangers and baseball.

This section is titled baseball and the kindness of complete strangers.

Since my last post I am happy to announce that Cody did indeed get to go to the T Bone game, care of a player on the team named Nate Tenbrink.  

He got with me and worked out a day for Cody to go see a T Bones game.  I won’t share a lot in words about the experience but I will share a video I made of how the day went.  Those of you who follow me on Facebook got to see some of the photos of the event so this may be duplicated information for you but hopefully this whole thread today won’t be that way.

We started our day as a kind of summer ending blowout for the whole family.  We went to Dave and Busters and had lunch and played some video games.  We walked around doing some Pokemon hunting and headed to the ballpark about 3:30 PM. 

Nate set up an amazing day.  Cody got to basically be a T Bones player for the day.   He showed us around the locker room and introduced us to the team as they got to the park about the same time.  Nate talked about his routine and what the routine was for most of the players did on a daily basis.  We got to see the rosters, scouting reports, meet all the coaches and managers.  Everyone was super, they treated him like a player on the team.  Of course being a locker room it was smelly, crazy, loud, there were TV playing ESPN and the Olympics.  Some players were scheduling their next day off to go play a scramble at the local golf course nearby.  There was loud music playing the entire time.  Apparently each player gets a playlist day.   Today’s mix was a mixture of Latin music and hard rap.   I can’t begin to do justice to the atmosphere it was amazing for Cody to fell what it is like to be a baseball player in the real world.  It was fun to watch Cody as you could see him take it all in. Sure we can discuss that the level was not MLB but there are kids on that team fresh out of college trying to make a showing in the hopes of being picked up by a team.   There are also former MLB players on that team, like Nate, who were drafted by MLB teams and still living the dream of maybe getting back there some day.  Some of them just play because they love the game.  Anyway from here I will let the video speak for how the rest of the day went.  From walking into the locker room to his throwing out of the first pitch he had been with the team in some capacity for about 3 and a half hours.  It’s a little over 18 minutes long but it was hard to recap his wonderful day in a much shorter fashion.

Needless to say he/we had an amazing time.  We stayed until the end of the top of the 8^th inning.  Cody was running out of gas and we didn’t want to cause a crisis.   At the time we left we waved good bye to Nate and headed home.  Cody was sad the T Bone were losing 3 – 0 to the Lincoln Saltdogs.  As it turns out the T Bones came back to win the game with a walk off HR in the bottom of the 9^th inning to win 4-3.  Cody was devastated that we didn’t stay for the whole game but he started complaining of being tired in the 5^th inning so we were pushing it to get to the 8^th.  He understands himself well enough at this point to know that he needed to go and he was the one who finally gave to OK in the 8^th to go home.  I wanted him to stay as long as he could but the overall day I think was finally all he could take.  As a side note I am sharing Nate’s side business as he trains youngsters up to high school age players along with a large group of pros at his facility in Lenexa.  If you have a kid who wants some one on one time with a pro at any position check them out.  It is the least I can do for what he did for Cody.  The name of the place is the Kansas City Fieldhouse.  Check it out I think you'll be impressed.

This section is titled friends, family, and baseball.

As many of you are aware I am holding a tournament at Lee’s Summit Legacy Park Baseball complex September 16-18^th.  All of the profits will go to Cody’s national foundation AIUnited.org with them using them money here locally to help us enact some changes within the community at hospitals, at schools, with EMS and fire department.  There are many things that need to change in order for Cody and people like Cody to be safe in their life with his rare disease.  We are getting a lot of support from the community and others on this project and we hope it is a huge success.  I have created a Facebook page to share information about the event feel free to check it out.  We would also love to have you out there even if you don’t have a team playing in the event we will have a lot of things to raffle off and have several silent auction items to buy to help raise fund for this cause.  Saturday will be the big day for all the fun events.

Unfortunately, Cody’s competitive baseball team broke up this summer and he is not playing the fall as we had planned.  I won’t get into the details but let’s just say it’s how competitive baseball works sometimes and this time it happened to us.  At the time of the breakup I came to realization that Cody wasn’t going to be able to play in the tournament that is essentially being held for him and his disease.  This of course was hard on us and Cody, but he’s a trooper and he decided that it was all OK.  He said he would be there to help at the tournament and help run it with Dad while we raise some money for his disease.  I don’t know how it is God blessed us with such a great set of kids that have an understanding of life and living with life’s challenges and just going with it.

For the last few weeks I have been racking my brain as to how to get enough 14-year-old baseball playing kids together just so I could get Cody in his tournament.   My friend and fellow coach Brent Walker’s twins and Cody have basically played together since they were about 8 years old.  He and I have discussed several options and we are working hard to finally get enough players together for a team.  

Working on the board for Lee’s Summit baseball I have some access to some coaches on the board who have kids at Cody’s age in recreational baseball and they have agreed to let their sons play with us.   Additionally, my nephew Cameron is going to play with us.  Cody and Cameron are best friends, but because of their age difference of a few months and the way the ages work in baseball Cameron has always been a year behind Cody in the league.  The only time they ever played together on a team was Tee Ball in Greenwood.  Ever since then since the age cutoff of April 30 has meant that Cameron had to play a year younger even though Cody and Cameron are basically the same age but Cody was born in February and Cameron in May of the same year.   I know Cody is very excited that Cameron will be playing on his team for this tournament and I personally can’t wait to see them in matching Jerseys together.   Oh and the added benefit is I know I have a scorekeeper!  Thanks to my sister-in-law Kim for volunteering to keep score for us.  Oh wait I haven’t asked her yet.   Hey Kim will you be my scorekeeper :-)?  Right now we have 8 players and we are working to get to 10 maybe 11 but officially with 8 players we have enough to at least play in the tournament.  I was happy to announce this information to my son last night and he was excited to hear the news.  

My goal was not to put together a team to win his tournament I just want him to be able to play.  Baseball is his life and his love and to this point I have been devastated that he wasn’t going to be able play.  Again God has surrounded Cody with people in his life that are loving enough to see what a big deal this is for Cody and his cause and helped us scrape together enough just to be able to play.  I am not totally sure what next year will bring for us and baseball.  We are working that out, but right now we are happy to get this road bump figured out for the tournament.   Win or lose Cody doesn’t care he’s just glad he’s getting to play again.