Back when I was Wes Parker

Back when I was a kid, I used to listen to just about every Dodger game all summer. I'd go out in the back yard, turn on the radio and pretend I was a player.

Best guy for me to be was Wes Parker. He threw left-handed, I threw left-handed. He played first base, I played first base. He was good-looking, I was ... left-handed.

I had two sweatshirts that I cut the sleeves off of, one white for home games, one gray for road games. My mom was nice enough to sew Dodger patches on the left sleeves and that was as close I got to playing for the Dodgers.

In fact, that's pretty much as close as I got to playing baseball at all. Never played Little League even though many of my friends did. Just never thought I had the talent to play; certainly never had the self-esteem. And my folks never pushed me in that direction.

But baseball has always been important to me. My mom was a huge Dodger fan. I always used to say the reason I became such a big fan was because the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series when she was pregnant with me. I'm sure her yelling and jumping up and down influenced me while I was still in the womb.

When I got older, I still listened to nearly every game. By then I was really into scoreboards. It sounds kind of silly, but I've always thought scoreboards were cool. I always liked how they record history every night and always had a thing about uniform numbers and how they'd be displayed on the scoreboard.

I accumulated a huge amount of those preschool magnetic letters and numbers and put together a replica of the Dodger Stadium scoreboard that I fashioned from looking at photographs.

Not only this, but I would also imitate the Dodgers' public address announcer, John Ramsay. I got to where I knew the uniform number of every player in the National League.

Wow, was I a geek or what?