Here Is One Shortstop that Got Stopped Short

I loved playing baseball when I was a child. I used to swing by bat 1,000 times per day to perfect my swing; I had a net I could throw the baseball into so that it would come back as either a fly ball, line drive, or ground ball ... I would throw at that thing for hours. Anything related to baseball was my passion.

When I was about 10 years old, I was playing shortstop and covering second base on a steal attempt by a kid named Brian Clayton. The ball was coming late so I thought I stepped forward to let him get by. He dove head first in to my left leg. My mom said she thought his helmet cracked because of the loud noise ... but his helmet didn't break, my leg did. I was carried to my dad's car and rushed to the hospital.

A few days in the hospital, a week in a wheelchair, and about 5-6 months in a cast. One neat thing that happened was my first "brush with fame": some local minor league baseball players visited me in the hospital. Scott Bailes, Craig Brown, and Mike Berger came and gave me some tickets to a baseball game. Here's the newspaper article here. The t-shirt I wearing says: "Here is one shortstop that got stopped short."