At age 25, the making of a baseball and Yankee fan

Yankee Stadium, El Bronx, NY -- Tino Ongis went to his first ever game at Yankee Stadium and saw the Yankees beat the Cubs 3-0 behind the 2-hit, 8 innings pitched by Masahiro Tanaka. What makes this worthy of mentioning is that 25 year old Tino (short for Martino) is an Italian visitor to New York, has been to several basketball games, but was waiting for the baseball season to begin before his departure to Bergamo, Italy in early May. 

This writer gave him a crash course on baseball fundamentals after which he said, "Ok, I will remember," and was very excited the days leading to the game.

The game originally was to have taken place on Tuesday evening April 15th, but was rained out, so it became part of a Wednesday double header, and the makeup game was scheduled for the afternoon; it turned out to be an arctic breezy sunny day with temperature at 43 degrees at game time.

Great -- as his anticipation of being there was full of an exuberant enthusiasm that one would only hope would not become a letdown by a fan of fast moving NBA games and soccer back home in Italy.

By mid-game when asked how he thought of the game so far he said, "I really like baseball, I thought I would get bored."

In the first inning he witnessed Carlos Beltran's 4th homer of the season land a few feet below in the famed low porch area in front section 204. Tino had a glove on his left hand even though he is a lefty thrower. The run produced by Carlos Beltran would be the first of 3 runs allowed by Chicago's starter righthander Jason Hammel who would pitch 7 innings of quality ball, only to be outdueled by Tanaka's two-bunt base hits allowed while striking out 10.

Tino was fascinated by the double play Jacoby Ellsbury grounded into in the bottom of the third inning. Not yet far along to be disappointed that his newly adopted team had one of its star players hit into a double play, but the motion set in play to execute it, he found interesting. "I like the structure of the game and I loved how the double-play happened," he observed (I had gone over the play with him after it happened and reminded him of the baseball lesson of what to expect on the field, which included the two revised plays).

After watching this writer look behind to see the speed of Tanaka's delivery on the scoreboard  and other information, Tino began to do likewise to keep track of the ball and strike count and also keep track of Tanaka's strikeouts.

At one point he said that Chicago with two innings to go, would not have a chance, until I told him that in baseball anything is possible. I reviewed the three-outs before a team took the field and the other came to bat and that a team could keep on batting until the 3rd out was recorded in their half inning.

"I really like this game, it is not boring, "Tino repeated several times." And in it there are a lot of actions that are fast."

He watched with anticipation the game ending on the top of the ninth. He inferred that the Yankees did not have to bat if the score remained unchanged. 

At the end, it was obvious Tino was a fan. The cold? "In Italy for a soccer match it is worst."

Waiting to catch the number 4 train, he added, " I would like to come again to the stadium before I return home, maybe the weather will be nice again." Thus we have the making of a new fan, at 25 --and from Italia no less.

To be featured in www.latinosports.com