Tag Archives: joe pepitone

Buy me some peanuts and Joe Pepitone

I don’t care if we ever go home.

I come from a baseball loving family. I’m not a fan but when they’d load up the vans to go to Wrigley Field when I was a kid, I was right in the middle of the fun.

And it was fun.
Not the baseball itself, but the ride there with my cousins, being at the ball park, singing at the 7th inning stretch, and watching all the activity. Oh, and looking for cute boys should most definitely be included in that list.
The summer we were 10, my cousin Cindy and I decided that we thought Cubs first baseman, Joe Pepitone, was cute. He had our attention for the entire game and he became our favored object of affection for months afterwards.
That Halloween, we decided to dress up as Joe Pepitone. We created our Cubs uniforms out of white pants and white shirts, used blue tape to make 8s on our backs and walked around town, the two cutest Joe Pepitones that ever begged for candy.
I was just in Chicago and spent a couple of days with Cindy. She told me that she had recently won a trivia contest on the radio. The question was, “What was Joe Pepitone’s number when he played for the Cubs?”
Random, yes?
Well, maybe for most people but not for us. They asked her how she knew that and she told them our Halloween story on the air. So funny, to me, but also so cool that our 10 year old obsession won her a prize 40 years later.
Prizes and winning. You know how I feel about that. 😉