I've had the best conversations with my dad just playing catch in the front yard." But the real reason we love baseball is just going out and tossing the ball around. "So many things around baseball are changing," says Albitz.
What tickles Albitz the most is the idea of soldiers 7,000 miles away, in a place so foreign and forbidding, playing the most American game of all.
And a group called Veterans United Home Loans out of Columbia, Mo., says it's going to send hundreds. The Virginia Tech baseball team sent a boxful, and balls, too. We didn't think anybody cared."Īlbitz's buddies in baseball have sent a bunch of gloves (although new Colorado Rockies third baseman Ryan Wheeler emailed him and said, "Dude! I just threw out five!"). Not just for the games of catch, he said, but "just to know people cared about us. One old soldier from Vietnam wrote saying he would've loved to get some gloves back then. Then I went to his grave and said, 'Well, Dad, you never got to Cooperstown, but your glove did.'" I took it to Cooperstown after he died and played catch outside the museum. "Seems like every glove comes with a story, too." I wish they would pick up a guy like you.Ĭoming back from a mission outside the wire and having the ability to wind down and play catch is a huge stress reliever.Īlbitz has a website he designed called, where soldiers can ask for gloves and people can donate them. We will be playing ball tomorrow afternoon thanks to you. What he loves are the emails he gets back. His goal is to send 1,000 by the time he reports to Cardinals spring training on Feb. Getting the gloves donated isn't easy, but getting the money to ship them (about $25 per box) is even harder. His dad oils the gloves and fixes the strings and Vance fills the boxes, adds a note and ships them off. He does it out of his parents' house in Torrance, Calif. "It helps not to have a girlfriend," Albitz says. He's sent nearly 300 this offseason so far, all by himself. In Afghanistan, Army medic Shaun Pelt went right out and used the ball and gloves sent to him by Vance Albitz. "Two gloves and a baseball," the soldier replied. I just thought somebody ought to thank them for it."Īlbitz read an article somewhere in which a soldier was asked what he'd most like to have sent to him. These guys are putting their lives on the line for us. "I feel that way sometimes, you know? New town, new team all the time. "I read where the soldiers over there get lonely and bored," says Albitz, who spent time with the Memphis Redbirds (Triple-A) last season. But this one - to box up gloves in his garage and send them off to troops - wasn't about that for Vance Albitz, a 24-year-old minor league shortstop in the St. With 18 American soldiers and veterans committing suicide every day, any idea that might help soldiers relieve the unimaginable stress of combat is a good one. "And this was the best thing: For that whole time, I forgot where I was," says Pelt, 34. He and his roommate immediately went out in front of the latrine trailers, in 20-degree weather, and played frozen-fingered catch for an hour, grinning like 8-year-olds. "All of a sudden," Pelt writes, "it was Christmas morning." Army Specialist Shaun Pelt, a medic, ripped opened a box from the States and found four baseball gloves and four balls. The Afghanistan snow covered the tops of his boots the day U.S.