This guy catches foul balls

Baseball season is well underway here, Stateside. Unless you live(d) in America and like baseball, you're not going to find this website particularly amazing. But if you're like me and you've lived in America for eleven years on-and-off, including several years in a city with an "amazin'" baseball team, and you like quirky Americans, you might like this.

>> Link: Stories and strategies from Zack Hample, a fan who's collected 2,803 balls from 40 different Major League stadiums...and counting.

Also, yesterday while watching Mets Weekly — a television magazine show on everything to do with the Mets baseball team — I was highly entertained by the following story about nicknames for Howard Johnson, a player on the 1986 World Series Mets team. The story was told by an old man they interviewed. [I'm a beginner baseball fan so I didn't recognize who he was, but he's probably somebody big in the baseball world.]

The story goes:

"Howard Johnson" was truncated to Hojo,
which then became the dimunitive Hojy,
which then, because of Ali Haji-Sheikh (a football player), turned into Haji,
which then turned into Sheikh,
which then lengthened to Sheikazoid,
which then shortened to Zoid,
which then degenerated into Z.

The old man who was telling the story chuckled and said, "Here's a man by the name of Howard Johnson whose nickname was Z." I think he chuckled for the same reason I chuckled, which is that baseball is so rich with these quirky facts you've just got to love it.

[Pic of Howard Johnson swiped from a site I googled.]