On Saturday, August 18th I had the opportunity and pleasure of being a guest at the MLB Fan Cave in New York City.

The Cave isn’t open to the public, so it was pretty exciting to have the opportunity to be there.

How did I get such an honor?  By being a Yankees Super Fan, of course.

OK, a little more details…

The Cave started to do a fan rivalry wiffle ball game when the Yankees and the Mets were playing, and decided to do the same this past weekend for the Yankees-Red Sox series.  They had Yankees fans and Red Sox fans from the area send emails talking about why they are a fan of the team they support.  All entries were screened by the sponsor Nike and they made their selections.  I was picked to play for the Yankees.

All of the participants arrived at the Cave around 10am.  When you signed in they gave us our gear:  A team shirt, shorts, and sneakers.

I had the honor of playing with these awesome kicks:

They loaded us onto two buses, Yankees fans on one and Red Sox fans on the other, and took us to Tompkins Square Park.  It was an intense battle of wiffle ball.  The Yankees fans took the lead 2-0 in the third inning.  I attempted to tag up on a sac fly, but was thrown out at home plate to end the inning (Oops!).

The Red Sox fans tried to make a comeback and took the lead the following inning scoring three runs, but the Yankees fans rallied back in the bottom half and retook the lead by scoring three runs.

Here was the final score:

Ball game over, Yankees win!  And Team Yankees Fans won tickets to tonight’s series finale!

We boarded the buses again and were invited back to the Cave for lunch and to just hang out.  It was just about 1pm so games were about to start.

The Fan Cave is really something spectacular.  Everywhere you look there are TV’s.  The wall along the left side of the first floor is covered in autographs by players who have visited.  They had a Nike challenge set up in the front of the room that had jump height, jump rope, and quick feet drills which I gave a shot.  Let’s just say my arms and legs are extremely sore this morning.

Lunch was downstairs, and it was your typical baseball game foods.  Hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, nachos…of course nothing wrong with any of those choices.  It was all delicious.

My favorite part of the whole place was of course on the first floor:

It’s a huge display of TV’s just covered in baseball games.  Baseball fans like myself would find this to be almost heaven-like.  I just sat on this couch, talking to some of my teammates and cave dweller Ashley Chavez.  We talked about baseball and just watched the games.  Doesn’t get any better than that.

All I could think to myself being in the Fan Cave was making sure I apply for next year.  How great to watch baseball for a living.  It’s a dream come true.

You can follow all of the remaining cave dwellers on Twitter.  They are all great people.

Gordon Mack (my coach!) @gordonmack
Ashely Chavez @smashleychavez
Kyle Thompson @KyleOKC
Ricardo Marquez @iBlogBetter

Give them a follow.

I had the pleasure of making friends with them and making some new friends with all of the participants. Props to MLB, Nike, and the Fan Cave for running this event.