Which one of us made it past freshman year baseball?

I’ve been doing warm-up at Ellen for years now, and rarely get nervous.  Yesterday we had a Major League Baseball player in the audience, and being a huge baseball fan, I had butterflies.  Mark Buehrle, White Sox pitcher, and one of only twenty pitchers in baseball history to pitch a perfect game, was in our crowd.

About 45 minutes before the show, I went to meet Mark and his wife Jaime in Ellen’s Riff Raff room.  They could not have been nicer, and were saying how excited they were to have gotten tickets to the show.  This blew me away, and I told them so.  I’m always excited to get good tickets to a baseball game, and it was shocking to me that somebody of his magnitude had trouble getting tickets to Ellen.  I guess it makes sense…there are probably more Ellen fans than White Sox fans, and our audience only seats 300 people every day, as U.S. Cellular Field seats over 40,000.

The ten minutes leading up to the show, the audience was dancing away, and I caught a couple glimpses of Buehrle, who was not comfortable with dancing (which I understand), but was still being a great sport, standing up and clapping.

During the show, Ellen danced right past him (watch it on Friday’s Ellen), and I couldn’t help but continue to check on Mark and Jaime during the show.  They were having fun, laughing hard, and were just great overall sports.

Rick Fox (former NBA champion), and Cheryl Burke from Dancing with the Stars danced on the show, and did an impressive foxtrot.  At least I think it was a foxtrot.  I went up to Buehrle after this dance and said, “That’s you, on Dancing with the Stars after you retire…”  Buehrle, while laughing, replied “No sir…its not!”

At the end of the show, Mark and Jaime walked up to me, thanked me, and said that I did a great job. 

It was a pretty cool day for me….and oh yeah; Lucy and her entire family worship the White Sox.  I know they’ll enjoy this story.