Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, Andy Cohen [the best books to read txt] 📗

cherry dip cones. (The things we do for a crunchy coating.) Also you got a different color T-shirt every year, and I wore mine like a badge of honor. Yes, I’d dropped every ball hit to me, endured endless strikeouts, and made several game-losing plays, but at least I had those T-shirts. At the beginning of every season, my dad asked me to let him coach the team, and every season I begged him not to. I wouldn’t let my parents even come see me play, so the idea of my father coaching was problematic, since he wouldn’t be attending any games.

In the last inning of our last game at the end of sixth grade, as we played together for the final time as a team before we moved schools and aged out of the league, we were one run down with men on base and two outs. I stepped up to the plate, with all eyes on me, carrying my teammates’ hopes and dreams on my little shoulders. It was like a movie where the underdog has one final chance to redeem himself. Unlike my boo, St. Louis Cardinal David Freese, in the now legendary Game Six of the 2011 World Series, I struck out. On the way home—we didn’t even stop at Dairy Queen—the mother who was driving us said, “Oh, Andy, you lost the game again?”

When I walked into my house I looked at my mom with a heavy heart and eyes brimming with tears. “That bad?” she asked. She opened her arms to hug me and I sobbed into her shoulder, silently vowing never to be humiliated on the baseball diamond again.

So I did not care to bounce the ball at Busch Stadium. I was given an extra final chance at glory, and I wanted a happy ending to my baseball career, tied in a neat Cardinal-red bow. And I wanted that bitch mother of my ex-friend to hear all about it!

As per usual, I completely overhyped the event and told everyone I knew. I secured a box at the game with room for thirty family members and friends who flew in just for the occasion, including my old friends Kari, Jeanne, Dave, and Amanda, Isaac Mizrahi (who was in town directing an opera and is a fanatical baseball fan), and, just to make the possibility of humiliation a smidge more emasculating, my Bravo boss, Lauren Zalaznick, a lover of both baseball and completely overhyped events.

The day of the game, my sister Em arranged for me to throw baseballs with a high school coach who would warm me up and critique my throw. Outside of a brief game of catch with Matthew Broderick that I shot for Watch What Happens Live (“Don’t throw from the mound,” Matthew sternly advised, between takes. “Oh, and you want the catcher to catch the ball.”) I hadn’t done much in the way of rehearsing training—but as is often the case, I was unrealistically optimistic. The coach told me that I looked okay, and he deemed me ready to throw—from in front of the mound, just like everybody said. I felt strong and coordinated (only later would I learn that he told Em I was so bad that he rolled the ball to me because he was worried I couldn’t catch it). When I got home, my dad asked me to show him my form. I indulged him so that his dream of coaching me doing baseball-related things could also come true.

“You look like you’re pushing the ball,” he warned. “You have to follow through.” I was sure he was right, but I had no idea how to make my arm not push, and now I was getting confused. My mom went to YouTube and pulled up George W. Bush throwing out a first pitch to show me how it was done. It was probably the only time anyone in my family used W as an example of doing something right. Ready or not, it was time to go.

At the ballpark, I was given a jersey that said “Cohen” on the back with the number 68, the year of my birth. You don’t see many Jewish baseball players, so on top of everything, I felt special to be representing. I left all my VIP spectators to watch me from the box as I headed to the field with my thirteen-year-old nephew Jeremy, my coworker, Bravo exec Dave Serwatka, my boss, Lauren, and her son Dale. And then a pregame event unfolded that changed my game plan.

There was a mass of Little Leaguers doing I Don’t Know What on the field, but it involved pint-sized hurlers throwing strikes from the TOP OF THE MOUND. These little pissant punks were showing me up before I even had the chance to humiliate myself! I looked at Lauren aghast. She’d taught me plenty about TV and I needed her help on the field. She tried to console me, though she agreed that my hands were tied and I simply could not pitch from the front of the mound without sacrificing my dignity.

My nephew was incredulous. “What is the big deal!?” he shouted. He didn’t get why I would care one way or another where I threw the ball from. (Easy for him, when he was the kid in the family who got all the hand-eye coordination.)

As I looked out at my family and forty thousand St. Louis Cardinals fans, Lauren explained to Jeremy, “Andy is having really bad flashbacks to being a gay kid in Little League who dropped balls and continually sucked.”

I actually hadn’t been thinking of that, but was sure to thank her for putting it top of mind, both for me and for my only nephew, just in case there was any danger of him ever looking up to me. We were interrupted by the Cardinals’ PR director, who informed me that in a short while I’d be introduced and throw my pitch, and then they’d bring out Bob Gibson to throw