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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Home run personal for player
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before the game, he visited his sister’s grave.
At the grave site, Austin Chambers made a birthday promise to Abigail Grace Chambers, barely 7 weeks old when she died of a rare disease on Aug. 19, 2007. Big brother made a promise: to hit her a home run.
On July 14, Parkview Team Georgia played the Duluth Wildcats in Bunten Park for the Dixie League state championship. It was the bottom of the seventh inning, Team Georgia was down 7-4. Two outs and two men on base. Austin, 16, a right-hand hitter and second baseman, was at bat.
Whack! The ball climbed higher and higher.
“I thought I’d hit it too high, and that it was just going to pop up,” said Austin, a rising senior at Parkview High. “But it kept going and going.”
He rounded third base crying. His father, Sam Chambers, is Team Georgia’s third-base coach. He cried, too. July 14 - game day - would have been Abigail’s first birthday.
“I didn’t find out [about the birthday promise] till we were on the way home from the game,” said Chambers, manager of the Mountain Park Athletic Association Senior League all-star squad. “It was a storybook finish. Just a storybook.”
As the game wore on, the story got sweeter.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Andrew Johnson, 19, hit a three-run, walk-off home run. Game over, 10-7. With the victory, Team Georgia became the 2008 Dixie Majors state champs. They’ll compete in the Dixie Majors World Series, which begins Saturday in Dyersburg, Tenn. The squad would like to rent minivans for the historic trip.
“It’s a lot easier with three or four vans as opposed to 13 vehicles,” Chambers told me. “I could talk about every one of these kids forever. They are amazing.”
To defray costs, the team has collected money from people and businesses. More is needed, though. Waffle House No. 1054, at the corner of Indian Trail Lilburn Road and Lawrenceville Highway, has stepped in. The team will receive 10 percent of all sales ‘twixt the hours of 2 and 9 p.m. through Thursday, said Diane Canfield, a veteran employee who lives in Lilburn.
“How about letting Gwinnett County know that this is the only team from Georgia,?” she wrote.
Parkview Team Georgia faces Team North Carolina at 5 p.m. Saturday in its first game of the World Series. I wish them well.
Tammy Chambers, Austin’s mom, wrote in an e-mail that the state championship game was extra special because of Austin’s birthday homer. But she stressed something else.
“This was a TEAM effort,” she wrote, capitalizing the word to stress its importance. “It was special to all who participated.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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