Charlie Sheen at Santa Monica High School, 1983

Today I found out Charlie Sheen once bought 2,615 tickets to a single Angels’ baseball game, hoping he’d be able to catch a home run ball.

Charlie grew up with a love for acting and baseball. As with acting, Sheen started out demonstrating quite a bit of promise in baseball. At Santa Monica High School, he was a shortstop and pitcher. His pitching ability was particularly impressive.  Jerry Nyman, former White Sox and Padres pitcher and one time minor league pitching coordinator for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, said about Sheen, “He was a good baseball player, among the best at the school…  He might have played pro ball, and if he played pro ball, he might have gone on to make the big leagues. If Charlie Sheen had chosen to go that route, who knows what would happen?”

In high school, Sheen, then known as Charlie Estevez, featured a fastball that averaged about 84-85 mph with good command.  He was primarily used as a relief pitcher, making the varsity squad in his junior year.  His coach, Jose Lopez (no relation to the major league second and third basemen, Jose Lopez) stated Sheen was the best reliever on the team and was “a tough kid, a focused kid, and a team player.”

Sheen was even offered a full scholarship at the University of Kansas to play baseball, but he turned it down to pursue acting.  His baseball playing career ended just a few days before the playoffs his last year at Santa Monica High, when he was expelled from High School for his poor attendance and bad grades.  This was particularly note worthy as the Santa Monica Vikings took an early 3-0 lead in their final playoff match before losing the lead late in the game, which may have had a different ending had their ace reliever not been kicked out of school.

Thirteen years after getting kicked out of High School, now having appeared in over 40 TV and film productions, including Major League 1 and 2, The Three Musketeers, and Hot Shots Part 1 and Part 2, in 1996, Sheen bought 2,615 seats in the outfield of a California Angels game for $6,500.  You might at first think he did this for similar reasons as many other stars do, to donate the seats to charitable organizations like orphanages or the like.  But then you remember this is Charlie Sheen we’re talking about and while particularly in the last decade he’s been involved with quite a few charities, he’s better known for “winning.” As such, he actually bought those 2,615 seats towards that end; so he could be the one to catch a home run ball, if one was hit.  He particularly was hoping Cecil Fielder would hit one to him.

Thus, Sheen and two of his friends sat in the nearly empty outfield waiting for a home run ball. After all that, he came up empty handed as no home run was hit that day, thus the man who is all about “winning,” lost that round.  When asked about why he bought up the outfield seats, he said, “I didn’t want to crawl over the paying public. I wanted to avoid the violence.”

And now, for your reading pleasure, a selection of bizarre things Charlie Sheen has publicly stated:

• “But you can’t focus on things that matter if all you’ve been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.”
• “As kids we’re not taught how to deal with success; we’re taught how to deal with failure.  If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If at first you succeed, then what?”
• “I have a different constitution. I have a different brain; I have a different heart; I got tiger blood, man.”
• “I have a disease? Bullshit. I cured it with my brain.”
• “I dare anyone to debate me on things.”
• “I am battle-tested bayonets, bro.”
• “Here’s the good news. If I realize that I’m insane, then I’m okay with it. I’m not dangerous insane.”
• “If you’re a part of my family, I will love you violently.”
• “You have the right to kill me, but you do not have the right to judge me. Boom. That’s the whole movie. That’s life.”
• “Check it, Alex, I embarrassed (Two and a Half Men creator, Chuck Lorre) in front of his children and the world by healing at a rate that his unevolved mind can’t process.”
• “I’m sorry man, I got magic and I’ve got poetry in my fingertips, you know, most of the time, and this includes naps. I’m an F-18, bro.”
• “I’m so tired of pretending my life isn’t perfect and bitching and just winning every second and I’m not perfect and bitchin’.”
• “I just don’t want to live like I used to. And at some point, I’m going to put a gag order on myself in terms of talking about the past. I’ve got to slam the door and deal with the present and the future.”

Bonus Facts:

• Carlos Irwin Estevez better known as Charlie Sheen was born on September 3, 1965 with Blue Baby Syndrome.  Blue Baby Syndrome is basically an abnormality where the baby’s blood isn’t capable of carrying normal amounts of oxygen throughout the body.  This syndrome can be fatal, but Sheen was successfully treated by his doctor.  Martin and Janet Sheen were so grateful for the doctor saving Charlie’s life that they made Sheen’s middle name “Irwin”, after the doctor.
• Martin Sheen (real name Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez ) took the name “Sheen” after Catholic Archbishop Fulton Sheen.  His reason for doing so was as follows, “Whenever I would call for an appointment, whether it was a job or an apartment, and I would give my name, there was always that hesitation and when I’d get there, it was always gone. So I thought, I got enough problems trying to get an acting job, so I invented Martin Sheen. It’s still Estevez officially. I never changed it officially. I never will. It’s on my driver’s license and passport and everything. I started using Sheen, I thought I’d give it a try, and before I knew it, I started making a living with it and then it was too late. In fact, one of my great regrets is that I didn’t keep my name as it was given to me. I knew it bothered my dad.”  Charlie Sheen also chose to adopt the stage name.
• Charlie Sheen once supposedly shot his fiancée, Kelly Preston, in the arm (now wife of John Travolta.)  Sheen has a different story for the event though.  He claims she accidentally shot herself when picking up a pair of Sheen’s pants that had the gun in the pocket.  The gun fell out of the pocket and when it hit the floor, fired.  The bullet then hit the toilet and ricocheted off it and hit Preston in the arm.  Sheen claims he was downstairs at the time and ran upstairs to find Preston naked and covered in blood.  Whatever the case, they broke off their engagement shortly after the event.
• Charlie has several bizarre tattoos, two of which are I guess “note-worthy.” I mean, if you are still reading this you must be interested in the guy so I’ll keep writing about the bizarreness that is Charlie. He has a tattoo on his chest of a note that reads “Be Back In 15 Minutes” and another of a small apple with the words above it saying “Death From Above.” Often I wonder what goes through the minds of people with bizarre tattoos; I think they might sometimes have interesting or deep meaning behind the art. However, in this case, I think, let me rephrase that, I’m almost positive that non-prescription drugs were involved during the choosing of his tattoos.
• Now this isn’t a Charlie Sheen Roast. I mean, he did have some shining moments in his life. Aside from several acting highlights, he also shined bright for 366 days… wait for it… In a row! His family at one point had an intervention to try to get him to control his drug and alcohol abuse. He did the rehab and made a vow to be sober from drugs AND alcohol for at least a year. True to his word and general winning nature, he stayed sober for 366 days. What did he do on his 367th day? He went and partied with his friend Nicolas Cage.
• Two years before making the movie Major League, where Sheen starred as ace reliever Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, Sheen was fairly modest about his baseball abilities, stating, “I could compete… I had a decent arm.”  Far from the braggadocios quotes we’re used to hearing today from Sheen about himself.  But fear not, more recently he has this more fantastical statement about his high school baseball career, “I hit .480 with 31 bombs and 800 stolen bases before I got hurt.”