Drew Butera was 4 years old when he sat in the deafening Metrodome for game seven of the World Series in 1987. His father, Sal, was a reserve catcher for the Minnesota team that beat St. Louis.
Then he was in his father’s sports car when it erupted in flames in the championship parade, apparently because confetti clogged up the exhaust system.
Drew Butera has no specific memories of that mayhem, but his involvement reflects a certain inherent entanglement with a game he believes he has loved “since I was born, literally.” There is photographic evidence of roughly that, in the form of Butera dragging a plastic orange bat along despite a pesky cast on his broken leg in the mid-1980s.