In 2007 I signed up for a new website called Twitter. It's basically a website where you can broadcast or 'tweet' a sentence or two about anything you're doing or anything on your mind and you can follow other people to read what they're up to. It sounded really lame to a lot of people at the time, but I thought it would be great for sports. Sometimes I want to know what's going on with my favorite teams, but don't have the time to read a 2,000 word article. I just want to know the meat of the story and I thought Twitter would be a perfect medium for that. There weren't any sports Twitter accounts at the time so I decided to create two accounts for my two favorite teams, a NFL team and MLB team.

In 2008 when Obama was elected president he mentioned Twitter and all of a sudden the website became really popular. I had been running the two sports accounts for over a year and accumulated a decent amount of followers. Then came a point when all the sports teams decided to get in on the Twitter game. In 2009, the NFL team contacted me and confiscated my account saying I was trying to impersonate them. That is not what I was trying to do at all and made sure there was messaging on the account saying I was just a fan posting news. I would have given them the account if they had asked--maybe even trade it for tickets to a game to compensate for the large following I had amassed for them. They took over my account without reply and still run that same Twitter account today.

I had a totally different experience with the MLB team. I didn't want the same thing that happened with the NFL team account so I contacted the MLB team's operations office and told them about the account and how I would gladly hand the it over to them so they wouldn't have to start a following from the ground up. They replied and wanted to meet at the ballpark. I took a long lunch at my work in the city and walked down to the park to meet what I thought would be a junior level media relations employee.

As I got to the ballpark I was met by three team executives and two senior media relations staff members. They all shook my hand vigorously with wide excited smiles, which took me by surprise. I immediately decided to change my game plan of trading the account for a couple of tickets to a game. I sat down with them and talked for a while about what I thought they could do with the accounts and the potential for engaging more with fans through Twitter. Then they asked what I would want in return for the account. I sat and thought for a minute and one of them looked at me and said, "Shoot for the moon." I totally spitballed a daydream and made up a crazy story about how I wanted to propose to my girlfriend, who grew up a huge fan of that team. I was sure they would say no. They didn't flinch and after a few seconds of exchanging nods they said, "We can do that." I made sure that the proposal was not on the ballpark video screen or TV--that's kinda cheesy in my opinion.

I decided to push my luck and asked if they wanted me to continue running the account that it would be great to have season tickets so that I can be at the games and tweet the action. They quickly said, "Sure."

I was so excited that I immediately called my girlfriend and told her the news that I traded the Twitter account to a MLB team and we now have season tickets and they gave me an executive suite for a game. We had 30 tickets for the suite so I told her to invite her parents and all her friends...but I didn't tell her everything I traded for.

Along came September, 2009 where my girlfriend's family, my family and our closest friends took over the field-level suite at the ballpark during a game. We were having a great time and our team was winning when, during the 7th inning stretch, a team employee came out with a basket of four baseballs autographed by four of the team's most popular players (All-Stars, MVPs, World Series winners and Cy Young winners). The lady handed the basket to me and as I turned to pass it to my girlfriend the employee said, "These signed baseballs also come with your suite." Each ball had one word written above each signature: Will, You, Marry, Alan.

My friends and family knew what I had planned and they started to really crowd around us as I got on my knee. My girlfriend's friends were all screaming when they read the message on the balls. As I stood up and kissed her, I noticed the crowd heard the commotion and were standing and cheering for us. I turned to the crowd and raised my new fiancé and my arms up in a victory "V". My sister was in the back of the crowd and couldn't see over everyone so she stuck her camera as high as she could and snapped a picture at just the right time to capture the moment.

She said, "Yes."

We framed the picture my sister took, the game's scorecard, tickets and had it matted and framed. At our wedding, visitors signed the mat as the wedding guest book and it hangs in our living room above the autographed proposal balls.

I still run the MLB team's official twitter account today.