Take Me Out To The Ballgame

William Petersen (Gil Grissom) watched the Chicago Cubs play the Florida Marlins at Wrigley Field on May 30th, and he talked about CSI: Crime Scene Investigation during the game.

Petersen led the fans in a chorus of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and threw out the first pitch before the Cubs played the Marlins in Chicago. The Marlins beat the Cubs 9-0, and as a die-hard Cubs fan, Petersen said that it's "rough, and this is one of the roughest patches I can remember just because I know this team is so much better than this." However, he won't let that stop him from tuning in. "I'll never stop," he said. "There's hard times, there's times where you just get disappointed a lot, but you turn on the TV again the next night."

The cast of CSI is currently on hiatus from filming. "[S]o I get to come to a few Cubs games, which is great," Petersen said. "We start up again in July, so they give us about nine weeks off, which is great." The vacation gives the cast a chance to visit with their families and, of course, to "see some baseball."

While at college at Idaho State, Petersen played on the football team rather than the baseball team. Nicknamed "Bird" (a shortened form of "Bird Nest," which was a comment on his hair), Petersen was not the best student. "My grade point average was so bad that I had to take theater classes to get my grade level up so that I could even be eligible." In the end, this turned out to be a good choice for the future CSI star. "I fell in love with the theater, of course, and the rest was history. I left football and everything else in the dust."

Petersen also mentioned "CSI: The Experience," the museum exhibit currently running at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. "It's really a treat for people that like the show or people that like science," he said. He called the exhibit a "tribute" to CSI and said that the people involved with the show are "very proud of it." However, the fans of the show aren't the only ones to benefit from the science of CSI. "I have a whole new appreciation for science," Petersen said. "I read articles that I never would have read eight or ten years ago. And I understand them at least a lot better than I did before."

With CSI readying for its eighth season, Peterson said that he didn't expect it to get this far. "Who woulda thunk it? We thought we'd try and do a decent TV show and maybe be on for a year or two, and here we are." According to Petersen, "it's been remarkable. We're unbelievably blessed."

Videos of Petersen's visit to Wrigley Field can be found on The William Petersen Appreciation Page.

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