They're the kind of moments that make baseball fans stand in admiration.

A scoreless game, top of the second, nobody on and nobody out. A ball is ripped up the middle. It looks like a rally-starter, zipping over the infield grass with eyes on center field, but the shortstop thinks it looks like an out. He breaks to his left with three quick strides and a belly-flop dive. He lands with a jersey full of dirt and a fistful of ball, and, before you can blink, he twists up and wings it to first for an out. One down, and the crowd gathered for the game is buzzing.

But little do they know the shortstop is nowhere near done. Fourth inning, now it's 1-0. A bouncer slowly mils to the left of the pitcher's mound. The shortstop dashes in with his bare hand, looking ...

"Hey Kuras!" a voice cries out from the crowd. "Wake up man! We need more trays and silverware up here!" With that, Seaman Apprentice Frank Kuras, a deck seaman serving his time as a food service attendant aboard USS Ashland (LSD 48), knows his daydream is officially over.

These reality-stained interruptions occur often for Kuras, a native of Rhode Island with plenty of reasons to daydream. That happens when you spend your first summer in the Navy stationed on a baseball diamond.

Kuras, the starting shortstop for the All-Navy baseball team, has lived that life; and it affects him to this day.

"Playing baseball has really given me a lot to think about during slow times at work," Kuras said with a slightly watered-down Boston accent. "But I wouldn't call it daydreaming; it's more like replaying. I replay stuff that happened in my ballgames all the time."

Sounds like your typical athlete-turned-Sailor. But Kuras' athletic memories are anything but typical His recollections highlight a path that led him from boot camp to shortstop for the All-Navy baseball team in less than a month.

"It all happened so quick," Kuras said. "I went from [joining the Navy and] believing that my baseball days were a thing of the past to being right hack in the thick of things. It was really just a matter of me getting to Ashland at the right time."

For Kuras, the right time came literally within days of what would have been the wrong time. If be had arrived a mere three days later, he would have missed his chance altogether.