I’ve loved baseball since I was very young, sitting with my grandpa in his den watching the Yankees play. He would talk to the players, give them advice, tell them what pitch to through, and being a New Yorker, refer to most players at one point or another as “bums”. All the while though, he taught me the game. I played little league like every kid, but he showed me the nuances. He explained things like the infield fly rule, why a lefty would come out of the bullpen to face a left-handed hitter, and why the AL had a DH when the NL didn’t (I must admit, we watched some Mets games too).
Enduring a trek across the country from Claremore, Oklahoma, where I was raised, with four siblings, my mom, and my step-dad was somewhere between exciting and excruciating. The drive was long with an annual stop over in Zanesville, Ohio, and a second day of driving which consisted primarily of getting yelled at and praying that the state of Pennsylvania would somehow shrink so we could just get there already.
When we did, our grandparents were waiting for us. My grandpa with conversation of the Yankees already queued up, and my grandma with packs of Topps baseball cards to keep us entertained. Of my two brothers, I was the biggest collector. I wanted every Yankee card, every all-star rookie … I wanted them all, and as many of them as I could get. I sorted them and re-sorted them. I brought tons of them with me to keep myself busy in between getting yelled at. To this day, I can tell you almost every player of every card between 1987-1990 just by the image.
I am proud to say that my love of baseball and the New York Yankees has been passed down to my son, who is in college studying broadcast journalism with the dream of one day getting paid to sit in a booth and talk about baseball. He’s smarter than I am, and more driven I think. He’s going to make it and when he does, I’ll be as proud of him as a father can be. If he doesn’t, I’ll be just as proud for having chased his dream.
I’m not a college graduate, I’m not a writer, and I’m not a baseball expert by any means. Fortunately for people like me, the internet exists and gives me a voice and an outlet to express my thoughts and perspectives anyway.
I’m here to write about the game I love. There is no more skillful, intellectual, or situational sport yet devised by man. Every situation comes with it’s own caveats and set of variables. It’s a human chess match paired with hand to eye coordination unparallelled in any other sport I know of. The combination of the two results in one of the most genius athletic competitions ever put into practice. I’ll blog about why that is true in an upcoming article.
Welcome to my blog. Feel free to agree, disagree, but not to be disrespectful about it.
thatbaseballer 