My best kept secret?

The thing that no one expects?

The excitement I feel for the start of the professional baseball season.

I never tell anyone that I like baseball because they always assume that I only like looking at the players. And I’m not going to lie, it did start that way. But my relationship with baseball runs deep. I grew up on the field, spending what felt like every weekend of my childhood getting dragged from ballpark to ballpark as my brother competed in travel games. At the time, I loathed it. I would spend the monotonous hours cartwheeling my bare feet to a blue sky across stretches of grass and staining my tongue red with skittles. Occasionally there would be other little sisters, but I was usually alone. So I noticed things. I was was hyperaware of my surroundings. This meant that I, by default, absorbed baseball into my skin just as naturally as I did the sun. And baseball was like sunlight: everywhere, all the time, seeping into your skin, becoming a part of you. It would be years before I understood or cared for any of the rules, but the game itself was already inside of me. Like a love lying dormant.

My brother conveniently stopped playing around the same time that I began to not mind going and watching a bunch of teenage guys run around. So baseball slipped quietly out of my life like water from my hands and I didn’t think much about it. Sure, my dad would have games on in the living room, but I couldn’t have cared less. I found them dull, long, and confusing. But then that too changed without warning. It took a global pandemic, but in 2020 I randomly sat down one day and watched the last few innings of a playoff game. The next day, I came in a few innings earlier. And by the next I was watching from start to finish. All three bloody hours of the affair. This, coming from someone who can barely sit still to get through a movie. My dad was in utter disbelief. The deep attachment to baseball that all those weekends spent at the park, the one that had been lying dormant all those years, was suddenly awake. Baseball was a language I was finally learning how to speak it. I was hooked. I sat down everyday and watched the Los Angeles Dodgers advance through the playoffs with my dad and my brother. We all sat in the same spot and pretended not to believe in superstition. They called me their good luck charm, for it was in those same spots we all watched as they won the World Series that year. Something they hadn’t done since 1988.

The following year, every one expected my infatuation to fizzle out. But it only grew steadier. I watched every game that season, and nearly every one since. It has become art to me, American art. When I sit down on a sunny afternoon to watch a game, it calms me. But in a more potent way, it inspires me. I know it seems odd that a twenty-year old girl with dreams of moving to New York to be a writer would feel so utterly inspired by a bunch of grown men playing a game that she has never even touched with her own hands. But it’s more abstract than that. It’s the story. Nothing is more inspiring to me than people pursuing their passion and being successful. It doesn’t matter if they are swinging a bat, singing, or building a computer, if they love it, I am inspired to do what I love. Which is this.

I remember watching Pixar’s Soul with a guy I dated and making a comment about how grateful I was to have a passion and a feeling of purpose, as is explored throughout the film. He looked at me like I was speaking another language. He, I quickly realized, did not have these things yet. That really shook me. I’ve always known exactly who I am and what I want. So much so, that I sometimes have to be reminded that most twenty-year olds are actually super lost on these fronts. I’m lost too, but within a designated realm; the torturously euphoric realm of being a writer and a creative. I have to remind myself that this is a blessing, one that I recognize in the faces of those players, singers, and engineers, who tell their success stories. I feel a part of something. And it pushes me harder all the time to continue following my passion, even when it feel impossible and impractical and like nothing will ever come from it. You see the hot shot players in all their glory, but not the long years that they spent in the minor leagues just aching to be seen. It’s work. And it’s constant. Like anything else worth anything in this world.

Baseball teaches me all of this. It’s a love story.

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