At the tender age of fourteen… I fell in love. With baseball.
You may recognize the year – 1992 – and you’ll probably recognize these names, too: Roberto Alomar, Joe Carter, Juan Guzman and Kelly Gruber. These were the men I followed; I knew their batting averages and on base percentage. I celebrated every home run, every run batted in, every base on balls. I held them to the highest standard. My role model (and even my first crush) could be found in that 40-man roster.
I followed the boys of summer straight through to their World Series Championship win that fall, and again the following year, when they repeated the feat. By the time I saw Joe Carter jumping up and down for the second time, I was already a bona fide baseball superfan.
Now I want to say that I continued to obsess over the Blue Jays, even as they spent years trying to rebuild a championship team, but the simple truth is that I was a teenager and I had more pressing issues (cough, boys) to attend to. …