Dear journal,
A few weeks ago, my mom sent me a picture. Just a small thing at first—an old photo, a forgotten afternoon. But when I opened it, it was like a door swinging wide. There I was, maybe nine or ten years old, standing with my dad and my brother inside Busch Memorial Stadium.
The stadium feels almost mythic in my memory now—the red seats stretching up and up like a mountain range, the soft light filtering through the arches of the upper deck, and the field below, impossibly green. It was one of those sticky, heavy days that only a Midwestern summer can offer, the kind where you wear the heat like a second shirt.
I don’t remember who the Cardinals were playing that day, but I remember why we were there: to see The Wizard, Ozzie Smith. Ozzie was everything to a kid like me—a magician with a glove, a master of the impossible. He made the infield look like a stage, every ground ball an invitation to astonish.
But looking at that photo, it wasn’t just Ozzie that came rushing back. It was all of it—the years of baseball cards spread across the living room floor, the crinkle of foil packs being opened with more reverence than some people give to Christmas gifts. George Brett. Bo Jackson. Frank White. Ken Griffey Jr. And then there was Mark McGwire, still a young lion with the Oakland A’s, long before the bright lights and broken records in St. Louis.
I loved McGwire before the rest of the world did. Before the fame got so loud you could barely hear the crack of the bat anymore. Back then, he was just raw power and possibility, a towering figure in the green and gold. I wore his team’s colors proudly, even standing in the middle of Cardinals country. In that photo, I'm in my A’s cap and shirt, defiantly loyal to my guy.
The cards are long gone now—lost to the tides of growing up, moving houses, the silent hands of time. But the memories haven't scattered. If anything, they’ve been pressed even deeper, like old cards tucked between the pages of a book.
Baseball was never just about any one team for me, though the Royals have always claimed the lion’s share of my loyalty. It was about the players, about the art and the architecture of the game itself—the slow stretching out of a season, the long silences between pitches that feel like a held breath. It was about belonging to something that felt bigger than the place you were born.
Maybe that's why, even today, whenever I visit a new ballpark, I always buy the home team’s hat. It's my small way of saying: I'm part of this, even if just for a day. Every cap carries a memory, a game, a summer evening where anything seemed possible.
That old photo stirred something deeper than I expected. It sent me searching—not for baseball cards, but for something more stubbornly physical. I needed that hat again. The A’s hat. That exact green crown and yellow bill that somehow made me feel taller, braver, closer to the game itself.
After some digging, a few dead ends, and twenty bucks on eBay, I found it. When it arrived, it was like shaking hands with an old friend. I put it on right away. It fits differently now, of course—the boy in the picture has grown into a man, with a beard and a few more lines at the edges of his eyes—but somehow, putting it on, I felt like I hadn’t changed at all.
That’s the magic of these small things we carry through life: they remind us of who we were, yes, but also of who we still are beneath the layers we’ve built.
The stadiums change. The players retire. The baseball cards yellow and crack. But the love of the game, and the simple, stubborn joy of it—that stays.
Always,
Dave