Essence

The songs aren't about baseball. They're about my relationship to baseball.

With knitted Steve Garvey doll

From kindergarten to age 15, virtually all I did with my best friends was play sports and collect baseball cards. Baseball was my first love.

Yet around 15 or 16, I got into music and there was little turning back. My consciousness of, and connection to, baseball would diminish for decades to come.

Though baseball and sport would reemerge in my life in the late aughts, it wasn't until the heart of the pandemic that I truly fell back in love.

And so these songs are about rediscovering an old lover. My mom always said the most passionate practitioners are converts. You might say I lapsed from baseball. Then re-took my vows.

Caricature by Ventura legend, Chris Martinez