How I Fell In Love With Baseball History

Childhood memories

How I Fell In Love With Baseball History

I became fascinated with baseball history at an early age.

When I say “early,” I’m talking early. So early that I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t absolutely fascinated with the history of the sport.

Back when I was 4 or 5 years old, I spent hours watching and rewatching a 1987 documentary called The History of Baseball.

You can find it on YouTube:

I’ve watched it so many times that the music makes me think immediately of certain eras of the game. When I watched The NeverEnding Story for the first time a few years ago, I was surprised to hear what I always thought was the soundtrack to Pete Rose breaking Ty Cobb’s hit record.

The second source of my early interest in baseball history was a somewhat obscure book.

I’m not sure why, but for one reason or another my father had a copy of this 1978 history of the World Series sitting around the house.

I looked through it hundreds of times. I spent a lot of time studying the composite World Series boxscores in the back, particularly the summaries of World Series highlights.

My favorite part, though, were the full color photo pages:

These cards weren’t exactly in great condition — but that didn’t matter to me, of course. At that tender young age, I didn’t realize how rare that Eddie Plank card was.

The funny thing, of course, is that I never actually read the book. I started a few times as I grew older, but I was always drawn to the photos more than the words.

So what does it all mean?

Lasting fandom is something that is cultivated, not born. It’s kind of hard to become a full-fledged fan of the sport if you’ve got no connection to its history.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to deck your home out in baseball memorabilia. However, your children and grandchildren are a lot more likely to develop an interest in the sport if they’ve got some kind of exposure to it.