I Love Baseball. Why Love Baseball?

The start of my history with baseball is really not terribly uncommon, I suppose. Like many autistic children, I cycled through special interests with an inspired level of fervor. First it was dinosaurs and you had better believe that I learned to spell pachycephalosaurus when I was five years old. They were so cool! Then it was animals, where I was like Lisa Simpson in her efforts to teach Maggie that nature doesn't stop at the barnyard. Pangolins and tapirs and axolotls, oh my!

Then my mom brought home some packs of 1989 Topps and a whole new world was opened to me. At that point, I was in first grade and knew basically nothing about sports in spite of my (soon-to-be-absentee) father being an ardent fan of basketball in particular. However, these cards were a treasure trove of new wonders that piqued my interest in so many ways. Different teams had different colors in their uniforms, which was ably denoted in Topps' design that year. The variety of photo types - both posed and action - depicted a world that was both foreign and fascinating. While a lot of the facts on the back of the cards were fairly generic in terms of dates on which certain feats were achieved, others gave a glimpse into hobbies and interests. And then there were the statistics. Oh my goodness, the statistics. To say that I was enamored would be a massive understatement. Including the things that I am currently working on, the amount of stat-related projects that I have undertaken almost exclusively for my own enjoyment over the past three-plus decades has been too large for me to estimate. Starting in second grade, I was the kid who knew way too much about baseball. For over 30 years, I played and coached in hundreds of games, collected an absurd amount of baseball cards, and based a huge part of my life around the sport. Today, I am the girl in the rando community who knows way too much about baseball - and will happily talk about it on end. And yet, in spite of all of this, I frequently ask myself one simple question: why do I love baseball?

Gary Carter redeem from Knucks

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As I have talked with more people from my various communities, many of whom are queer, I have heard no shortage of stories about how the sports well was poisoned for them at a young age. For many, a fixation on hypercompetitiveness by both adults and peers made what was supposed to be a fun experience into an ordeal that was stressful at best, agonizing at worst. Similar to school as a whole, differences in personalities, body types, athleticism, et al. are often stigmatized in sports, especially on local levels. Professional sports often feature some truly dreadful individuals and organizations who are nonetheless celebrated for their talent, skill, and on-field success, which can make it extremely hard to relate to those in the arena and give a very legitimate reason for tuning out.

These stories tend to be disheartening to me on multiple levels, one of which is that I can very much see myself in the shared stories despite of the difference of specific experiences. Particularly once puberty started to get thrown into the mix, relating with peers was often brutal, especially those from my own grade. During my time coaching, highly aggressive parents and fellow coaches often pulled the focus away from creating cultures of teamwork and fun, with that trend veering more and more frequently to the realm of abuse as the years went on and I moved up the levels. I cannot say how many times it was pointed out to me over the years that I was "different" from other people in the baseball community, with the sentiment sometimes even coming from individuals that I had just met. While it should be noted that many of these framings were intended to be positive, it can be draining to frequently hear that folks are taking note of how atypical you seem. Especially at the high school level, being in exclusively male-dominated spaces rarely felt comfortable and on many occasions left me feeling a lack of safety that was (and still is) hard to define. And pro sports, where to begin? Let's go with 'the Mets not only bring back Jeurys Familia and José Reyes, but celebrate them despite their history of domestic abuse' as a catch-all for how readily it gets demonstrated just how little these organizations' ethics resemble my own.

By any measure, there were a myriad of occasions in which it would have been more than fair for me to join the litany of folks who found themselves sidelined and disenfranchised in an environment that ostensibly should be for everyone. I observed recently that I feel as though I know how to endure and know how to survive, but I do not know how to live, which could be easily used to explain why I put up with so much negativity. Particularly during the final few years at RHS, I do feel as though there was a kernel of truth to that notion, as I knew that the situation was often uncomfortable and yet I could stick it out because, you know, baseball. However, I do not think that this is actually the answer.

                          Pat Borders redeem from Echo       Andrés Galarraga redeem from Royale

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Not like it truly matters, but I actually wrote this section quite a bit differently before realizing that I was getting too verbose and losing track of what I really hoped to convey. When I actually cut through the noise, I came to realize that a very simple answer actually existed: in spite of the slings and arrows that came from the lowest points in my time with the game, there have been so many worthwhile moments and relationships that baseball brought into my life that have nothing to do with wins/trophies for me to downplay what the sport has meant.

While it is not even close to being an exhaustive list, here are some of the things that most readily come to mind from my time in baseball thus far:

- I mentioned it years ago on this blog, but one of my teammates during my eight-year-old season was a boy named Elijah who struggled mightily to make contact even in soft toss, let alone off of a pitching machine. Given that at bats at this level exclusively ended via strikeout or by putting the ball in play, it was rough to see a teammate go down on strikes literally every time. Our coaches devised a plan to basically measure out where the pitches were coming in that day and have Elijah put his bat on that plane, which eventually resulted in two balls being hit into fair territory. The second of those two pieces of contact may have only rolled slightly down the first base line, but it stayed fair and Elijah beat it out for his lone hit. That was easily the best moment of the season for every member of our whole team.

- While not all of my youth coaches were experts at instruction, the vast majority were nonetheless great people and treated the kids with kindness. This included my mom, who, despite raising three young kids, twice took the time to coach me in the sport that I loved. On each occasion, she was the lone woman coaching and I admired her so much (still do - please don't cry, Emily).

- I made an out in t-ball by popping up into the upturned glove of a fielder who was not looking at the infield and hit my lone homerun the following year in part to a left fielder playing with the dirt instead of noticing a line drive hit his way. It seems like both of those kids were having their own kinds of fun.

- My 13-U Babe Ruth coach once pulled me aside to tell me that I was the best teammate to the other 11 players on the squad, but the worst teammate to myself. He'd likely say the same thing today, LOL, but it really meant a lot that someone recognized that I tried my absolute best to be a positive teammate to others.

- Despite the fact that I was a high school student, Al and Don (the coaches of Squash's when I began coaching) never treated me as though I did not belong there and were willing to let me handle things like scouting and individual instruction that I have still seen few coaches entrust to young coaches. I tried to treat the former players who returned to help me coach with the same level of consideration.

- The running jokes. Oh, the running jokes. From the "Golden Glove" fielding competition on those early Squash's teams to José Lima telling the kids to "look him up on the internet, Lima was great!" at a Bridgeport Bluefish game to Jack/Ryan bringing huge amounts of levity to our 2018 JV team as juniors, and everything in between.

- The conversations. One thing that I tried to never lose sight of from the start of my coaching tenure to the end was the idea that people are people. They might be kids in school, they might be adults making obscene salaries, but no matter what, they are all people. Especially in the roughest years at RHS, I had a lot of very real talks with players about stuff that meant way more than statistics and win-loss records, and those discussions hold a lot of meaning to me (and hopefully did to them).

- Three of the people who meant the most to me in term of friendship and mentorship passed away over the span of 10 years, but their influences still hit me in worthwhile ways to this day. I met Peter when I took over as the new coach of his son Sage's team in 2010 and, despite a disability suffered in college and having no real athletic background, Peter was still out the field every practice to try to help make the game his son loved more fun (while offering up his chair in the dugout to any player who wanted a seat(. I still tear up thinking about how he thanked me for making him feel like part of a team, which had always been elusive for him, and he swiftly became a dear friend to both me and my mom. Peter passed away just hours after giving me a ride home in 2011 and us making plans to visit his art restoration work at Yale in the near future... Peter's chair would become a fixture in our dugout for every game for the decade that followed and it was an honor to tell the new players about the lovely person who we were remembering.

I coached with Ken so many times over the years that I do not actually know the number, as I'm pretty sure that his son Daniel played more games on my teams than anyone else that I coached. While he was a little more intense than me, we meshed well and always struck a good balance together as a coaching tandem. Even after Daniel moved up the ranks, Ken remained a good friend, mentor, and even helped me get involved in coaching high school again. I mentioned earlier that my father had almost no positive impact on my life and I have long struggled to find the worthwhile male role models, but Ken probably came the closest to being someone in my life whose impact on me at times felt the most like what I wish that a father figure could have offered while never once being patronizing. His passing was a total shock and came not long after we had been talking about my hiring at RHS.

Dave was twice my all-star coach in Little League, an older guy who simply loved the sport and kept coaching for decades after his own kids had aged out of the program. I remember him giving me rides to away games in his classic convertible, being willing to talk about the game for hours, and having the most impeccable architect's handwriting on his lineup cards (that I emulate to the best of my abilities). In his 80s and having been away from coaching for over a decade, Dave nonetheless reached back out to me to fill a "scorekeeper" role in the mid-2010s, an offer of which I gladly accepted. He treated the kids so well and did way more to improve their experience than merely keeping score, that's for sure. While it was rarely a shock to hear about elders passing in 2020, it definitely made a terrible year even worse. Despite losing all three of these wonderful people, though, the positive impact that they made on me before their passings cannot be understated.

(Also, my aim earlier to not cry completely fell to pieces here.)

- In my 2025 "coming out" post to the people in my broader life, I made a point during the section concerning my fairly abrupt departure at RHS to say that the kinds of things listed above were what had been missing during those final handful of seasons. The former players who reached out were not only uniformly supportive of me being trans, they also said that when they caught up with friends and reminisced about baseball, the conversation always focused on the fun/funny stuff and the support that I had provided - not the championships. All of that meant a lot.

Kitty Bear redeem from Tank

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For the last few years, I have been trying to find myself, which has been a tricky process filled with its ups and downs. In spite of the bits of progress, I still felt like there was something else missing even should transition, home, community, et al. all work out and I eventually realized that I have also been trying to find baseball. I have been asked by many people if coaching is in the cards and my answer is always a definite maybe, although I am definitely not mentally at that point right now and figuring out coaching in a new area while also being trans is stressful on its own. There is a women's softball league in town and I may still pursue that option as an additional sporting outlet, but I have also seen that queer-friendly does not always equal trans-friendly and recent local backlash against drag performers makes me less than eager to find out if the folks involved are actually cool.

However, a friend on Bluesky recently passed along an article that she thought might be up my alley. The subject of the piece was "tgirl baseball," all-transwomen baseball teams that were popping up around the country. I had to slow down while reading, as the events being described sounded almost ideal in their inherent imperfection. For many of these teams, the level of experience of players ranged from folks who had played from childhood until adulthood to those who had never played previously. The small victories - making contact, trying out positions, supporting each other - were the real successes; score and stats were mostly afterthoughts. There also seemed to be an actual sense of community around the games, with some folks playing little or not at all, yet still being just as much a part of the team as a whole.

In the span of a few days, I went from not even knowing that such groups existed to believing pretty steadfastly that I had found the kind of baseball that I wanted back in my life. Figuring out how to make that happen on a local level in a new place is more of a challenge, which has resulted in me reaching out to a bunch of folks to learn about the individual steps that they took for the many moving parts involved with making their respective groups come to fruition. I was also fortunate to be able to join in with Albany Queer Baseball this past weekend and, in spite of my social anxiety doing its usual thing and still not being able to run post-surgery, it was an amazing time. Being back on the field felt so good, the people were so kind/inclusive, and it was simply an occasion in which the "right" things about baseball were the focus - including a mid-practice trip to the ice cream truck. ;)

While my summer already felt gobbled up by recovery from the aforementioned surgery, it's definitely also a little bittersweet to not discover queer baseball until the weather is starting to turn. However, I feel pretty good about the potential for this avenue being what I have been looking for after so many years. We are holding a pretty simple "community catch" day this coming Sunday in Oneonta and I hope that at least one other person wants to come by the field, toss around the ball, and chat. I am also super excited to go back to Albany the following weekend for the season-ending Halloween game - although my social anxiety about being new might now be overrun by my complicated history with costumes. :X I love baseball and think that I finally found it again.

Arya/Emily redeem from Shin

What's in a Name?

Names are an interesting concept if one really thinks about it. From the time we are young, identifying people, places, and things by their names is a key aspect of not only learning on its own, but also finding ways to navigate the world in which we live. For the most part, these identifiers are considered to be set, static titles. As with most aspects of language, conveying meaning and gaining shared understanding does have significant benefits in terms of interpersonal interaction.

Most things that we recognize by name are inanimate in nature, lacking in consciousness and ability to consent. Many other living beings, such as animals and plants, do not share our language or concept of identity in the way that we know it, leaving it again to humans to engage in the process of assigning and disseminating their various names. However, the concept of names for people has always fascinated me for the manner in which it plays out. For the vast majority of folks, they are named at birth by their parents and, save for some minor tweaks such as nicknames ('Matt' instead of 'Matthew,' 'Peg' instead of 'Margaret') or going by one's assigned middle name rather than one's assigned first name, that's just the way it is for the rest of their lives.

Of course, this convention makes sense at birth given that a baby does not yet possess the language skills or the levels of wordly awareness that they will even just a few years later. What is intriguing is that even once these attributes develop, "their" name is still usually one that has been assigned rather than one of their own choosing. For trans people, this concept can prove to be particularly vexing, as assigned names typically align with a gender to which one does not relate and can feel like a further reminder of the lack of autonomy over our own lives that society often tries to claim exists. That, however, is an illusion to be smashed.

                     Cecil Fielder redeem from Royale               Derek Bell redeem from Will

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Quite a few years ago, I spent some time compiling a list of first names that I liked. Most of them started with a vowel with a lighter sound and I used several for character creation in games. The common throughline, of course, was also that they were all feminine names. It was the one thing related to my ideation of preferred gender that I remember getting "caught" with, as my mom found the list and inquired about it. I played it off by claiming that it was a list of prospective names should I ever have a daughter and that I simply had not yet gotten around to the names for boys. That was a lie, of course. Besides the fact that I never had plans to have children, there was never going to be a list of boys names. I had already been assigned one of those and never really wanted it, in spite of my mom's best intentions.

During my process of finally figuring things out two years ago, I read many stories from other trans people (mostly trans women) about their own experiences. Two that stood out for me on this particular topic were Mae Dean's comic about self-realization and Doc Impossible's personal story that springboards from having also read Mae's comic [TW: later posts in Doc Impossible/Zoë's series of articles do include considerations of self-harm]. In both instances, each woman had one name in the back of their respective self-consciouses that they would ultimately pick for their chosen name. This got me thinking back to the list of names in a concrete fashion for the first time in a long time, rather than it just being something that I had compiled and slightly referenced.

Unlike Mae and Zoë, there wasn't a single name that was emblazened in my brain as one that I had specifically singled out for use. It's not an exaggeration to say that there were probably several names that I would have been okay with using as my own; they had made the list, after all. However, as I further considered the notion that this would indeed be my name, I kept coming back to the point that I wanted it to be my name. There were plenty of other names on the list that I also liked, yet were ones that I associated with other women. Elizabeth was my grandmother's name, I knew several Emmas and Ericas/Erikas, Anne was the name of a lot of adults that I had known over the years (they weren't all names that started with an 'e'...), et al. Aside from a couple of minor acquaintances, I really did not know anyone else named Emily. It struck me right and felt good.

Even after I made the decision that Emily was my choice for name going forward, it's not as though things instantly changed. Sharing that this was how I wanted to be known going forward was still scary, both in terms of what reaction I might get as well as the fact that, to me, it felt like just saying the name made this real. However, the responses that I received were uniformly positive and even seemingly silly stuff like changing one's email address or website username to reflect the change gave me a positive jolt. I went from being very reticent to wondering why it had to take so long to be able to see a probate judge in order to make a legal name change. That day did eventually come, though, and getting to officially sign something using my new name was so unexpectedly cathartic. I cried a little bit when we got home from the courthouse, but it was okay. Emily had a good, happy cry that day. ;)

                                                       Frank Thomas redeem from Zax

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 It would not be something that I write if it was all sunshine and rainbows, of course. One thing that transphobes love to do is deadname trans people, which is typically enacted as a means of control and authority. This actually strikes a stark parallel to the world of sports, where athletes who have converted to Islam in particular have often had their chosen names be ignored. Think about how, even if 2026, you will hear Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Muhammad Ali casually referred to by the names that they have not used in 60 years, while Ahmad Rashad was repeatedly called by his old name before getting traded to the Vikings and having coach Bud Grant taking the care to actually respect Rashad's personal/religious autonomy.

When you come back to the initial point in this post, though, it feels ludicrous to me that anyone would have the temerity to tell people - trans or otherwise - what their names are. It is particularly wild when it occurs online and the folks hurling insults are utilizing pseudonyms that I'm pretty sure are not on their birth certificates. However, I believe that there's a lot in a name and a lot of value in being able to call yourself something that makes you feel whatever positive sentiment one wishes a name to bestow. Whether that name is one your have chosen, one that was picked for you, or anything in between, it's yours to decide and yours to hold. Even though my name wasn't always Emily, I've always been Emily and I am happy to get to speak the name aloud. :)

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In between posts, we've had a ton of redeems on my Twitch channel, going over 100 custom cards in the gallery. That triggered a switchover from the 1952 Topps design to 1987 Topps, which has definitely been a fun change of pace. I've also gone through way too many archives and found a bevy of other designs that I can semi-replicate with my stellar MS Paint skills, which should help keep up some variety going forward. In IRL news, I threw on Tuesday for the first time since 2024 and it was great. Hopefully that can be the kickstart toward playing something next spring!

     

                                                      Kirt Manwaring redeem by Ahab

A Return...of Sorts

Well, um, who saw this coming? Who saw any of *gestures broadly* any of this coming? It is actually pretty wild to take note of the fact that my last post came nearly seven years ago. So, has anything changed in that span? Um, well, let's see:

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- When we last left off in 2019, things were kind of rough on the health front (in large part due to my still-unresolved sinus problems) and I was coming off an incredibly stressful high school baseball season in which the Varsity coaches had been fired for abuse, which proved to be a greater betrayal of trust to me emotionally than I would have guessed. Due largely to the backing of way more folks than I would of guessed, I wound up applying for and getting the Varsity head coach position for the 2020 season. So, maybe there existed the chance for things to improve on that end, right?

- So, um, then 2020 happened... A worldwide pandemic that shuts down most aspects of our society, kills millions, and continues to present a health crisis with major short-term and long-term implications certainly can change things. Having grown up in what I call "survival mode" for most of my youth and large swaths of adulthood, covid most certainly hit on all of the horrible anxieties associated with just trying to get through things and literal survival felt paramount over anything else. I definitely don't feel like I'm anywhere close to being on the same level emotionally or motivationally that I was prior to the onset of the pandemic, nor has my concentration been as good as it was pre-covid. :/

- The years that followed after things opened back up were kind of a mélange that really ran together in terms of sameness. I did wind up coaching Varsity for four seasons, including winning a regular season conference title, knocking off a top-seeded team in states, and seeing a couple of players that I coached get drafted in recent years. If I am being fully open, though, it never really felt fun. My focus for coaching was always about team building and positive effort/motivation, which led to much success over the years without me ever having to fixate on wins and losses as a primary motivating factor (which I disagree with as a concept). Unfortunately, the hyper-privatization of travel teams and instruction in a very affluent area of CT led to very few kids entering high school in a good position to actually play for a team, as they were told by parents and private coaches that their own stats and being visible for college coaches was all that mattered. Please contain your surprise here, but almost none of these kids actually played in college. After getting stuck with an antagonizing assistant coach and receiving abuse from parents (as well as total outsiders), the enjoyment was sucked dry and this became what I never wanted coaching to be - a job that I was only doing because it loosely involved baseball. Following the 2024 campaign, the situation was so atrocious and other aspects in my life were so far from what I wanted that it was time to move on. Honestly, it *should* have happened earlier, but I kept holding on in hopes that the environment would revert to what it was when things were fun and/or that I could fix it. That just wasn't going to happen, unfortunately. I miss baseball and coaching a lot, but what I miss is the dynamic that existed closer to 2010 than 2024. That realization was important.

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- So, speaking of realizations, let's get to the biggest one, which was that the other significant life event for me in 2024 was coming out as being trans. I've never strayed from heavy topics on this blog and won't start now, although I don't think that too many details are really necessary. The Cliff's Notes version is that while I was aware for years (even decades) of most of the characteristics that made me trans, I did not know that they were pieces to an actual puzzle. After allowing myself to experience aspects of femininity that I had repressed, a lot of things made sense and I felt levels of positive self-valuation that had not existed since elementary school. With the support of my family, friends, and a gaming community that I had met through A Link to the Past Randomizer (ALTTPR), I was able to try out things in more low stakes environments. The interesting thing is that even when the down moments hit or I was faced with more momentous aspects of transitioning, there was not a doubt that this was the right thing for me.

I changed my name to Emily in the fall of 2024 and have taken a great deal more steps since then toward becoming a person who feels like she is actually me, rather than just trying to muddle through life in a role that never fit. Again, it's certainly not all sunshine and rainbows, but the differences that I feel in terms of openness, comfort, and self-care are night and day from what they were just a few years ago. I am still trying to navigate this new version of the world in which I find myself and life in this country can often be exceptionally cruel toward trans people, which is a farce based on nothing except blind hatred and bigotry. I am happy - and even proud - to be trans, though, as I'm literally only living my life doing most of the same things that I have, just in a mental and physical frame of existence that actually makes getting up each day feel okay rather than trash. If that's considered a negative rather than a positive for someone, I reckon that I feel sorry for them.

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So, what is the motivation for coming back to this and potentially reviving this blog in some fashion? Well, it's twofold. One, I have started to finally again feel the impetus to write for the first time in a long time. I did briefly start a new blog when I was beginning my transition, but things were so hectic at that time that my focus simply wasn't there and navigating the vast amount of changes that were taking place at that time took most of my energy. However, after a pretty packed spring that included a move and surgery, things have finally settled down just enough for me to focus again.

Secondly, I mentioned the great support that I have received from the ALTTPR community, which is the first larger group of people that I've ever been a part of in which I have truly felt as though I fully fit. I have developed somewhat of a reputation of being the girl who knows way too much about sports and created a redeem on my Twitch channel for folks to ask me to talk about various athletes (mostly baseball). It's been rather well-received and, for me at least, a ton of fun, especially in terms of filling in some of dead air that can take place while playing rando seeds. I had wanted to make baseball cards for all of the redeems, but initially lost the list. However, I recently found it and set to making the cards, which have been sprinkled throughout this post and can be viewed in full on the sidebar. Given that I have neither a worthwhile image editing program nor much artistic aptitude, these are in the style of 1952 Topps since I can create them in MS Paint, LOL. I'm nonetheless pretty happy with these cards, had fun seeking out cool photos, and enjoyed getting to include my friends' avatars on the nameplate.

As for everything else, well, I guess that I'll figure it out as we go. While I have continued to read other folks's blogs over my hiatus, my level of engagement wasn't super high and I haven't done too much on the collecting front since the pandemic. I was making some progress toward consolidating toward players/sets that I want to keep and move others, but, um, my collection is presently several hours away, so that part will still be TBD. For now, though, I might just write what comes to mind and throw in images of the newest cards that join the array regardless of if they fit the theme of the piece. Something is better than nothing and I'm mostly just happy to be motivated enough to write, even if it's just a little. There's a lot of folks for whom am thankful for helping get me back to this place. 🧡