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.
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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
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