It’s not because I am a great athlete that I caught the bug. Or maybe it is because I’m not a great athlete that I did. I don’t know.

And it’s not that it’s been this lifelong passion. There were probably 15 to 20 years that I didn’t think about it at all, between my “playing days” and my Chicago years.

And yet, at a particular point in my adult life it kicked in, this deep affection for the sport.

Baseball.

It certainly isn’t because of my 6th grade season, when I was a Lurch-like pole on the Roadrunner Little League Tigers- a gangly spectacled spasm on a team in a division behind most of my peers. It was that summer when I couldn’t hit a thing, although my coach spent a lot of time with me trying to help me see the ball. Still, I spent most games that year on the end of the bench, frustrated, waiting for my obligatory three innings in right field somewhere near the end of game- anxious about having to go up to the plate and swing a bat.

It may be because of that wallop one bright spring Saturday morning when I was almost in 4th grade and I really had little idea what I was doing on the field at Mile High Little League, but the pitching machine spit the ball at me, my bat came around, and the ball leapt into the sky and drifted back, drifted back, over the center fielder’s head, and then, to a swell of cheers, over the fence. Gone. My most celebrated moment ever as an athlete came when I was a kid, hitting my only homer ever, off of a robot.

My parent’s were good enough to sign me up for baseball every spring when I was young, committing me to sandy gravel practice fields and Saturday mornings at the ballpark for five or six years.

It’s not that I didn’t like playing. I did. But I was mostly almost average.

I have to think some of it is just from time spent on the diamond, though.

Those yellow-skied Saturday mornings when the world was mostly still waking up and there was dew on the grass that you could smell because it was freshly cut.

Those practices after school when dark clouds covered the sky in the west and the clouds spit on you from above and your ears stung from the cool air.

And the ones after school when the desert sun was a white heat lamp blasting the city and whipping breezes would raise walls of grit and fling them across the field, and into your eyes and mouth.

Taking fielding practice, when Coach would clink a hard shot at you on rocky earth, and the ball would at the last moment hop oddly away from your glove and into your shin.

In a game, at the crack of the bat, wheeling to your left and planting your back leg on first base to turn and stretch and dig out an offline, bouncing throw from the shortstop.

That satisfying solid feel in your hands and that recognizable sound when you’ve connected with a pitch and the ball rockets out of the infield.

The rise of your heart rate when you are on base, anticipating a hit or preparing to steal, scanning the pitcher and the catcher to gauge the opportunity before you aim your body and burst up the base path.

Snow cones post-game from the concession stand when your mouth is dry and your neck moist with sweat.

High fives and hand slaps after you scored a run and at game ends.

The feeling of being on a team.

Throwing, running, hitting, catching.

Sunlight. Earth. Wind. Grass. Spring.

Activities of being a kid at the beginning of the sunny time of each year.

That’s undoubtedly part of the reason I came to love it.

Baseball.