First Pitch

Baseball is a beautiful thing.

This is probably a truth universally acknowledged by anyone coming to this blog, but it bears repeating nonetheless. If you don’t yet feel that way, go watch Ken Burns’ Baseball, or at least the opening monologue, and then come back and keep reading.

My father will tell you that I loved baseball as a small child. My recollection is that, for the majority of my life, baseball was just my dad’s hobby that I was reluctantly forced to engage with. Aside from the adolescent rebellion of hating whatever your parents do, I hated the sun, the heat, the noise, the tedium, and being forced to score the games; I didn’t like major sports in general, and baseball was in no way an exception.

About 20 years later, I moved to Boston, started graduate school, befriended some Mets fans there, got really bored while doing my homework, and made the mistake of putting baseball games on as background noise. Then I got my heart broken in a rather stupid and totally foreseeable way, and as the semester ended, I began to spiral. 

The “background noise” quickly became a daily obligation. My friends who hadn’t seen a game in their life started getting all sorts of texts about Jesse Winker. My roommates would watch me abruptly leave my bedroom to stand in the kitchen because “Pete’s up to bat with the bases loaded, and if I’m not in there, they’ll score, but if I’m watching, they won’t”. I went to my first major league game as an adult, and then set about frantically making up for lost time.

After months of making round trips to New York and too many dollars spent on tickets and cards and merch and train fare, the worry that the spark would fade—that I’d regret it all and want back everything I’d wasted—continually itched in the back of my mind. I thought, first, that the Mariners’ postseason elimination might have broken my heart too badly; then, after I watched the World Series anyways despite insisting I was too upset, I thought that the drought of the offseason might make it wither on the vine. Instead, it was the exact breathing room I’d unknowingly been waiting for, giving my thoughts and feelings the air they needed to flourish while I watched rosters instead of games. And when they needed even more space to grow, I began to write.

From Seaver to Seattle started as both a formal writing exercise and a platform for sharing my opinions on baseball, because I was getting really irritated at what I considered to be a lot of horrendous takes from both casual fans and professional writers. This is a relatively common experience, most often referred to in academic circles as “being a sports fan”. Not wanting to engage in the time-honored practice of yelling at people on Twitter about it, and craving a space to put some longer-form writing, I decided to put this together instead. 

The name encapsulates many of the things that define what baseball is for me: the team I was born with and the team I later chose to love; the richness of the past and the vitality of the present; and the vast span of the world that the great game embraces, a mari usque ad mare and beyond. It also just rolls nicely off the tongue.

This blog, and my current love for baseball, would not exist without the support and encouragement of more than a few people. Thank you to my parents, Craig Calcaterra, Sean Forman, Silvia Alvarez, Scott Bush, Mark Armour, and my friends in North Carolina, D.C., Florida, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle, for getting me this far. If this ever becomes a lucrative venture, I promise I’ll give you at least a dollar.

If you made it all the way here, thanks for reading! Consider subscribing for notifications of all the writing that goes on here. I can almost guarantee it’ll be worth your while.