The Best Baseball Gift I Received

The 12-year-old version of me was perhaps the biggest baseball fan I've ever been. Thanks to the baseball video game "All-Star Baseball 2003," there wasn't a player in the league whom I didn't know. Around this time, I began to notice what players were wearing. It was nothing like today, where each player seemingly has 12 attachments that he puts on or takes off from the time he leaves home to when he gets to first base. In 2004, I started noticing players' gloves.

Up until that point, I don't think it had ever crossed my mind that there might be nicer gloves than others, that perhaps I was using just a cheap "kids" glove. One thing I know for sure is that my mind was blown away when I found the website www.justballgloves.com. I would go onto the website every day and look at every model of gloves that every player they had listed used. Being the early 2000s, there was one player whose glove I had my eye on more than anyone else: Derek Jeter.

Derek Jeter was my Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle – you get the point. As a 12-year-old, all I knew was that Derek was the captain of the best team in baseball, he played the coolest position, he was on the cover of my baseball video game, and apparently, anyone could just use the same glove as him!

My parents would have my siblings and me write out a Christmas list of 10 things we hoped to receive. I wasn't new to this game; the first thing you listed, Mom and Dad always seemed to make appear under the tree come the 25th. I made sure I was specific. In all 10 spots, I wrote an 11.5-basket web Rawlings Heart of the Hide model ProDJ2.

I love the game of baseball. If you ask me where that love specifically comes from, I'm not sure if I could point to something specific. Maybe it was all the wiffle ball games I played with the neighborhood kids, maybe it was Backyard Baseball, collecting baseball cards, and hoping to have one with my stats on the back someday. What I do know is the moment I unwrapped that glove, nothing could break the love I had for the game of baseball.

It's weird to think that the feeling of excitement that gift brought me may very well have been the driving force to want to make baseball my career. It may have been what pushed me to go to every practice, complete every workout, or bear down while pitching to get one more out when I felt like I had nothing left.

If you have kids and they're interested in the game of baseball, encourage it, add to it. You never know what might be the tipping point that gives them that feeling, a purpose, or a goal to achieve. Maybe they'll be just like me and be able to look back and definitively say, "This was the best gift I ever received."