In 2005, my family made our first trip to spring training in Sarasota, Florida. My husband, 3-year old son, and I drove down from Indiana to a cheap extended stay hotel. The room was shoddy and required our own cleaning before we could sleep there, but the hotel pool was nice. We spent off evenings in the pool with our son, in his floatie, who bonded with the kids of the migrant workers who were also staying at the hotel over their enjoyment of Dora the Explorer, albeit in different languages.

We spent most days at games. We had tickets to every game. We’d get to the parks as soon as the gates opened and camp out. My son would do the toddler squat between rows of seats and play Pokemon on a Gameboy Advance SP. I loved it because it protected him from sunburn and foul balls. He couldn’t read yet, so he just walked his little character around in the tall grass until an encounter happened. We made sure he had a party that was overpowered for the area he was in, so all he had to do was press A until he’d beaten the Pokemon, then go back to walking. He’d repeat until his lead ‘mon ran out of PP for the first move in the list, then he’d turn the game off and on again without saving so he could go back to walking his little character around in the tall grass.

Back then, the Reds played at Ed Smith Stadium, and they would play the same playlist from the time the gates opened until the first pitch every day. We got to know the playlist by heart, ad we could tell how close we were to game time by the song they were on.

They had great food at Ed Smith, and with the money we weren’t spending on good accommodations, we could afford to eat whatever we wanted. We’d get our son unlimited cotton candy and ice cream cones that we had to eat most of to race the heat.

What I remember most about two weeks of nearly-daily baseball games was how good I got at knowing where the ball was going off the bat. In the first days, I didn’t know whether a contact would be a home run or a popup to the short stop. By the end, I could almost tell you where the ball landed just from the sound of the contact.

That was a pretty unexpected skill for me to gain. I had not grown up a baseball fan. I was the person with two after-school activities per night in high school and three part-time jobs at the same time in college. My husband, who had grown up a fan but had sworn it off in 1995 when the strike happened, had gotten back into it when Griffey Jr returned to the Reds. At first I thought it should qualify as grounds for marriage annulment; it was not fair that I did not know I was going to end up a baseball widow when I agreed to the marriage.

But the world was less serious back then, and I had the time to learn something new. As I watched broadcasts and asked questions, I could see the barriers to fandom baseball put up against its own prospective followers. I’ve made my career explaining technical things to beginners, and I saw a lot of opportunity to make baseball make sense to everyone.

Never was that need so obvious as one game I attended in person in Cincinnati. It must have been 2004, so it would have been Great American Ballpark by then. We sat two rows behind a young couple where the man obviously followed baseball but the woman didn’t. She’d ask him questions about what was going on and he’d sigh and shake his head and make fun of her for not already knowing. That’s when I thought I needed to start writing about baseball in plain language, someplace welcoming and free. I had a vision of that woman telling her boyfriend something she’d read on my blog and shutting him up with her wit and wisdom.

Blogging was a lot of fun back then. It was just hobbyists cracking themselves up. The Reds were always awful, but that doesn’t matter when you’re making jokes. If anything, that makes it easier. Bloggers would get together for online chats that we’d publish on our sites, and we’d meet up in person for occasional games. It was online friending.

As time went on, things got more complicated: in baseball, in my life, in the whole world. Blackout rules became insurmountable. I stopped enjoying the baseball, then I stopped enjoying the blog, then I stopped writing the blog.

That was probably the wrong order to do those things in.

Now it’s 20 years later. Spring training trips are charmless package deals. My son still plays handheld games, but now he also develops them, plus he’s too tall to comfortably sit in stadium seats, let alone squat down between the rows. I have another kid, and she hates baseball with a fervent passion. I spend my free time protecting the environment and democracy. But I also have a subscription that lets me watch Reds games again for the first time in probably 10 years.

Game 2 of the season just wrapped. It’s a win against the Giants! Maybe I’ll learn these new guys’ names. Maybe I’ll remember how to crack jokes–I certainly could use the laugh. Maybe I’ll get used to Joel being mentioned on every TV broadcast.

One thing I’m not going to do is draw anyone’s attention to the fact that I wrote this. No one needs to hear a middle-aged lady’s nostalgia about the good ol’ days of the mid ’00s.