Me embracing my free Jim Palmer jersey on my visit to Camden Yards three years ago. I love baseball so much that I’m making my way around all of the MLB ballparks, one year at a time.

I’ve been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember.

I had posters of Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth hanging on the lavender walls of my bedroom when I was eight years old.

I listened to my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates on the yellow Mickey Mouse radio that sounded more of static than the play-by-play announcers, and I saved my box tops to order that Wheaties’ collector’s edition Pete Rose poster when he broke the all-time hits record. 

(That was before he broke my heart by getting thrown out of baseball…)

In 2013, just two weeks after my wedding, I made a quick 24 hour round trip to Pittsburgh to watch my team play in, and win, the Wild Card game, making the playoffs for the first time since I was 15.

To this day, it’s the coolest baseball experience I’ve ever had.

I struggle to explain to a non-baseball fan what it is that I love so much about the game. I love the pace - I love the strategy - I love the quiet rhythm of the crowd and the announcers on a summer’s evening drive home from the gym. I don’t know where I learned to love the game so much - but baseball is as much a part of my blood as my Irish and Welsh heritage. 

Tonight, as I watch my guys battle the Milwaukee Brewers to get back to a .500 record, I’m struck by the one thing that keeps me tuning in for every pitch of every game, even when my team is, as they often are, losing.

I tune in for the possibility.

The possibility that my team, however long they’ve gone without a World Series win or appearance (40 years), might string together some amazing moments.

Like the time the Pirates scored six runs in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs, to defeat the Houston Astros in a game that didn’t mean anything to anyone.

Except some of us fans.

So yeah, I tune in for the possibility.

What I love about baseball, and just about any sport really, is the fact that the momentum of the game can turn on a dime. That one great defensive play can spark an offensive outburst the next inning - that one player can foul off nine pitches, find a way to get on base, and change the energy of his (or her if you’re watching softball right now) team.

The funny thing about baseball, is that those momentum and energy shifts are almost always the small things. The worst thing that could happen right now when my team is down by three? A home run.  

Sounds strange right? I mean how can a home run be a bad thing? Because there is a different energy and feel to the game when the bases are empty. And if you’re down by three in the ninth, it’s hard to build a rally on a home run. But a bunt single? A hustle double? A batter working her way back from an 0-2 count to draw a walk? 

Those are the moments that change the energy and momentum and ultimately, the outcome of a game. 

I’m writing this tonight as a reminder, not just to you, but to myself as well, that it doesn’t always have to be the big thing that gets you going in the right direction. You can stack one small habit on top of another small habit and before you know it, you are making changes to your life that feel good for you.

But the one thing you do need?

Optimism. You need to be optimistic that you can change - that your life can be different - that, no matter what life has dealt you recently - that you can put together that one great at bat that will help steer you in the right direction.

And if that’s not something you can believe in for yourself right now, well, I’ll tell you what I tell everyone else - I will be optimistic for you until you can be optimistic for yourself.

In the meantime, the Pirates are losing 2-0. But I’ll watch the game to it’s end tonight, and I’ll tune in again to watch them tomorrow. Because tomorrow’s a new day, filled with new possibilities - and you never know when the momentum is going to shift.

But I believe it will. And I’ll be watching and supporting them when it does.

By the age of 10, my belief in Santa was waning. I still believed, but my 13 year older brother was, by then, a non-believer and pointing out the flaws in the existence of the man. Most notably, he pointed out that our chimney ended in a wood stove that was constantly in use.

"He can't come through the flames," he said. "And....he's too fat."

Skeptical though I was, I nonetheless sat on Santa’s lap at the annual Ebensburg Moose Christmas party and parlayed my request to ol’ Saint Nick.

"I’d like a Pete Rose baseball card,” I said.

In the mid-1980’s Pete Rose was everything to me. Despite living in Western Pennsylvania and carrying a healthy allegiance to my home town Pittsburgh Pirates, it was Pete who was on my Wheaties' box and the poster on my wall.

It was Pete I pretended to be when we played backyard baseball.

In the days before my parents had cable television, I don't recall any fanfare when Pete passed Ty Cobb to become baseball’s All-Time Hit’s Leader. I knew because I read it on a Wheaties' box. And it was on the Pete Rose poster I sent in box tops to acquire.

Pete Rose was more than the all-time hits leader when I was a kid growing up in the 80’s. He was the definition of the way you played the game. When you slid into home, you did a Pete Rose slide, which meant sacrificing your body to take out the catcher on the way into home plate.

His nickname was Charlie Hustle. If you watch clips of Pete playing baseball, he was not the graceful athlete that Derek Jeter was or Mike Trout is. He lumbered when he ran, and hunched and poked out hits at the plate, offering more of a chop than the beautiful swing of a Ken Griffey Jr. He was an average looking guy who hustled and worked his way to being a super star.

And so that’s what my Dad taught me to do.

When Pete was at the plate, he watched the ball into the catcher’s mitt on every pitch.

Dad said I should do that too.

So it should have come as no surprise that all I wanted for Christmas when I was 10 years old was a Pete Rose baseball card.

When asked if I wanted anything else, anything at all, I said no. There was honestly nothing I could think of more than to add Pete Rose to my healthy and growing baseball card collection. I had Ricky Henderson and Roger Clemens and some guy named Cal Ripken Jr.

I’m sure the request turned my parents sideways. Sports card shops had not yet blown up in our part of the country. In a few years you could walk into a store and pick out a Pete Rose rookie card or something else from his early years. But not in rural Western Pennsylvania in the mid 1980’s.

So my parents did what they could do.

On Christmas morning, I woke up and shuffled through the presents under the tree. There were several packs of baseball cards - Topps and Donruss - and I ripped through them all - finding Nolan Ryan and Andy Van Slyke and other stars that I admired.

But there was no Pete Rose.

My dad called a friend whose son collected baseball cards to see if he fulfill my wish, and was assured that there was a card to be had for me.

I eventually did get myself a Pete Rose baseball card to go with the thousands of other cards that sit at my parents' house.

Of course as you read this, you probably wonder why Pete Rose. These days he's almost kryptonite to the game of baseball, setting up his yearly protest in Cooperstown during the Hall of Fame inductions. And admittedly, he was the first hero to fall for me, when he was banned from baseball permanently for betting on his own team while managing the Reds.

As I re-read this post, it sounds kind of sad, but I don't remember it that way. I think very fondly about the year I wanted that one simple thing because of what it represented. Pete Rose symbolized the most important thing in my little 10 year old world.

Baseball.

As I've gotten older, and life has gotten more complicated, I take great pleasure in having memories of Christmases past that I can look at with such fondness, even if the memories are likely tinted with rose colored glasses.

How lucky I am to have memories so dear.

Wishing you and all of those in your life a very happy holiday.