San Diego, sometime in summer 1980. The first Major League Baseball I attended, and it was a banger. 

The San Diego Padres had a loaded roster with future Hall of Famers Dave Winfield, Ozzie Smith and Rollie Fingers. The San Francisco Giants boasted stars like Vida Blue and Darrell Evans and future Hall of Famer Wilie McCovey.

I was there on vacation with my parents, a long road trip from Arizona up and down the California coast, and this game was a highlight for a kid who played Little League and collected Topps baseball cards. 

I was born in Phoenix, and grew up in a small town, Cottonwood, Ariz. San Diego was the closest MLB town. 

I had previously attended some Phoenix Giants games at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, but minor league affiliates aren’t the same. 

So that 1980 game, part of McCovey’s farewell tour as he retired that year, made a big impression. That didn’t prevent me from buying a Pittsburgh Pirates cap in the team shop at that game. I rooted for the “We Are Family” Pirates in the previous season’s World Series when they beat the Baltimore Orioles in an epic seven-game series. 

I don’t remember why I picked the Pirates. Maybe it was Willie Stargell’s hero presence. Or Kent Tekulve’s glasses and weirdo delivery. Or the Sister Sledge song. Or that my Puerto Rican godfather idolized the late, great Roberto Clemente. 

And it’s not like I hated the Orioles. More on that later. 

A few years later, I rooted for the Padres in the 1984 World Series, when they came up short against the Detroit Tigers.

So I must still feel fondly, or even root, for the Padres?

Nope. Although I’m sure I’d like their new(ish) stadium in downtown San Diego, although I’ve never been. I respect the Slam Diego vibe they’ve cultivated. Childhood love fades. 

Was it because Phoenix got their own expansion team in 1998, the Diamondbacks? 

Not really. The Diamondbacks started play the year I left Arizona. I rooted for them in the 2001 World Series, and was glad to see them defeat the New York Yankees, even though that spoiled the 9/11 New York comeback narrative. The plucky little flair home-run slugger Luis Gonzales plinked off of Mariano Rivera for the game-winning run is like the anti-epic conclusion of such an emotionally charged Series. 

But not having grown up with the Diamondbacks, I don’t have the same home-town connection I have with, say, the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, who predated my time here on Earth. 

I still rooted for the D-Backs in 2023 when they lost the Series to the Texas Rangers. I go to games when I visit home. It’s a cool stadium. The swimming pool and the retractable roof are just so Phoenix. 

Here in the present time, I have partial-season tickets for the Washington Nationals, dating back to 2020. I’ve attended every Nationals home playoff game since they moved to D.C. from Montreal, including the Werth Walk Off and the 18-inning Giant Heartbreaker. Oh, and all three 2019 home-game World Series losses, crummy games all.

I live just a few blocks away from the old RFK Stadium, where the Nationals nested from 2005-2007 until Nationals Park opened in 2008. (I went to the grand opener for Nats Park, too, and witnessed Mr. Walk-Off’s Walk-Off.)

So the Nats are as close to a home team as I have. I’ve been here as long, longer, as they have, and I feel like I’m part of their community. (Why else keep season tickets amid the long, long rebuild after the 2019 World Series win?) A chosen family, the Friendsgiving, if you will, of sports allegiances.

But the Nats weren’t even my first kinda-sorta team after I moved to the Mid-Atlantic. That would be those Orioles whom I didn’t root for in 1979. 

When I arrived in Washington in 1998, the city was still seven years away from stealing the Montreal Expos. 

My boss, Doug Bailey, had season tickets for Baltimore that he liked to share with the staff. 

Cal Ripken Jr. was still in the middle of the Iron Man streak, having broken Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played and adding to it every day. Ripken was the man, but the Orioles also had stars like Mike Mussina, Roberto Alomar, Harold Baines and niche fan favorites like Brady Anderson and B.J. Surhoff. They were easy to root for. I didn’t even mind the drive up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. For baseball, anything. 

And now there is some supposed big rivalry between the Nats and Os. Am I supposed to hate the Os? Is it over anything more significant than a lopsided television rights fight that lasted for years? Can’t even remember. RIP MASN, or whatever. I can’t bring myself to dislike the team or the city of Baltimore, for that matter. 

The point of all this is that, growing up without a hometown baseball team, but being a baseball fan, deprived me of the all-encompassing passion of being a fan of one team, that fabled, monogamous, live-with-the-team, die-with-the-team relationship. 

I get the appeal of that. I have a lot of friends from Boston and Chicago and New York. 

Also: In an adjacent sports world, I still live and die with the Suns. (More often, die, by the way. When my friends were trying to console me after the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Suns in the NBA Finals in 2021, I had to inform them: “Thank you, but you don’t understand. We only go to the Finals every 30 years or so. And we always lose in six.”)

Back to baseball. I have a team now, the Nats, but I’ve had teams before, to varying degrees. Serial monogamy? I guess. I still get along with all the exes. 

It could get real complicated, though, in the playoffs. 

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Baseball Issue Summer 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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