How Becoming a Baseball Mom Made Me Into a Fan

As a comically unathletic person, I never thought I would have anything to do with sports. My kids had other ideas.

First hit. Photo credit: Jan Conrey.

For Christmas a couple of years ago, my siblings gave me a giant green coffee mug that says “# Baseball Mom.” I was excited that the mug was so large, but puzzled by the inscription. “Shouldn’t it say ‘#1 Baseball Mom’?” I wondered. Luckily, before voicing this thought aloud, I remembered about hashtags.

I never imagined that my kids would be athletic. In my personal experience, playing sports has been either dangerous or embarrassing, or both. When I was a kid, my parents used to make us choose a sport every year. Once, I chose softball. That summer I got hit with the ball in the left eye three times. When signups came around again, I told my parents I wasn’t playing anymore. No one objected.

Anyway, the thing is that somehow I ended up with two kids, both boys, who are not just averagely athletic. They are freakishly athletic, like the kind of athletic where other parents ask where they got it from and if maybe one of us used to play whatever sport it is when we were in college. I am not saying this to brag. I am saying it because it is hugely mysterious to me. I’m active and energetic, and their dad is an avid mountain…