If you’ve read some of my stuff before, there’s a chance you’re aware of my baseball fandom’s origin story, because it’s a weird and honestly pretty funny one and I mention it every once in a while. It’s one of those that never fails to draw at least an amused grin out of anyone who hears it for the first time.

For those of you who don’t know why a Spanish teenager circa 2018 decided to start following a sport from another continent that he knew essentially nothing about, I’ll make it brief: my fascination with American sports began when I was just a kid who liked basketball—and thus the NBA—and eventually graduated to the odd, violent, almost alien game that is American football. At some point in early 2018, then, having stopped caring about basketball and also out of love with another of my childhood sports, Formula 1, there was for the first time in my life a gigantic, six-month gap in stable sports content from the final snap of the Super Bowl to the first few NFL preseason games. I decided I wanted something else to care about and, as it happens, the bulk of the MLB season fits perfectly within the NFL offseason.

By the time Week One in 2018 rolled around, football was very much a secondary concern of mine; baseball captured my imagination very, very swiftly. (It probably didn’t help the gridiron that my chosen baseball team, the Rockies, were exciting, and my chosen football team, the New York Giants, were not.)

I’ve told this story before, though, at least parts of it. It’s vintage Mario Delgado Genzor the writer, like Jacob deGrom dotting a 97 mph fastball down and away for a called third strike. What I’m guessing none of you fine readers know is that 2018 wasn’t technically the first time I tried getting into baseball. There was another instance, a handful of years before 2018, when the baseball diamond was within sight but didn’t capture me. I was around 13 years old then and just getting into American football, so I told myself, why not follow the other major American sport as well?