Typically, at this point in the day – at this point in the week – I’d introduce a column in which I offer ten thoughts on some of the newsier items around baseball. I like doing it because, well, I really like baseball, and I really like sharing what I think about baseball. In this sense, it’s not surprising that occasionally my thoughts will admittedly drift toward becoming self-indulgent.

In fact, the whole premise of offering up my thoughts as something that others NEED to read – and promoting it through social media as “my thoughts” – has always felt a little bit too suggestive of megalomania to me. My greatest fear is that someone reads through TSTOAF and counts the number of times I used “I think …” to start a sentence. Nonetheless, the response for the weekly feature is usually pretty good, and the conversations in the comments section tend to be opinionated in the good way – respectful of the perspectives of others, while still offering insight that causes points of view to be questioned.

This is what makes the column worthwhile to me.

Today, I’m going in the opposite direction of the one toward which I’d like to move. I’m going to be self-indulgent, and it’s probably going to seem as though I think my experiences are more important than they are. I don’t feel this way. In fact, my hope is that my experiences are common. That you’ll recognize your own experiences in mine, and that you’ll be able to walk away after reading this with the ability to express something that you felt but couldn’t articulate before, or that, like our comments section does to me, you’ll question your own perspective.

I’m going to write about the ten most influential moments in my own baseball fandom.

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