Bridget Flaherty

In 2007, I took my two-and-a-half-year-old son to a baseball game.

We lived in Dayton, Ohio, and someone had given us some free tickets to see the Cincinnati Reds, so we drove an hour and a half to the stadium.

I was under no delusion about what it would be like to take a toddler to a baseball game.

I fully expected that we would walk around the stadium, do some of the kids' stuff, eat stadium food, maybe watch a little bit of baseball, and then drive home.

But that is not what happened.

Ian was completely enthralled.

He loved the wave and cheering and he got to meet Mr. Redlegs and he actually enjoyed watching baseball.

And that day began a love of baseball in general and the Cincinnati Reds in particular.

In fact, I had to start DVRing Cincinnati Reds baseball games

for those of you that remember when we used to have to do that, because he watched baseball like other toddlers watch their favorite show or their favorite movie over and over and over again.

And he would stand in front of the TV acting out what he saw on screen, hitting and throwing and sliding and cheering.

By the time he was in kindergarten, he knew the entire Cincinnati Reds starting lineup, their names, their numbers, and their positions.

So when he was 10 years old, I arranged for a special treat for him to go to see the Cincinnati Reds at spring training in Arizona.

And I really didn't know what to expect, but I had heard that if you showed up on a day when they didn't have a game, that you could watch them practice.

So we did that.

We got there early and we sat on the little bleachers outside of the practice fields.

And lo and behold, we were just a few feet away from his idols.

And he was just over the moon.

He had brought a brand new ball and a Sharpie, hoping to get some signatures.

And other than the two of us, there were only like a handful of other people in the stands, all of them young men with binders full of baseball cards, hoping to get signatures.