(This article goes with the one posted yesterday and part three should be coming out about 5 minutes after this one goes live.)
I want to share a little bit about the things I went through the last few years for a few reasons. First I think it is good for me to just write it out. I want to move forward but I can’t do that if I keep internalizing things. The second reason is that I know there are others out there that have struggled the last few years like me and maybe writing out my journey can help someone else.
Despite being a favorite of mine, baseball had become a source of negativity for me. It became a reminder of a failure of goals I had set before me. Add that to being in a new state where I didn’t have any friends (not that I had many in Washington), it all added up to being a hard time.
Near the end of 2018 I decided to dive deep into building my photography and baseball coverage sites to see if I could make that my full time job. Things were moving along well, thanks to many of the relationships that I had built the previous years with the 9 Inning Know It All site.
The summer of 2019 had me traveling all across the northwest, covering games all spring and summer. I was trying my hand at youtube and making more progress than I expected.
In the Fall of 2019 I returned to Phoenix to cover the Arizona Fall Classic for the third time and was planning on making that an annual trip. My photography business was taking off and I was excited for the path I was going down.
Then 2020 hit. That sucked. All of it.
However, one good thing that started because of this was the podcast. This was a positive thing during a tough time, but I found that even though I really enjoyed doing these, it didn’t make up for the lack of opportunity to be at the field, covering games and building relationships.
By 2021 my wife and I were feeling a need to move out of the state of Washington. Our hometown was becoming dangerous, the schools in our area were not great, and we felt a need to move to a new location.
By November I was on the road with a full car to North Dakota. It was the right decision, but as I mentioned in the previous article, I lost the relationships I had with the baseball community I had built. I didn’t know coaches, players or parents in North Dakota. Heck, I didn’t even know where teams were located to try and cover games.
I tried to keep the podcast going, and I did for a while, but the longer I went without being able to cover games in person the harder it was to do this. I was feeling disconnected and even angry to a point and I blamed baseball for these feelings. This caused a spiral where I stopped going to games, and I pretty much refused to watch even MLB games on TV. I wanted to distance myself from baseball.
Fast forward to this year. This spring I changed jobs, and with that change came a huge relief of stress, and that allowed me to sit back and reassess what I want to do with things. After a few months of really thinking about things I keep coming back to the same thoughts. I want to get back to getting out to games, photographing games, interviewing coaches and players, and just building the amazing relationships that I truly enjoy.
Now I know things can’t be the same as they were back in Washington. That just isn’t possible. However, what can be done is taking what already exists and transforming it into something different, but still good. So that is the goal. Now how are things going to change, well that is the topic for the next article. I hope you will check it out and let’s see where things go from here.