Baseball can save your life.
Well, at least, I think it saved mine. In late spring in 1995 my mother moved my sibling and I back to the Seattle area after a four year layover in southeast Idaho; I was a wee kid of eight. The reasons for coming back were many, but chief among them was that we were escaping years of abuse.
I already had an interest in baseball, knew about the Mariners as much as any kid tends to know about a team at those ages. But it wasn’t an intimate knowledge and one mostly passed down by my grandparents who would visit us while were in Idaho.