Southern California was electric that night. I was holed up at Uncle Lee’s place doing my best to steady the anticipation.
Sunday, August 20, 1989, wasn’t just any day on my calendar—it was going to be the final leg of my pilgrimage. One I had “waited my entire life” for, which in the strict math of childhood meant the past five years of my eleven-year-old existence, ever since I tore open my first pack of baseball cards at Don’s Dugout and fell headlong into the religion of the game.
Now I was laying out my gear for my first Major League Baseball game at Anaheim Stadium. I handled each item with the reverence of a priest preparing communion.
A mitt, a cap, a binder of cards, three baseballs, and two blue pens were laid out in front of me with the precision of a preflight check. I was a meticulous planner—part boy, part clipboard.
Like every kid in America who worships the game, I had rehearsed it a million times: snag a foul ball and coax some signatures out of actual Big Leaguers.
I cracked open my binder for one last inspection of the players I’d be watching the next afternoon, studying their faces the way a geologist studies rocks.
Earlier that week, I marched into a card shop in Camarillo to hunt down the missing pieces of what was clearly destined to be the California Angels’ starting lineup. This wasn’t just any team—it had some legends in the making: Devon White, a future 3-time World Series champion, Chili Davis, another future 3-time World Series champion, and Wally Joyner, the first rookie ever to be voted into an All-Star starting lineup.
The Angels were the darlings of the Sunday forecast—sitting smugly at the top of the AL West with seventy-three wins and forty-eight losses. The kind of record that made you nod and say, yeah, they’ve got this.
The Cleveland Indians, on the other hand, were languishing near the bottom of the AL East, third from last, looking every bit like the underdogs they were depicted to be in the screwball comedy Major League. The movie had hit theaters earlier that year. The way the Hollywood team fumbled and stumbled was so absurd that it was hard not to laugh out loud. I loved that movie. It made me cheer, it made me cringe, and yes, it had me singing The Troggs’ immortal “Wild Thing,” as if the fate of the game—and maybe the universe—depended on it.
But don’t get me wrong—the real Indians weren’t completely hopeless. They had a shooting star in future Hall of Famer Joe Carter. He’d later be traded to the Toronto Blue Jays. Carter hit a three-run walk-off home run off Phillies pitcher Mitch Williams to win the 1993 World Series. In fact, Carter is one of only two players to end a World Series with a home run, the other being Bill Mazeroski in 1960.
Also in the Indians’ lineup was a rookie named Joey Belle. Just 36 days before I laid eyes on him at Anaheim Stadium, he recorded an RBI single off Rangers pitcher Nolan Ryan in his first career at bat. There’s something else you need to know about Belle. He changed his name to Albert after spending ten weeks in alcohol rehab in the summer of 1990.
His mother would say this of him in Sports Illustrated in 1991: “Joey is extremely smart. He’s great with figures and crossword puzzles. He could spell backwards when he was five. Did you know my Joey was an Eagle Scout? He took French in high school, finished sixth in his class of 266. I brought him up to excel in everything. He wants to be perfect.”
Belle, it turns out, was a man of few words and even fewer smiles. His hulking presence could hush an opposing ballpark by just lifting his bat. He was one of the premier sluggers of his era. In 1995, he did something no one else had ever done: fifty doubles, fifty home runs, all in a season that lasted just 144 games. And as if that weren’t enough, he became the first player in Major League Baseball to break the $10 million-a-year salary barrier, proving he could swing both a bat and a deal with equal force.
In 1998, Mark Bechtel said this about Belle in Sports Illustrated: “Throughout his major league career Albert Belle has demonstrated a distinct pattern: When the surly slugger gets P.O.’d, baseballs get K.O.’d.”
Over the course of his career, Belle did do some crazy shit—the corked bats, the spats with reporters, the forearm shiver to Fernando Viña to break up a double play, knocking him flat on his ass, the chase-down of trick-or-treaters, the clubhouse tantrums. Despite all of this, I still admire his relentless drive to be the best. No excuses.
I snapped the binder shut, carefully packed my mitt, cap, cards, and pens into my backpack, and zipped it up, grateful to Mom for making this impossible-seeming day happen. Growing up in Oklahoma with Dad, I didn’t see her often. Wyoming was a long drive. Our visits were rare, special exceptions like this trip to California.
She had bought me a plane ticket to Wyoming. From there, I piled into Mom’s white Chevy Impala with my half-sisters for the long haul to Southern California to see Grandma Deakin. Mom knew baseball ran in my veins, so she’d orchestrated this pilgrimage to Anaheim Stadium.
Satisfied I was fully armed for the game, I slipped into bed, but sleep came fitfully, buzzing with dreams of grass as green as ever, cut short and well-manicured. The roaring crowd. The crack of the bat.
The next morning, Mom, Aunt Susan, and Uncle Dave loaded into his Jeep Cherokee, and we set off on the two-hour drive to Anaheim. I pressed my nose to the window, mesmerized as the suburban sprawl slowly yielded to rolling hills dotted with citrus orchards. Windows down, the air carried the sweet, tangy scent of oranges. The road stretched out ahead like a ribbon unspooling toward baseball heaven. Every mile felt like a drumbeat, counting down to the moment I’d finally be there, in the middle of it all.
The drive felt endless. We crawled along the 101, then merged onto the 5, my impatience growing by the minute. And then, finally, there it was: the iconic “Big A,” halo perched like a crown, rising above the stadium like a beacon for every baseball-obsessed kid ever born. I couldn’t look away. It towered more than 230 feet, a gleaming monument to everything I’d been dreaming about.
Installed behind the left-field fence in 1966, the sign had been moved to the parking lot in 1979, just a year before the Los Angeles Rams moved in with the Angels. History, trivia, and awe all rolled into one—yet to me, it was simple: a giant, haloed invitation to baseball heaven. I was ready to answer.
We parked, and I practically launched myself out of the Jeep, clutching my golden ticket. The stadium thrummed with life, the energy thick enough to make my heartbeat skip and stutter. I couldn’t get through the turnstile fast enough. Words would never capture the mix of awe, excitement, and pure electricity pulsing through me.
We moved briskly along the main concourse until we reached the ramp leading up to section 226 along the right-field line. You have to understand—I was nearly having an out-of-body experience. This wasn’t just any ballpark. Only forty days earlier, in this very place, Bo Jackson had done something only eight men before him had managed: he belted a leadoff homer to dead center in his very first All-Star at-bat while President Reagan watched in the booth with sportscaster Vin Scully. Jackson went 2-for-4 that night as if auditioning for the role of greatest athlete in pro sports during my teenage years. Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser summed it up perfectly: “It was watch Bo hit, watch Bo run, watch Bo play.”
That was the field I was walking toward.
I craned my neck, catching my first glimpse of the left-field upper deck. Reaching the top, my eyes fell on a lush expanse of green that seemed to stretch forever. A tiny, makeshift sandlot came to mind—the one I’d played on next to my house—but this? This was another universe. The turf gleamed under the California sun, groomed to perfection. The stadium swallowed me whole, a cathedral of baseball on a scale that made the sandlot back home feel like a sandbox.
We slid into our seats as the first pitch crept closer. I sat there in open-mouthed amazement, scanning every nook and cranny of the stadium. I’d watched dozens of games on television, but television flattens everything. This was the real thing—alive, three-dimensional, and buzzing.
One disappointment came quickly: we were nowhere near a dugout. No chance for autographs. No brush with Big League immortality. I sulked for about twelve seconds, then the stadium swallowed me again.
At exactly 2:10 p.m., with 32,640 fans filling the stands, the players took the field. What followed was a slow-paced, low-scoring affair—baseball in no particular hurry, content to unfold inning by inning while I tried to catalog the entire stadium.
I don’t remember a single foul ball coming anywhere near us—not even a teasing arc that made you rise halfway out of your seat. The scoreboard sat frozen in place, as if the bulbs had unionized and refused to work overtime. Then, in the bottom of the seventh, Angels Kent Anderson reached second on a ground-ball error. Suddenly the game had a pulse again. My attention, which had begun to drift back toward the architecture, the vendors, and the distant possibility of ice cream, snapped back to the field. Something was finally happening.
Second baseman Johnny Ray stepped to the plate next. He was from Chouteau, Oklahoma—a detail I knew without hesitation. I had a habit of flipping every baseball card over to study the fine print: height, weight, handedness, birthplace and year, and hometown. I’d mentally file each one away as if preparing for a final exam that no one else knew existed.
Knowing where a player came from made them feel more real to me, more human—less like distant heroes on glossy cardboard. My odd little obsession with geography, nurtured for hours in my bedroom, paid off. There was Johnny Ray, a fellow Oklahoman, standing right there in the batter’s box. For a moment the whole stadium felt like home turf.
Ray laid down a sacrifice bunt that helped advance Anderson to third base.
My pulse jumped when Wally Joyner stepped into the box. Batting .291, he was exactly the kind of hitter you trusted to nudge a run across when the game had been stuck in neutral all afternoon. And sure enough, Wally justified every penny of his $920,000 salary by lofting a clean sacrifice fly to center, bringing Anderson home for the only run anyone would see that day.
It wasn’t a dramatic win, or even a pretty one, but the Angels had eked out a victory over the Indians. To my eleven-year-old self, it felt like watching a masterpiece unfold in slow motion.
Joey Belle went hitless in his three trips against Kirk McCaskill, once frozen by a pitch he watched zip across the plate. But he left his mark on the field. Playing right, he hauled in six fly balls. One came off Joyner’s bat; he caught it and snapped a throw to shortstop Félix Fermín, who relayed it to second baseman Jerry Browne to double up Kent Anderson.
The best part of the day didn’t happen on the field. It happened after the final out, long after the lone run had settled into the record book. After most of the crowd had filed out, we drifted down toward the first-base dugout—a hopeful sweep, just in case a straggling player was still signing.
No luck. Only two security guards stood there, leaning on the rail, chatting the way people do when the show’s over, and the brooms are coming out.
I mustered my politest eleven-year-old voice. “Any players still around?”
One of the guards shrugged. “Not here,” he said. Then he added, almost casually, “But the Indians will be boarding their bus outside. Back of the stadium.”
My jaw nearly hit the ground. We thanked them like they’d handed us state secrets, then bolted—halfway around the stadium. We’d made it in time.
We waited with the kind of anticipation that makes minutes stretch. Thirty. Maybe forty-five. During this time, Mom did snap a picture of me posing with a California babe about my age—sun-bleached hair, easy confidence, and that West Coast glow I’d only seen on TV. She wore a sports bra crop top, but had no breasts (yet), and black compression shorts. She posed such that one of her butt cheeks was really, really accentuated while her hand rested on her hip. There was not an ounce of fat on this girl’s body. Toned. Everything between her head and toes. Like I said. Toned. I did my best not to look like a kid who’d forgotten how elbows worked. I was instantly smitten—a six-second crush preserved forever.
The players eventually appeared, walking up the ramp in some of the sharpest suits I’d ever seen—creases crisp, shoes shining, ties knotted with the seriousness of men who meant business even on a Sunday night.
And then the miracle: they stopped. They signed. They took their time. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.
I met Joe Carter. He signed for a handful of us—quick, effortless strokes—then made a getaway to the bus before anyone could hand him a second artifact. Corey Snyder was polite and unhurried. I remember him visiting with a certain couple, as if they were good friends. Snyder was born in Inglewood, just thirty-two miles away, so that made sense.
I will never, ever forget meeting the one and only Joey Belle. Yes, Albert Belle. Around his neck was a pair of SONY stereo headphones, the kind I’d only seen locked behind glass at electronics stores. They gleamed like luxury items from another tax bracket.
I stared at those headphones, thinking they must have cost him a pretty penny—maybe several. In my eleven-year-old mind, anyone who owned headphones like that practically lived on Mount Olympus. And now I was close enough to hear the faint hiss of whatever he’d been listening to, close enough to hold out my ball.
He looked enormous, like carved out of granite, with a stare that suggested he did not suffer fools or slow-moving autograph seekers. I edged forward, heart pounding.
“Mr. Belle?” I squeaked, holding out my ball.
He paused, glanced down, and without a word, signed his name. He handed the ball back, and for a moment I felt six inches taller.
And that—more than the Big A, more than the game itself—is what made the day unforgettable.
Word Count: 2,505
Here are six “writing” takeaways from this chapter:
The Beginning
1. Start with atmosphere, not explanation.
Good writing begins by placing the reader somewhere real. My chapter opens with electric Southern California air and a kid laying out his gear with ceremonial care. It orients the reader instantly.
Try This: Before you tell your story, drop us inside it. Give us a setting we can smell, see, or feel.
2. Zoom in on the obsession
I don’t say “I loved baseball.” I show the ritual: the mitt, the binder, the blue pens lined up like a preflight check
Try This: Identify the object, ritual, or habit that defined that chapter of your life—and write through it. Concrete objects are memoir’s best access points.
The Middle
3. Let the story breathe with well-chosen details
I sprinkle in just enough trivia, stats, and history to honor the voice of an 11-year-old superfan, without drowning the reader. The result is color, not clutter.
Try This: Choose details that deepen the emotional truth, not ones that merely decorate the page. Let each fact earn its place.
4. Build tension by letting your expectations collide with reality
The chapter’s middle isn’t about big drama—it’s about a slow game, a far-off seat, and the “twelve-second sulk” before wonder returns. Small disappointments and reversals keep the narrative human.
Try This: Don’t force drama. A memoir lives in the gap between what you hoped would happen and what actually did.
The End
5. Let the payoff be human, not heroic
The climax isn’t the game-winning run; it’s meeting players by the bus, being frozen by a California girl’s confidence, and holding out a ball to Albert Belle with a squeak.
Try This: End your scene where the feeling peaks, not where the action stops.
6. Close with the moment that changed you—even if it’s small.
My final line—what made the day unforgettable—anchors the whole chapter in emotional truth. The memory isn’t about baseball; it’s about being seen, being close, being chosen for a second.
Try This: Ask yourself: What stayed with me? End there. A memoir is memory distilled, not events recounted.
