My Dad has since passed and my brother still loves baseball. He has all of the baseball cards we collected and put into plastic binders. He has the baseball signed by Hank Greenberg, a legendary Tigers player, from 1934. And he now lives in Atlanta where he goes to at least a game a week to watch the Braves play. And he takes his kids who enjoy hotdogs and ice cream and being with their Dad. I, on the other hand, left baseball many years ago. Perhaps because I just lost interest in the game as my favorite players retired. Or maybe I developed other interests as I grew older. Books. Art. Music. Or maybe it was because I grew further and further from my childhood memories.

So it was with a bit of melancholy and curiosity that I took an animation job for a web project called Baseball Stories, a nine part series featuring some of the best players in the major leagues today. In order to create a 30 second opening animation, I immersed myself in baseball. I spent hours watching game footage, scouring image collections and finding minutiae like hit distribution diagrams, strike charts and visualizations of baseball rotation paths. The project was challenging and interesting and rewarding. But did it bring back my love of baseball? Not really. I won’t be watching or attending a game anytime soon. But I will remember more vividly the warm nights at Tiger Stadium, sitting with my Dad and brother, waving a pennant and cheering for players who no longer play the game.