The package arrived on a Tuesday, which feels important to mention only because Tuesdays are historically terrible for me. Alas, on this particular Tuesday, wedged between a glossy and cheerful Whataburger coupon and an envelope stamped RENT DUE in red, as if the color itself might frighten the money out of me, I found a small padded envelope covered in Japanese characters I could not read and a signature written by an actual human hand.

Inside were baseball cards, and this alone would not have surprised me. What surprised me was whose face looked back from the cardstock: Shugo Maki, the sure-handed second baseman of the Yokohama BayStars, a team whose name, three years earlier, would have meant nothing to me. I couldn’t have found Yokohama on a map if you held a gun to my head, and I certainly had no idea that the BayStars existed. And yet here I was, a man who now rose at four in the morning (an hour I associate less with devotion than with insomnia) to watch this team play, to watch this particular player hit dingers on the other side of the world, and to feel like I had a dog in the fight.

The sender was named Thomas Love Seagull — and yes, I have said that name out loud four times since receiving this package, and yes, it sounds like a character J.D. Salinger would invent if J.D. Salinger wrote a book about minor league scouting in Hokkaido. Thomas runs a blog called “Baseball in Japan,” which is exactly what it sounds like and somehow so much more: a labor of love from a guy who apparently spends his days (as most of you reading this) thinking about box scores, current standings and the art of moving the runners over.

I have never owned a Japanese baseball card. Not one. In 40-some years of loving this dumb, beautiful game, (collecting cards in shoe boxes, trading doubles on elementary school blacktops…) it never once occurred to me that an entire universe of cardboard existed on the other side of the Pacific, with its own stars and its own rookies. And now here is Shugo Maki, staring out from a card stock that feels different in my hand, like these cards know they’re representing a league that takes its baseball very, very seriously.

Nobody understands how special baseball cards are anymore, and I was reminded of this that afternoon on the living room floor, ripping open the envelope with an urgency I would have been embarrassed to explain to anyone watching. Because it wasn’t a ballplayer I was holding, it was a kid I hadn’t let myself think about in some years: an old version of me, cross-legged on a rug someplace, sorting cards by team with that specific kind of concentration you only get to have once, when you’re 12 and nothing in the world has come around to ask anything of you. No debts. No bad news. Just a stack of cardboard, a little imagination, and all the time there is.

I’ve never met Thomas Love Seagull. I probably found his blog through some rabbit hole of a rabbit hole, the kind of internet Cheshire Cat adventure that eats up a Sunday afternoon and leaves you smarter about something nobody else in your stratosphere cares a lick about. But he thought of me. He put cards in an envelope, walked to a post office, and sent a piece of Yokohama baseball across the dark curve of the ocean for no other reason then he figured I’d appreciate it.

The human journey, I think, is a little bit insane, a little bit fightening, and a little bit unbearably beautiful. Most days I forget this…and then an afternoon comes along and reminds me. And then that afternoon goes wherever it is they go.

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