I always thought there were two kinds of baseball fans. The traditionally more charming of the two is the person who is born into fandom of a certain team because of who his or her parents root for and where they live and then continues to support the home team forever.

The second is the bandwagon fan. This individual is wowed by high salaries, marquee names, championship banners.  Usually this involves the Yankees or the Red Sox or maybe the Dodgers.  The Phillies had a lot of fans a few years ago and sold out every game. Now the Phillies don’t have so many fans. Wonder why?

The only problem with my theory is that I don’t fit into either category. While I’ve been a fan of the Mets consistently since they were formed, I’ve also been a fan of several other teams as different times and it can’t be explained by either heredity or celebrity.

Sometimes my baseball preferences clearly reflected where I was in life. That is what this series of blog posts in about. It’s about my childhood heroes, about coming of age at the same time my favorite team did, about learning the joys of watching baseball games in places other than New York. And it’s also about growing disillusioned with the influence of money on the sport.

I’ll be posting these stories weekly between now and the start of the World Series.