One of my earliest memories—maybe my earliest—involves baseball: my dad and grandpa teaching me how to hit, at the park with the wooden pirate ship. I couldn’t have been older than 2 or 3. They were showing me how to hold the bat, guiding my swings. Each time I’d make contact with the slow, arching, underhanded lob, I’d stumble around imaginary bases, hitting a home run every time.
Baseball would go on to eat up the vast majority of my childhood. There was Little League, travel ball, and eventually varsity, not to mention trading cards, video games, and books. Summers were spent with my grandma, who would reminisce on Yankees of yesterday (Mickey Mantle and Tony Kubek were her favorites) and complain about “that bum Torre.” I could (and mostly still can) name all the World Series winners and losers. I even had a baseball blog—which I am not too embarrassed to admit but am too embarrassed to name.
So when it became evident my playing career was coming to an end because 5’6” first basemen don’t really have a future in baseball, I knew what to do—become GM of the New York Yankees. And the first step was to obtain a Sport Management Degree from Rutgers University—at least, that’s what all my advisors and professors sold me until I ended up selling tickets for a minor league team in Texas.
Why I Started Making Photographs
The seeds of this project were planted on June 6, 2015, a day game between the Baltimore Orioles and Cleveland [censored]. Visiting each Major League ballpark is at the top of every baseball fan’s bucket list. I was 23 and never traveled before, apart from a weekend tournament or a family day trip to the Jersey Shore. Yet I was itching to see America, one ballpark at a time. And Cleveland was batting leadoff because it was the cheapest flight.
At the game I took a million pictures with my phone—on the ground, standing on railings, and straining in different poses to get the perfect shot. I was compelled to photograph everything.
That winter I took the next logical step and purchased a “real” camera—a Nikon D3300 with the 18-55mm kit lens—to document the bucket list. I was now a “photographer.”
A phone photo from that first trip to Cleveland
One of my first photos taken with a real camera. Photoshop sliders on max.
Disillusionment
Fast forward to September 2019. I turned 28 having crossed 24 stadiums off the list. But then something happened. Well, a couple things happened.
The first thing was a presidential election, or my coming to god moment. I absolutely loved America, Back-to-Back World War Champs. In third grade I wanted to be a US Senator. Instead, I became a corporate drone. This disenchantment opened my eyes to the chasm between alleged American ideals and American reality. So I turned to Marx. Socialism always sounded appealing—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs—that’s some pretty cool shit right? But as a good American liberal, I filed that away as impractical idealism. Yet there was this Bernie guy making some good points and being called a dirty commie for it, so why not go directly to the primary source?
The second thing that happened was a global virus that shut the world down, Major League Baseball included. Games were closed to the public and I sure as hell wasn’t getting anywhere near a large crowd of people. Not that I cared about that. How could I care about that when people were dying? How could I give a shit about a silly sport when Blackrock owns $10 trillion in assets while 500,000 Americans sleep on a sidewalk—coincidentally the same number of Iraqi civilians killed by The Troops. Oh, but my team won last night, it’s all good.
From 2020-2021 I don’t think I watched more than a handful of innings. I certainly didn’t watch a game from start to end. Baseball wasn’t on my mind much at all, until a random archive dig. I came across all the stadium photographs made the year before the pandemic. All I could see were giant corporate ads intruding every frame, but as my initial disgust with these “unusable” pictures ebbed, I saw a way to synthesize my love of baseball and my disdain for the business side of the sport—and our capitalist society at large. Eureka! After a lengthy breakup, my relationship with baseball was rekindled.
The Project
If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame explores American culture and society within the confines of America’s pastime. Baseball is a dying sport, with a dwindling fan base and myriad of problems that won’t be solved so long as it is beholden to the profit-making interests of owners and advertisers, at the expense of fans like myself. This work is my attempt to document America— at the grand ole ballpark.
Why (the question that haunts of every body of work)?
Baseball directly shaped the course of my life—it’s the reason I even picked up a damn camera! As I grow disillusioned with America and her national pastime, it’s the camera that helps me reconcile the dissonance, to explain the world as I see it. Photography is my voice.
If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame is more than a conflicted love story or a social commentary. It's a self-portrait.