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[111/365] the Hrbek jersey
Apr. 21st, 2021 11:43 pmThe Minnesota Twins retired Kent Hrbek's number in 1995.
Each baseball player wears a one- or two-digit number on their jersey, and usually the number is recycled to a new player when the one who wore it retires or leaves the team. But sometimes the player is very good and with the team for a long time, so the team and the fans end up associating the number so strongly with that person that when they retire the number is retired too. This means no player for that team wears it again, and a big version of the number is displayed in the stadium so everyone at the ball game can see it. There's a ceremony for retiring the number, which takes place at some particular game.
The Minnesota Twins retired Kent Hrbek's number in 1995, which means I was thirteen years old. I don't know why we went to that game: was it intentional? We only went to a couple Twins games in my entire childhood; one to see the Mariners because Ken Griffey Jr. was my brother's favorite player (because his baseball glove had Junior's fake-signature in it, but I think really because he was always a fairweather fan who liked winning teams which the Twins certainly weren't by this point), and once I got to see Jim Abbott pitch, which it turns out was this game. Nothing else about that box score sticks in my mind, even though I got to see my beloved Kirby Puckett play.
All I remember, and I remember it distinctly, was the replica Kent hrbek jerseys being given away to "the first 10,000 kids 12 and under" which I was worried about because I was thirtee but I desperately wanted a jersey. I adored Kent Hrbek as much as I did Kirby Puckett; these two were giants in my tiny life, making me think by the time I was nine that winning the World Series was a rather unremarkable event that was going to continue to occur at regular intervals through my life, since it had already happened when I was five. (It hasn't happened once since, and I'm thirty-nine now.)
Baseball had broken my heart by going on strike the previous year. As a kid I didn't understand the specifics of the situation at all, all I knew was that one of the stalwart features of my summer could suddenly be taken away. To go to a game the next year, to be reminded of Herbie and everything he'd done that made me love him (and that this point the love was such that I truly believed he hadn't pushed Ron Gant off the base) back when I was a kid -- this is how I thought about it when I was 13, "back when I was a kid" -- back when baseball was reliable and good and exciting, was such a treat.
Turns out I needn't have worried about being too old; no one was checking non-existent kid ID to see if I was 12 or under. Walking through the turnstiles next to my little brother might have helped too; we were clearly Kids. The girl handing out the jerseys I remember as not being that much older than us, a teenager just whipping jerseys out of a box, all the same size, barely looking as she grabbed them out of a big box as crowds flowed past.
I wanted to wear the jersey over my normal t-shirt at the game, but my mom didn't allow it. She said it had to be "kept nice." I didn't know what'd happened to it after we got home that night. I was frantic about it for a while. I rooted through my closet and under the bed but everything was so neatly organized, so excruciatingly familiar, and none of it was the Hrbek jersey.
It was one of those things I'd randomly think about while I was trying to fall asleep at night:
Why had it been put away? It was special to me but it didn't have any monetary value or anything, a shirt like literally 9,999 others, with nothing special about it, the occasion of the number retirement was only connected to it in my mind. To anyone less obsessed it would've just looked like any replica t-shirt, it could've come from Shopko or Scheels like my other Twins stuff. As a kid I was used to outgrowing my clothes all the time and it hurt to think that this would join them; this thing from when I was a kid I'd one day outgrow and never be able to make use of.
Eventually I learned it was in the wicker chest, but that was no help. This collection of things my mom had decided to keep for me since I was a baby was kept in my parents' closet, no room for it in my own tiny room. And even if I did sneak in and find the shirt, amidst the piles of weird old baby stuff and things I'd made in school and clothes carefully folded in tissue paper which my mom always believes will keep clothing from getting creases in it, what could I do with it? It's not as if I could wear it without my mom seeing.
What did I want it so badly for anyway? I couldn't even articulate that to myself really. It was special because it was lost, and it was mine, and Kent Hrbek was special to my childhood, baseball was special. I just wanted to see the thing again, wanted to touch it.
But there it stayed. For years, as I grew up and moved away. It stayed there for twenty-four years and I never saw it, never touched it. But I kept thinking about it. I caught homesickness and nostalgia like a disease when I moved to the UK, and this seemed somehow emblematic of everything I was wistful for, everything it hurt to remember and do without.
Finally a couple of years ago, my mom, thinking toward eventually having to move off the farm and out of this house they'd lived in for longer than I have existed, wanted to go through the wicker chest with me, see what I wanted to keep and what could be given away or thrown away. I had little idea of what was in there and didn't remember or recognize much of it. The only thing I was absolutely sure was there, the only thing I really cared about, was the Kent Hrbek jersey.
When we unearthed it, it was covered in weird brown stains and the lettering, screenprinted with what was likely to be no special care, had faded and and flaked. It broke my heart a little to see it like that, and to think of how it'd just sat so nearby moldering when I was nearby and pining.
My mom treated the stains and washed the shirt for me. I packed it with my other clothes, the clothes I actually wore, in my suitcase and took it home as if it were a normal shirt. Not knowing what else to do with it, I put it in the drawer with my other t-shirts when I unpacked, as if it were a normal shirt. But it wasn't; I was scared to even try it on. It looked pretty big for something tossed at even a surreptitious 13-year-old, but I'm so used to being too big and too fat for everything. Anyway, would I want to wear something that was still flaky and had the lightened-but-obvious brown stains on it?
I moved it to a new drawer with my t-shirts a few months ago, and wondered again what to do with it. I always figured it was a decision I could make later. But then this morning, amidst a new and worsening depression, having already rejected my first choice of outfit and even my second choice of trousers, I was sinking into a feeling of being too big and the wrong shape for all of my clothes. Digging through the t-shirt drawer, I don't know why I thought it was suddenly the time to try on the Hrbek shirt, but it was.
I put it on and I actually loved it.
Maybe this is a story about appreciating things while you've got them, maybe it's about how they're there for you when you least expect it, but I don't really have a neat moral to tie this story up with. I just like this picture. I wore the shirt to work today and it's tight on me and I wish my body were a different shape but I still felt great.
Each baseball player wears a one- or two-digit number on their jersey, and usually the number is recycled to a new player when the one who wore it retires or leaves the team. But sometimes the player is very good and with the team for a long time, so the team and the fans end up associating the number so strongly with that person that when they retire the number is retired too. This means no player for that team wears it again, and a big version of the number is displayed in the stadium so everyone at the ball game can see it. There's a ceremony for retiring the number, which takes place at some particular game.
The Minnesota Twins retired Kent Hrbek's number in 1995, which means I was thirteen years old. I don't know why we went to that game: was it intentional? We only went to a couple Twins games in my entire childhood; one to see the Mariners because Ken Griffey Jr. was my brother's favorite player (because his baseball glove had Junior's fake-signature in it, but I think really because he was always a fairweather fan who liked winning teams which the Twins certainly weren't by this point), and once I got to see Jim Abbott pitch, which it turns out was this game. Nothing else about that box score sticks in my mind, even though I got to see my beloved Kirby Puckett play.
All I remember, and I remember it distinctly, was the replica Kent hrbek jerseys being given away to "the first 10,000 kids 12 and under" which I was worried about because I was thirtee but I desperately wanted a jersey. I adored Kent Hrbek as much as I did Kirby Puckett; these two were giants in my tiny life, making me think by the time I was nine that winning the World Series was a rather unremarkable event that was going to continue to occur at regular intervals through my life, since it had already happened when I was five. (It hasn't happened once since, and I'm thirty-nine now.)
Baseball had broken my heart by going on strike the previous year. As a kid I didn't understand the specifics of the situation at all, all I knew was that one of the stalwart features of my summer could suddenly be taken away. To go to a game the next year, to be reminded of Herbie and everything he'd done that made me love him (and that this point the love was such that I truly believed he hadn't pushed Ron Gant off the base) back when I was a kid -- this is how I thought about it when I was 13, "back when I was a kid" -- back when baseball was reliable and good and exciting, was such a treat.
Turns out I needn't have worried about being too old; no one was checking non-existent kid ID to see if I was 12 or under. Walking through the turnstiles next to my little brother might have helped too; we were clearly Kids. The girl handing out the jerseys I remember as not being that much older than us, a teenager just whipping jerseys out of a box, all the same size, barely looking as she grabbed them out of a big box as crowds flowed past.
I wanted to wear the jersey over my normal t-shirt at the game, but my mom didn't allow it. She said it had to be "kept nice." I didn't know what'd happened to it after we got home that night. I was frantic about it for a while. I rooted through my closet and under the bed but everything was so neatly organized, so excruciatingly familiar, and none of it was the Hrbek jersey.
It was one of those things I'd randomly think about while I was trying to fall asleep at night:
Why had it been put away? It was special to me but it didn't have any monetary value or anything, a shirt like literally 9,999 others, with nothing special about it, the occasion of the number retirement was only connected to it in my mind. To anyone less obsessed it would've just looked like any replica t-shirt, it could've come from Shopko or Scheels like my other Twins stuff. As a kid I was used to outgrowing my clothes all the time and it hurt to think that this would join them; this thing from when I was a kid I'd one day outgrow and never be able to make use of.
Eventually I learned it was in the wicker chest, but that was no help. This collection of things my mom had decided to keep for me since I was a baby was kept in my parents' closet, no room for it in my own tiny room. And even if I did sneak in and find the shirt, amidst the piles of weird old baby stuff and things I'd made in school and clothes carefully folded in tissue paper which my mom always believes will keep clothing from getting creases in it, what could I do with it? It's not as if I could wear it without my mom seeing.
What did I want it so badly for anyway? I couldn't even articulate that to myself really. It was special because it was lost, and it was mine, and Kent Hrbek was special to my childhood, baseball was special. I just wanted to see the thing again, wanted to touch it.
But there it stayed. For years, as I grew up and moved away. It stayed there for twenty-four years and I never saw it, never touched it. But I kept thinking about it. I caught homesickness and nostalgia like a disease when I moved to the UK, and this seemed somehow emblematic of everything I was wistful for, everything it hurt to remember and do without.
Finally a couple of years ago, my mom, thinking toward eventually having to move off the farm and out of this house they'd lived in for longer than I have existed, wanted to go through the wicker chest with me, see what I wanted to keep and what could be given away or thrown away. I had little idea of what was in there and didn't remember or recognize much of it. The only thing I was absolutely sure was there, the only thing I really cared about, was the Kent Hrbek jersey.
When we unearthed it, it was covered in weird brown stains and the lettering, screenprinted with what was likely to be no special care, had faded and and flaked. It broke my heart a little to see it like that, and to think of how it'd just sat so nearby moldering when I was nearby and pining.
My mom treated the stains and washed the shirt for me. I packed it with my other clothes, the clothes I actually wore, in my suitcase and took it home as if it were a normal shirt. Not knowing what else to do with it, I put it in the drawer with my other t-shirts when I unpacked, as if it were a normal shirt. But it wasn't; I was scared to even try it on. It looked pretty big for something tossed at even a surreptitious 13-year-old, but I'm so used to being too big and too fat for everything. Anyway, would I want to wear something that was still flaky and had the lightened-but-obvious brown stains on it?
I moved it to a new drawer with my t-shirts a few months ago, and wondered again what to do with it. I always figured it was a decision I could make later. But then this morning, amidst a new and worsening depression, having already rejected my first choice of outfit and even my second choice of trousers, I was sinking into a feeling of being too big and the wrong shape for all of my clothes. Digging through the t-shirt drawer, I don't know why I thought it was suddenly the time to try on the Hrbek shirt, but it was.
I put it on and I actually loved it.
Maybe this is a story about appreciating things while you've got them, maybe it's about how they're there for you when you least expect it, but I don't really have a neat moral to tie this story up with. I just like this picture. I wore the shirt to work today and it's tight on me and I wish my body were a different shape but I still felt great.