Baseball memories: Career in baseball started with dad’s lefty glove

As baseball season gets into full swing, we are asking 710 ESPN Seattle and KIRO Radio hosts about their favorite baseball memories. Leave your own unforgettable moment in the comments.

710 ESPN Seattle’s Shannon Drayer has traveled with the Mariners to stadiums around the country for 14 of the 18 years she’s covered the team. And while she’s met and interviewed some of sport’s all-time greats, her favorite baseball memories came on the other side of the world with a group of her peers.

Drayer was born in Bitburg, Germany and traveled the world in her youth. She lived in Singapore, where she first started playing baseball and softball. In those days before the internet, the game was her only connection to America, where her parents were born, other than long-distance phone calls and the weekly Stars and Stripes newspaper. So she and the other young transplants stormed the baseball diamond with a different kind of vigor.

“My first team was the Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff and Madison Rebels,” she said. “I loved playing. I had my father’s glove, which was absolutely ridiculous because he was left-handed and I was right-handed, but I learned to play left-handed. The glove was probably almost half the size that I was. It was a first basemen’s glove and there I am, 10 years old and this giant, giant glove. But it was the only glove I would play with until it fell apart in high school.”

She said the games helped give her a sense of camaraderie and a much-needed weekly taste of home.

“It really just put you in touch with home,” she said. “It was just the most American thing to be these little American kids thousands and thousands of miles away, in the tropics, playing baseball over at the American high school. That’s something that stays with me to this day.”

Other baseball memories: ‘C’mon, son. Rock and fire’ | Why grandpa’s are the best | It all started with an 11-year-old named ‘Boogie’ | A backyard diamond made of pillows | A great reason to yell during a Mariners’ game

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