Insane. I must look absolutely insane, I thought. 

Because if someone had opened my bedroom door at this exact moment, they would’ve seen me standing, bent over next to my bed, shifting back and forth on either leg. I was not momentarily possessed. Rather, Ruppert Jones, former two-time Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star, had just told me over the phone to simulate a proper ready position in the outfield. “Just rock from side to side, Luca,” he said. 

I didn’t think twice about getting up within my approximately 10-by-20-foot bedroom and pretending I was an outfielder roaming the grass in a cavernous MLB stadium. Because when a two-time All-Star is trying to tell you something baseball-related, it’s probably a decent enough idea to listen and learn. 

If you’re bent over and you’re in position, he asked, what’s your first move when the ball’s hit? 

I pondered, trying to think this one through. Up, he said. Your first move is up. But if you’re ready, rocking from side to side as I was rather than bent over with hands on knees, it would save an extra split-second of reaction time to the ball. That’s how Jones played defense in his heyday of the 1980s. This 45-minute phone call started out as an interview about Angel Stadium for a story I was working on. I promise, it really legitimately did. But a few minutes into our conversation, Jones started talking about how baseball today is different from when he played. 

Immediately, the baseball nerd living inside climbed into my brain and started pulling the strings controlling my mouth and the original intention of the interview spiraled off into the distance like a home run ball off Jones’ bat in 1985. 

I asked him about the hardest pitcher he ever faced. Frank Tanana in 1977, he answered. He had won over 200 games in his career, Jones estimated. “Oh yeah, I remember,” I found myself saying. “You’re too young to remember that, man,” he laughed. He was certainly right, because I’m 18 years old and aggressively baby-faced. But because I obsessively pore over statistics in my free time and had seen Tanana’s, we then got into a long-winded conversation about advanced analytics in baseball nowadays. 

I thought they were good measures of a player’s performance. He didn’t. Yet while he was eminently more qualified to discuss the topic than me, I pressed on anyway, because I was having fun. It’s quite hard to read emotion over the static murmurs of a phone call. But by the fluctuations in his tone, by the occasional laugh, by the way he repeated my name at the beginning of most sentences to grab my attention, I think he was having fun too.