Caught looking?

My twin brother Iain and I watched every Blue Jays game together. Not always in the same room or at the same bar or even in the same city, but always together. A text from him simply saying “Vladdy” or “Kirk daddyyy” was all I needed. My stream was usually behind his and that message told me to look up because something cool just happened. We had a whole language built around the game and a lot of what’s in this app started as something one of us looked up mid-inning.

When he was in the hospital, I told him all about what had just happened in the World Series. What was going on in free agency. What was (not) happening with Shohei’s plane. I don’t know if he could hear me, but that’s what I’d tell him about when I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Tom was my father-in-law. The first thing my now wife told him when we met was that I liked baseball. She couldn’t even finish her sentence before he started asking my thoughts on the Blue Jays that year and the questionable decisions their manager was making at the time. He was a Mariners guy, but he had something about the Jays ready to discuss every time we spent time together.

I didn’t build this for them. I’m not actually sure who I built this for to be honest. I just kept adding the things I wanted to know — the stats and context and history that make a game feel like more than nine innings. But I think about them both every time I’m building out a new feature or using the site to follow a game. I think about every “Vladdy” text I’ll never get. Every John Schneider or Charlie Montoyo blunder we’ll never moan about. This app is about my love for baseball and baseball is how I loved Iain and Tom.