Radio Tapio.

From PRX.

Dear diary.

6th grade. February 14th.

1991.

I am really depressed.

How could she break up with me?

Mom, you can't read this.

This particular journal was largely about boys.

Boys I had crushes on, boys I went out with, boys I made out with.

It's actually only the bottom half of the page, but I had like drawn an actual baseball diamond

and I wrote down next to each base when and with whom I had reached said base.

It did help me kind of organize all of this kind of unfamiliar stuff, but you know it also turns it into this sort of weird competition.

Who had gone to first? Who had gone to second? Who had been to third?

You know it's funny when you think about how things get disseminated in like a pre-internet age.

How did all of this spread among like every teenager in America?

Like how did everyone know this? It's very strange.

Over a century and a half before Dory Shea Freer drew that baseball diamond in her diary,

the first organized baseball game was played in New Jersey.

And by the end of World War II, baseball had become America's undisputed pastime.

It had captured the hearts of Americans everywhere.

And then around that same time, a teenager somewhere in America figured out that the rules of baseball could apply to something

...