I've always collected baseball cards. I first started playing baseball when I was eight years old, and when my hometown Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, I began meeting many of the players at autograph signings and events around Boston（波士顿（美国东北部城市））. But I noticed a few things in common. These players weren't very friendly, they were all quite overpaid, and they acted more like celebrities. So in middle school, a friend introduced me to a new way to collect autographs, writing to players through the mail. In doing so, I would write a letter, send a self（自己）-addressed（写名字地址） stamped envelope（信封）, and send a few baseball cards.

  Within（在……之内） a few weeks, I'd often get a response. But it was never the modern players that would send back. It was always the players from the '50s and '60s who were much friendlier and much less recognized during their career. So I continued to write letters to these retired ballplayers, and in 2007, Topps baseball cards came out with a set（[数] 集合） where they included a few Negro（黑人） League（同盟） baseball player cards. Negro League was a period from 1920 to the 1960s where blacks who were segregated（隔离） from playing in the major leagues（同盟） played in their own baseball league（同盟）, often busing around the country playing two to three games a day under much less glamorous（富有魅力的） conditions. But over time, due（预期的） to the lack（缺乏） of glamorization and public interest, everything just kind（种类） of faded（褪色） away, leaving the history of the Negro Leagues behind.

  So I ended up writing to these players in this set, and within a few weeks, they signed my cards. From here, I began writing to Negro Leagues who didn't have baseball cards, guys that were even less recognized. And in my letters, I'd often include my phone number, and a few of them began reaching out to me. When I started speaking with them, I noticed they all had a few things in common. None of them had baseball cards. None of them had any documentation（文件）, no newspaper articles, no sorts of photos from their career.

  Just nothing tying them to the game. And lastly（最后）, they had just left all their teammates behind. They hadn't stayed in touch（触） with any of their teammates. So I tried to change this, and I started off by making baseball cards in my home computer, printing them out, designing them, and sending them to ballplayers. And what I also did is I began signing up for newspaper archive（档案馆） websites where I'd find（找到） old newspaper articles that would give these guys the recognition（认出） that, you know, tied them to the game.