From the Dugout

From the Dugout

May 19, 2026 1:30am Sally Bjornsen

If you want to feel genuinely, unreservedly happy — find a t-ball field on a spring morning, pull up a lawn chair, and just watch. You'll be smiling before the first inning ends. It's pure comic gold. Above the little purple-and-gold player has decided that whatever is happening at first base is worth a full, head-down inspection. Mitt on the ground, back rounded, cap facing down. The whole universe has reduced to this base, right now. Baseball can wait.

This spring, photographer Troy Nebeker had the opportunity to capture exactly that kind of magic — a series of youth baseball and t-ball games shot on assignment for Academy Sports + Outdoors and agency McGarrah Jessee. The brief was simple enough: document the energy and excitement of the season. What they came back with was something more. These images are a love letter to the sport in its purest, most joyful form.

There's no posturing here, no performance for the camera. Just kids in oversized helmets, coaches bending to knee height, and the kind of unrestrained enthusiasm you can only find at the beginning of a baseball journey.

From the Dugout

The best stories in baseball are rarely on the field. They're in the dugout — where the noise is loudest, the face paint is freshest, and the team spirit runs hottest. In Image 1, a young player grips the chain-link fence, mouth wide open mid-cheer, teammates pressed in close behind him. He's wearing red, white, and blue war paint on his cheeks. He means business.

This is what sports photography at its best captures: not the highlight reel moment, but the emotional temperature of the whole experience. The community of it. The belonging.

Gear as self-expression

If there's one image in this set that stops you in your tracks, it's this one. A player on the Hillside team — jersey red, hat blue, red-and-white pearl necklace — holds a Rawlings glove that looks like it was designed by a committee of kindergartners asked to make the most beautiful object possible. Hot pink, sky blue, sunshine yellow. It is absolutely, completely perfect.

For Academy Sports + Outdoors, this image says everything: gear isn't just functional, it's personal. It's how a kid walks onto a field and says, without words, I belong here and I've got style. That Rawlings glove is going to be remembered for a long time.

"Stop by your local baseball field this season. You'll leave with a spring in your step — guaranteed."

This image is tender and elemental. A coach in a red Crawdads shirt leans in, placing the ball on the tee for a tiny batter in a red helmet. The child holds the bat. The coach holds the moment. In the background, small figures in purple and gold are spread across the infield doing their best approximation of ready position. This is where baseball begins — not in stadiums, but on patchy grass fields, with patient coaches and determined little hitters.

There's an intimacy to this shot that Troy Nebeker has captured beautifully. The compositional choice to shoot from behind the batter puts us inside the child's perspective — the scale of the coach, the whole wide field ahead of them, the singular focus of that ball on the tee.

Scenes from the diamond

And then there there's this one— pure comic gold. The purple-and-gold player has decided that whatever is happening at first base is worth a full, head-down inspection. Mitt on the ground, back rounded, cap facing down. The whole universe has reduced to this base, right now. Baseball can wait.

This is t-ball. This is spring. This is the sport at its most alive.

Project Credits

Client: Academy Sports & Outdoors

Agency: McGarrah Jessee

Photographer: Troy Nebeker