Chuck D
I asked Chuck D one question—“What do you feel when you walk into a ballpark?”—and the floodgates opened. Turns out, the guy who helped make the baseball hat iconic doesn’t just like baseball. He lives it. Cardboard stadiums as a kid. Bubblegum-stained cards. Sketchbooks full of players and parks. We talked Mazeroski, Shea, Doc Gooden, Baseball Digest, and why some walls are 280 feet deep (hint: there’s a train behind them). This wasn’t just nostalgia—it was reverence. Ballparks, to Chuck, aren’t just places. They’re memory machines. And I gotta be honest: I’ve never loved the game more than I did after this.
Robby Incmikoski: What does it say about your love of the game when I say the number “9” and you immediately think of Mazeroski and the Pirates?
Chuck D: Baseball was a refuge. It was a thrilling field of imagination. What makes it different is the slower pace—you can revisit the moments long after the game ends. You etch them into your soul. That meant everything to me growing up, wanting to do something different with my childhood.
Robby: What was the moment it really bit you?
Chuck D: 1969. I was nine. That Mets team came from nowhere and won 100 games. But honestly, it was 1970 that sealed it. I started reading Baseball Digest—that magazine changed me. I started drawing from it, mimicking the portraits and puzzles. It shaped my skills as a cartoonist.
Robby: You even built stadiums with your brother, right?
Chuck D: Out of cardboard boxes. We made Tiger Stadium, Comiskey, even one like the stadium in The Natural. We’d paint the field green, draw fans, build upper decks. You could open it up and play inside it with little painted players. It was beautiful.
Robby: Do your fans today know about this side of you?
Chuck D: Not really. Baseball’s not the national pastime anymore. But me and C-Doc made “We Wreck Stadiums”—a rap record entirely about baseball. Nobody else in HipHop’s touched baseball like that. I’ve had songs about cards, stadiums, even the heartbreak of players not making the Hall of Fame. But most people don’t ask.
Robby: You once told me you kept Hank Aaron’s autograph in your wallet?
Chuck D: Yeah. Got it at the Atlanta airport. Just saw him walking by and he signed it. I never put it under glass. I carried it with me. That was personal.
Robby: You can name lineups from the '70s by heart. What were your favorite Mets teams?
Chuck D: The '73 Mets. “You Gotta Believe.” That team came back from last place. We had Willie Mays. We beat the Big Red Machine. Took the A’s to Game 7. I cried when it ended.
And the '85 Mets? Man, that was a romantic season. Strawberry, Gooden, Carter—Gooden went 24–4 with a 1.53 ERA! Watching him pitch in real time was magic. I was 25 years old and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Robby: When you walk into a ballpark today, what do you feel?
Chuck D: I feel something you can’t get from TV. I study the field, the architecture, the quirks. The manicured lines. Every stadium tells a story. Like the Polo Grounds—its weird dimensions were because it was built for polo. Or quirky outfield fences in cities where you couldn’t move a train line.
I know the difference between a stadium and a ballpark. Some fans don’t understand that. But I look at those intentional quirks and love them.
Robby: You helped make the baseball cap a HipHop staple. Why the Pirates cap?
Chuck D: Black and gold. The “P” could stand for “Public.” I loved Clemente. The Pirates had the first all-Black starting lineup. People thought the “P” stood for Public Enemy. That look—Pirates hat, Raiders jacket—was our look.
Robby: What would you say to a fan trying to visit all 30 ballparks?
Chuck D: Do it by car. Take your time. Journal it. Sketch the ballparks. That’s what I’d do. You can document it better than ever now, but there’s still magic in putting pen to paper.
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More from Chuck D
NOTE: The above was edited for clarity and length.
You can read the full transcript here.