World Series

Baseball is timeless. It's also cumulative. Fans have watched the same sport played over decades, learning about the legendary athletes and their historic moments that came before much of it documented and living on in black-and-white images.

The game and all of the stories that come with it helped me to assimilate when I moved to California from El Salvador at age 12. I heard about Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, legends from a time before me whose influences add up to make baseball what it is.

This was my first time covering a World Series, and I wanted to show the players and games in a way that honored that nostalgia that, to me, is baseball's essence. So, I packed Canon 1DX Mark II cameras with lightning-quick shutter speed, able to capture split-second swings and catches, for the Chronicle's daily needs. But I also packed my Polaroid SX-70, a camera created decades before the Astros won their only World Series in 2017, and fistfuls of film.

Polaroids convey a sense of a time far gone, contrasted with a feeling of immediacy. The shutter clicks, the print pops out, and you are instantly holding a fragment of history. The film and the process itself is imperfect, with any particle of dust affecting the way the image will look. Many times, the players moved just too fast for the film.

But that was OK. This was our history, of Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman and Juan Soto. It was urgent and immediate those crazy seven nights, but it also was part of the bigger history I'm still learning about, long to be repeated and remembered.

Here are the captured moments: