When I attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I bring a lot of gadgets with me: a tiny laptop, a smartphone, a digital camera. But my most useful accessory always ends up being my Cardinals cap.

As I troll the booths showcasing the latest tech toys, I wear a name tag that says I am from the Post-Dispatch. But from across a convention-hall floor, people with St. Louis connections can spot that red cap, and they often end up collaring me.

Last night I was chatting with a San Diegan from a software company called Boxee that enables Mac users to aggregate all their music, photos, TV channels and streaming-video sites onto a single screen that can be shared worldwide. (There are lot of all-in-one media solutions being shown here.) At the end of a nice chat, he asked me if the Skyview Drive-in in Belleville was still open. It turns out his wife is from the East Side and attended Wash U.

Then a guy was telling me about the new Sharper Image. He said some investors bought the name of the recently bankrupted tech-store chain and are hoping to restore its luster with value-priced gadgets that will be sold at department and specialty stores. But it turns out the guy was a Cubs fan who was more interested in quizzing me about the Cards’ bullpen.

I always look forward to seeing the Energizer booth, because it’s a St. Louis company whose convention reps spot the red hat and then hand me the top-secret lowdown on the newest battery technologies. Ann Balsamo, who does P.R. for Energizer, said the big news this year will be zinc-air batteries, solar assisted power packs and wireless charging. She said the latter technology involves placing your phones, MP3 players and other devices on an ordinary-looking tabletop with embedded circuitry that charges the device without plugs or wires. Then Ann asked me not to mention that she was wearing bunny ears, because her friends and family read the newspaper and might not realize they were just pink-foam promotional bunny ears with the Energizer logo, and not something, you know, silly. I told her my lips were sealed.

Another booth was promoting Fuji’s Enviromax batteries. They’re free of mercury and packaged with a minimum of plastic. As I was looking at the batteries, a Fuji rep named Jerome Pruett saw my cap, handed me his business card and suggested I should Google him.

Why, I asked.

He said he pitched for the Cardinals in 1967, when he was a 19-year-old phenom with a 100-mph fastball. He roomed with Roger Maris, got pitching tips from Bob Gibson and was looking forward to a long career. But then he blew out his arm, was cut from the team and was drafted into the Army. Now he sells batteries. “But you don’t want to hear my old baseball stories,” he said. “You want to get back to the toys.”

But I did want to hear more. Because long before I ever heard of laptops, smartphones and digital cameras, this boy’s first and favorite toy was a baseball.