It's that time again

[alwaysamy]

I have a column up at Romancing the Blog today, on baseball! Well, on baseball heroes in romance -- or the lack of them.

Hey, when a girl dreams about David Wright as often as I do...

(Hush. I know he's only 23.)

Comments

[ex-fashioni.livejournal.com]

But he's prettttttttttttty. :-)

[susanw.livejournal.com]

My main Mariners crush is Ichiro Suzuki. Our younger stars range from kinda plain (Chris Snelling, Jose Lopez, Yuniesky Betancourt) to downright homely but scary talented (Felix Hernandez).

But lately I've developed a fondness for Raul Ibanez. He's not conventionally handsome, though he's got a certain Yul Brynner appeal about him in his more intense moments. But it's not about the sex appeal so much as what he's come to symbolize. You see, Dylan and I have developed a habit of talking about my writing career in baseball terms, and for the past several months we've been thinking of me as Triple-A, waiting for the call up to the big club. After my last few rejections, Dylan rather dismally said, "I think you're starting to be Quad-A." I'd never heard the term, so I asked him to explain, and he said it meant a player who everyone expected to be something big, but who had trouble making the transition to the big club--he'd pop up in September, but never be on the team in April, etc. I asked him if there were any players that were called Quad-A who eventually stuck and became successful big leaguers. He said, "Well, the obvious recent example would be Raul Ibanez."

So he's my new favorite player because he's my symbol of hope. It took him 10 years from his minor league debut and 5 years from his first major league appearance to land a regular starting job, and that one-sentence summary doesn't half do justice to the sheer number of setbacks he went through before he finally made it. He's not one of the all-time greats and he'll never make the Hall of Fame, but he *is* by any measure a successful Major League player, nothing Quad-A about him. And if he can stick with it and prove the naysayers wrong, I can damn well do it too and get myself published and build a writing career.

Anyway, to pull back from the specific to the general, that's one of the things I love about baseball--it's such a great metaphor for so much else in life.

[dre-l.livejournal.com]

I've crushed on hockey players I could have given birth to. Then there was the time I went to an A's game and arrived early enough to see Barry Zito go through his pregame yoga routine...