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Maggie
How could you not be romantic about baseball?
It’s a game of failure and perseverance. A game that starts when the flowers first bloom and ends when the leaves fall from the trees. Fathers bond with their sons over their favorite teams, and those sons begin to form their own dreams of walking between those two white lines to a roaring crowd of fans. For several hours, you can forget about the world around you and lose yourself between three outs. There are heroes and villains, Davids and Goliaths. For non–sports lovers, it’s a game you can fall asleep watching, wake up thirty minutes later, and not have missed a thing. The perfect pastime.
Years ago, I had been one of those kids with their dad. My father and I bonded over the game he grew up loving. From the moment I could walk, he had me at my very first Cougars game with a foam finger and a little souvenir baseball helmet full of ice cream. I had sat in this very stadium eating a corn dog and watching some of the greats run around the bases while fans screamed their support. Everything about it was magical. It was the first place where I imagined wanting to capture a moment forever with the camera my mother got me for my birthday when I first got into photography. The process of trying to get just the right shot that would encapsulate the memories and the feelings from a moment was exhilarating.
There had never been another feeling like a baseball game for me. The energy that danced through the air was unbeatable. It could make even the most unlikely sports fan cheer as the rookie hit a home run on his very first at bat of his career. Or when two brothers faced each other for the first time ever in the major leagues. It was a game that brought people together and could have the entire stadium sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next big play or groaning when their favorite team lost.
I mean, how could you not love baseball? There truly is something in it for everybody.
Those moments at the baseball field with my dad felt like a foreshadowing to where I am now. That very first camera that I used to capture my first action shots helped me realize what I was good at. The days spent at the ballpark, just me and him, were the catalyst for my interest in working in the sports industry. It is a masculine industry where women are forced to work twice as hard to prove they deserve their place. Even in the jobs behind the scenes that women dominated, men still seemed to question our ability to showcase the magic of baseball. Those days spent in the stadium with my dad allowed me to understand what brought fans back to the field game after game.
The week prior to Opening Day always brought chaos, and to say that things were a little hectic around Renaissance Field would be an understatement. With Opening Day arriving in two short days, the grounds crew was working tirelessly to make sure the field was perfect, box office workers were getting ready for season ticket holders, the players were tweaking their form to prepare for the first pitch, and the media teams were rallying the fans with as much excitement as they could make around the big day.
Which was exactly why I was here bright and early for a practice at six in the morning, camera in tow. My boss, May, had called me an hour before to ask me to be at practice to grab some shots for the social media pages, much to my dismay. She had woken me up from a hot dream that included me and a popular actor on a romantic date in Mykonos. Those dream dates are the only sort of romance I’ve had in the past four years, and I consider those hours asleep with me and Mr. People Magazine’s Hottest Guy of the Year sacred.
However, even when I did get a call out of the blue to come shoot a practice I wasn’t already on the schedule for, I still went. Not because I knew I had to, but because I knew I wanted to. I loved my job. It was like I had entered a fever dream the moment I signed my contract with the Cougars almost three years ago and I had yet to wake up.
Did it pay the bills? Sure.
Was I going to get rich off it? No.
But did I love coming to work every day and photographing a sport I was excited about with players that were easy on the eyes? Absolutely.
Did I want more? Yes.
What more was, I didn’t know, but it had been itching some part of the back of my brain for some time now. Like something was missing.
I nodded at some of the grounds crew as I passed them in the tunnel that opened out onto the field. The second the world went from complete darkness to the seats rising around you with neon lights peppering the top concourse was easily my favorite view of the entire park. The sound of a bat hitting a ball cracked across the stadium, the empty seats amplifying it. Some of the media team was already set up in the stadium seats behind home plate, but that wasn’t my destination.
“How do you always beat me here?” I asked my best friend and fellow photographer, who was already taking pictures of the team like she had been here for some time already.
“Because you always stop to get coffee, no matter how late you’re already running, Maggie. And you always take the bus, which we know is not the most reliable.” I glared at my friend as I pulled my camera out of its bag. She knew how cranky I could get if I didn’t get my caffeine in the morning, and she knew why I refused to drive my car through the city anymore. But she still had to remind me of my faults every morning I was late, which was most mornings.
Olivia Thompson and I were complete opposites, which was probably why we had gone from just coworkers to best friends after only a week of knowing each other. Olivia’s auburn hair was always perfectly tamed, while my brown curls were a frizzy, wild mess. She was never found without a full face of makeup, while I was lucky to remember to put on sunscreen at the end of my skin care routine. We fit together like two puzzle pieces, perfectly filling the gaps that the other one lacked. She was the Amy Poehler to my Tina Fey. The Thelma to my Louise. The Laverne to my Shirley.
We were both hired in the same season almost three years ago now. Together we have covered some of the biggest moments in the league. The two of us work together like a well-oiled machine, never needing to tell the other where to line up to get the second angle. We never corrected each other and always trusted one of us would get the shot in the end.
Outside of work, Olivia was like my Mr. Miyagi. Without her, I would be sitting on my couch every night eating ramen, drinking wine, and watching yet another rom-com. She was the life of the party, and quite literally she would drag me every weekend to said event.
“Anything interesting happened yet?” I asked as I started to walk toward the third-base dugout to get a closer shot of the guys taking practice swings at home plate. This was my favorite practice of the entire year. The nerves were high, but not as high as the excitement. Most of the players had found their place on the team and joked freely. Morale was normally at the highest point of the season and so was the hope of winning it all, last year’s result forgotten. It was the promise of new beginnings and the potential for anything to happen this season. A fresh start.
“Actually, yes,” Olivia replied as she carried her camera attached to the long monopod over her shoulder. I raised an eyebrow at her in surprise.
How could I have already missed something good? It was six in the freaking morning.
“Remember May telling us about the Cougars picking up that hotshot Tommy Mikals?”
“The one who has a different girl on his arm every night as he leaves the clubs after games?” I asked.
“That would be the one.”
“What about him?”
“He’s here.” My eyes darted around the field, searching for the newcomer. There was our star pitcher, Adam; my favorite player, Jamil; and then my eyes landed on someone I didn’t recognize playing shortstop. He was tall with broad shoulders and had a full sleeve of tattoos on perfectly muscular arms. He wore his hat low over his eyes, and his pants were stopped around his knees, which I’ve always thought was much better than long pants. He carried himself with a confidence that came from years of experience, years of always coming out on top. But even with the skill he showcased, his antics off the field tainted him for most of the league. When San Diego let him go, most of the other teams wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole, too afraid of the media scandals that would follow him. Chicago must have thought his cheap price and high skill level were worth the risk of a few scandalous photos splattered across the tabloids.
A GQ model wouldn’t hold a candle to him. I turned to snap a few shots of him as he went to field a hard-hit ball up the middle to try to cover the fact that I was totally eyeing him through my camera.
