This has nothing to do with writing, or does it? It does and it doesn’t. What I mean is, lots of male writers are sports fans but what about female writers? Joyce Carol Oates is into boxing–or used to be, a sport I Just Do Not Get At All. Male writers wear baseball caps, write about sports in their fiction (The Sportswriter, etc.) but what about women? Where are the stories and novels in which sports play a part?

That’s not what I meant to write when I started this post. What I meant to say is, I encourage my students to read the sports page. Even before I was so deeply into baseball, I read the page now and then, to refresh my approach to verbs. Sports writing has to move, can’t get bogged down in passive verbs. But when I became an Angels fan(atic) this past spring, my sports page reading progressed from once in a while to every day, first thing, the first part of the paper I look at. I love Bill Plaschke’s commentary and Helene Elliot’s, too.

When baseball season is over, I imagine I’ll enter a state of withdrawal, like I did with Diet Coke and coffee (both of which I drink again; all those headaches for for nothing). I will look at the sports section for any mention of my Angels. And my TV watching will decline by a ton of hours a week. The upside: More time for writing (although I rarely write at night anyway). Actually, there will just be more time with a hole in it where a baseball flew through. Until April 2008 when baseball season begins again. (I looked on the Angels web site; it doesn’t say….)

So I keep thinking I need to incorporate baseball into my writing. Justify all the time I spend on the game. As if it needs justification.