Meet the women of SB Nation’s MLB team brands: Why they’re passionate about baseball

The women who cover baseball for SB Nation’s team sites have two important things in common: They love the team they cover, and they’ve found a home for that passion within SB Nation’s team communities.

Baseball is a part of the fabric of these women’s lives. We asked them to share the stories behind their love of the game and what led them to the specific team they each cover.

You can enjoy each woman’s individual answers to our questions for this series and the rest of the posts below.

I grew up in a baseball family. My brother and I played wiffle ball in the living room with our dad until my mom made us move the game outside when I was about five years old because we started hitting the ball too hard. When I was nine, I brought the Little League sign up home, only to be tremendously disappointed that girls “didn’t play Little League.” I’m not easy to deter, however, so I stayed involved however I could. My dad coached the team, my brother played, and I kept the scorebook, operated the hand scoreboard in left, and when I was older, I channeled my inner Harry Caray and announced my brother’s Little League and Babe Ruth games on the PA system.

All of this led to my first byline, because our little town had a paper, but not a lot of people to cover every event. So at 13 years old, I started writing up some of the Little League All Star games and was thrilled when they were published by Price, Utah’s Sun Advocate.

Neighborhood kids introduced me to baseball when I was young and I took to it ever since, from playing Little League to making up a game called knee ball that I played in the living room (don’t tell my parents)! I’ve been a huge fan of baseball ever since and feel it’s the best game on the planet. I grew up a Twins fan, but when I moved to Orange County as an adult I adopted the Angels as my team of choice.

I dislike the “how did you fall in love with baseball?” question because it so often feels like a question that’s asked of women but not of men. For me, there’s no “how did you get into baseball” because I don’t remember getting into it; it always just was. I used to sit in front of the TV and mimic what was happening in the game with my stuffed animals and a set of cardboard bases.

My mom is a big baseball fan; she was an early beneficiary of Title IX and played baseball when she was young, and has likely eaten more Dodger Dogs than she’d care to admit. I grew up playing softball, but insisted on using her ancient baseball glove until a coach gently suggested that I might have better luck catching softballs with a softball mitt. My Mariners fandom developed as a result of my quest to be “special” in elementary school — surrounded by A’s and Giants fans, I adopted the team of my birth state, with little regard for how profoundly this would shape the rest of my life.

I was born into a baseball family. My first identity was not Californian or even American, it was Giants fan. But what led me to fall in love with baseball was playing it in the empty lots in the trailer park where I grew up. We would go out there and play wiffle ball, with ghost runners, and we all thought we were Barry Bonds, about to hit a grand slam full of ghost runners.

Falling in love with baseball was something I was born into. I grew up taking the 4 Train to Yankees games with my dad, brother, and uncle. I remember sitting at my first game ever —which was a big deal to me because it was Beanie Baby Day, but ended up being David Wells’ perfect game — feeling so at peace and at home, that I had so much passion for this game to uncover and it was just circulating through my bloodstream. My love for the team and the game was so well-nourished by my own curiosity and my family’s willingness to field any and all of my questions. I also played baseball until I physically couldn’t anymore, spending an intangible number of hours in my backyard running drills and wishing to be the first woman to go pro in the MLB (I made myself a trading card, #noshame).

Growing up, I was that kid who tried out for every sport at least once. I was on the quest to find the perfect fit. Between first grade and high school, I tried everything from basketball to cheerleading to taekwondo. You name it, I tried it. I was so interested in the idea of baseball that I not only played t-ball, but also tried out for softball three consecutive years. I failed to make the team (I have a similar skillset to Brett Gardner, if Gardner could only throw the ball 15 feet). It finally dawned on me that I could at least watch it if I couldn’t play it.

One night in 2004, my stepdad happened to be watching the ALCS in the living room. I sat down down for a minute, and ended up watching the entire game. For whatever reason (probably the fact that they were winning), I decided that I wanted the Yankees to win the series and that they were my favorite team. Sadly, the ALCS was never completed; the Yankees definitely didn’t blow a three game lead. I have stuck with the Yankees ever since, though.

I can thank my twin brothers for my love of baseball. We spent countless hours at the baseball field from the time they were 4 years old. I can’t remember a night in season that my family wasn’t gathered around the TV watching a Braves game. Still to this day I watch or listen to all 162 Major League games, attend spring training and affiliate games, and passionately track statistics, player status, and trade rumors. Being a true Georgia peach and growing up during the 90s, I can’t imagine loving another team like I do my Braves.

I was born into Blue and come from a long familial line of Dodgers fans going back to my grandfather, who rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in Boston. My brother and I grew up watching Dodgers games together, and we took score by hand in our personal ‘scorebooks’ while watching games — the ones that were televised — on our console TV in the 1980s and ‘90s. My uncle, who was at Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, took us to countless games at Dodger Stadium as kids.

One memory I will never forget is when we were waiting at the players’ parking lot for autographs after the game. There was a high fence you had to reach over to hand the players what you wanted autographed. My uncle accidentally dropped a pen in Raul Mondesi’s eye. It took him a moment to recover, but he still signed for us. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love baseball and the Dodgers.

I fell in love with baseball because of my mom. She grew up in northern Minnesota and has been a Twins fan since the day the team moved here in 1961. I was born and raised in Minneapolis, and my mom instilled the same fandom in me. We’ve gone to hundreds of Twins games together. It didn’t hurt that the Twins won two World Series in my formative years, either. The Twins and the Lynx are the only teams that have ever done anything for us Minnesotans.

My parents were both baseball fans, and my older brother was always the best kid in little league, so I grew up around the game. I pretty much just wanted to beat my brother at something for once because I was always losing to him at video games. To practice, I made my poor mother pitch tennis balls to me for hours on end, mostly ricocheting them off various parts of her body. Never did beat him though!

The 2002 Twins were the team that made me fall in love with the game. The Twins had been awful the entire time I had been alive, but this team was good and the whole “contraction” threat was something to rally behind. It felt like I was part of some rebel movement against “the man” and that appealed to the little punk rocker in me. Still kinda want to punch Bud Selig, but I haven’t stopped watching since!

I honestly cannot remember when I started watching baseball. As far as I can remember it has been there, just another fabric of my being. I grew up deep in the Cardinals territory of Illinois, so there was really no chance of rooting for any other team. I was 11 years old in 2004. I had just changed schools, and this was my first summer with my new friends. Summer softball was going to be my ticket to really cementing the bonds I had formed in the classroom, but I broke my wrist at the end of May and my plan was foiled. Instead, that summer was all about me sitting inside with Scott Rolen, Jim Edmonds, and Albert Pujols. I had always liked baseball, but that summer I fell in love. That love has since made me more friends than I ever that possible. I am so glad I broke my wrist.

My dad and uncle had season tickets in the orange seats (behind home) at Shea Stadium when I was a kid. I don’t remember much about the games; I just vividly remember sitting in my seat with this huge field in front of me. As I got older we didn’t go to as many games, but you had to walk down a hallway to get to your seats at Shea. As you did, all of a sudden the stadium opened up in front of you. It was cool feeling and one I miss at Citi Field. My Dad was a Mets fan and he passed that down to his kids. The rest of my Dad’s side of the family are mostly Yankee fans, and my mom is from Philly, so the other side of the family are all Phillies fans. My Mets fandom has survived a lot.

We moved to California when I was almost four, and my parents took me to the A’s game for my birthday — not one of us ever looked back. We have all been die hard A’s fans since 1985. I remember we’d go to games often when I was a kid — the ‘88, ‘89 (especially, and it has nothing to do with the earthquake that rocked the Bay Area, although I remember that too — it has to do with one word: SWEEP!) and ‘90 World Series are especially vivid memories, even though I watched them from home.

Around the year 2000 my parents came home from a game and announced they had decided to get A’s season tickets. We’ve had the same tickets ever since and have not missed a spring training trip to Arizona to see the A’s since, as we have also not missed a postseason home game. It appears we may be headed towards a few of those this year, and even though I now live two hours outside of the Bay Area, I WILL be at every single one (even if I have to live at my parents’ for the month of October! If it was the entire month - I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t mind!). Even though I have moved and my attendance at games has dropped from approximately 60 to 30 a season, I always watch every single A’s game, which is exactly what I am doing right now!

My earliest memory of baseball was watching the Toronto Blue Jays win the World Series in 1993. I was nine years old and was just enraptured by the excitement of it all. Unfortunately, the following season was the strike, and my limited attention span couldn’t hold onto my baseball love. Much later, in my 20s, I was re-introduced to baseball by a boyfriend who was a huge Detroit Tigers fan, and watching the games with him I fell in love with the sport all over again, and with the Tigers specifically. Since then I have also found that same excitement in covering the Rays and the Cubs.

A love for baseball was something I never saw coming. Three years ago, my dad was explaining batting average and ERA to me during a game at Dodger Stadium. I was never particularly fond of sports, and I was terrible at every one I tried to play. In the second half of the 2015 season, the Blue Jays were all anyone in my non-sports watching family back in Toronto could talk about. I had been living in Los Angeles for five years and was completely intrigued, so I thought I’d give baseball a shot. If you watched the post-2015 deadline Blue Jays at all, you can understand how one might get hooked — they were truly such a fun team to watch. The playoffs that year were absolutely captivating, topped off by Jose Bautista’s legendary bat flip in the seventh inning of ALDS Game 5 against the Rangers. I have been in love with baseball ever since.

Elizabeth wrote a FanPost on DRays Bay about “converting” to a Tampa Bay Rays fan:

First, living in an area that is relatively transient, it’s important to cultivate a sense of place and of belonging, and shared support for the home team gives us that. Despite claims to the contrary, the Rays are beloved by many, and I have had many experiences of bonding with colleagues and strangers over the highs and lows of the team.

Secondly, I love the perpetual underdog struggle and how the Rays management tries to use creativity to overcome their lack of resources. Ideally I would prefer to have an MLB that did more to balance the differences, but in the meantime it is fun to watch smart people try to overcome the odds.

Finally, although I hail from New York and have lived in Boston, and have affection for both cities, the solipsism and sense of entitlement that emanate from Red Sox and Yankees fans, and from the northeast sports media, are immensely grating. Every Rays win sticks it to those folks. What could be more satisfying?

My father is my main influence into baseball — while he signed me up for ballet classes, he also toted me to Candlestick Park to watch extra inning games and also had sports talk radio on. He was my personal teacher to the game. I grew up a Giants fan because of Dad and his love and passion for the sport.

I fell in love with baseball at a pretty young age. My dad has always been a huge Boston sports fan, so I was exposed to it a lot growing up. Once I was old enough to understand what the Red Sox meant to the city of Boston, I was immediately enamored by the Sox and the sport itself. My first trip to Fenway Park was when I really started to feel the way I do now about baseball though.

I fell in love with baseball at a young age. My dad would bring my three sisters and me to Coors Field, driving us down from Longmont to spend a wonderful afternoon with the Rockies. I adored the well-manicured field, the crisp uniforms, and above anything else, a Rockies win. I loved the Rockies, but I also started admiring the sport itself. Anywhere we’d travel, we’d visit the local baseball stadium to catch a game. I’ve been hooked ever since.

I met some people in college who were really into baseball, but I started attending Arizona Fall League games when I moved to Phoenix full time a few years ago, and that’s when I became really passionate about the game again. It became a really great way for me to decompress, and I met a lot of really interesting people going to those games! Growing up in Colorado made me a Rockies fan, but living in Arizona has made it a bit more difficult to follow my team. Covering the Rockies for Purple Row gave me the perfect opportunity to really focus and follow them more closely even though I live 800 miles away.

I grew up on a farm in rural Wyoming, and when I was a kid, we had limited television access and no regional MLB team. But we always watched baseball, following the players that interested us. When I went to graduate school at Texas A&M, I finally experienced baseball in person and fell in love. I became an Olson Field season ticket holder and learned how to fill out a scorecard. Baseball kept me sane. My first season, the Aggies had three very talented left-handed pitchers and made the trip to Omaha.

When Denver got a franchise in 1993, the timing was perfect. I finally had an MLB team of my own to follow. I still farm in the summers, and the Rockies on KOA Radio are part of our lives. I love baseball for many reasons, but it is a way in which I am connected to my family and the farm that has defined us for generations.

I fall more and more in love with baseball as the seasons come and go. I’ve grown interested in the in-game strategies over the years and watching games closely enough so that I can ‘manage’ along with the actual managers. I will admit that I am not very statistically savvy, but that is an outlet I attempt to study and hope to be fluent in someday.I cover the Cardinals because that’s the team I have grown up (in life and in writing) following. I watch all the games I can, of any team, and I am pretty proud that I know the majority of the coaching staffs and players of all MLB teams.

I’ve been a baseball fan since my dad first propped me up in a car seat in front of the radio to listen to the 1982 World Series. Being a Cardinals fan wasn’t something that I ever consciously chose; it just felt as natural as breathing.