Confessions of a former delusional baseball fangirl: a photoblog

My new life as a total baseball fan began on June 4, 1999, when I won tickets from Pizza Hut to watch the White Sox play the Pirates.  My life as a total baseball fangirl would begin shortly thereafter when I noticed a certain redheaded player by the name of Josh Paul.

I don’t remember when exactly I noticed the insanely hot backup catcher, but from the moment I laid eyes on him, 15-yr-old me had already started planning our wedding.  I wrote sappy love letters that he would never see when I was in class; I would daydream about being a baseball wife; and I would talk non-stop about him to my friends.

And then, I started seeing him in person.

Soxfest is an annual fan convention that I attended every year just to get a glimpse of my fantasy man.  I attended my first Soxfest in 2000 and my last in 2002.  In just those two years, I met Josh Paul three times.  I would drag my poor best friend and my sister with me because I was so painfully shy and knew that I couldn’t manage meeting His Greatness on my own.  

And I was right, because after I snagged his autograph and a picture with him, I broke down into tears like a teenybopper at a Backstreet Boys concert and had to be led away by my slightly embarrassed friend.  Luckily for everyone involved, Mr. Paul didn’t see my spectacle.

At least I hope so.

Sometime along the way, I started working at the ballpark, possibly with the hopes of seeing him more, but it was around that time that I started noticing a blue eyed pitcher by the name of Mark Buehrle.  I switched my focus towards this new Missouri boy during his second season with the team (he went bleach blonde…I normally don’t go gaga for blondes, but you have not seen Mark Buehrle as a blonde, presumably.  It was…magnificent).  However, after being rebuffed by the ace (a story for another day), I decided that perhaps Josh Paul was the guy for me after all.  So I decided to do something dramatic.

I asked him to marry me.  Sort of.

I wrote about this experience in a previous blog:

I decided that, during my senior year, I would make a sign asking for his hand in marriage and wait for him outside of the players’ parking lot. My friend and I go to the game, leave and wait up to an hour following the final pitch…and then we saw him, walking to his SUV with his lady. And suddenly, I lost my nerve.Where it went, who knows? But I begged my friend to show him the sign for me. So she called out his name and held up the sign. The prettiest, biggest, most gorgeous smile crossed his face. And I realized that he was smiling at the girl holding the sign; not me. And I felt like a colossal idiot, especially when he walked over to autograph the sign…and then handed it back to her. She may have given it back to me after he walked away, but the experience will never ever really be mine.

Although my attraction to Josh Paul would never completely wane, over time I stopped being gaga.  As evidenced by my photos above, I still have my various trinkets from my fan girl phase. 

I keep them around as a further reminder that I was a strange teenage girl with the oddest habit of crushing on the most random people.  But I’m not sorry.  Dude was superfine.  But then this happened:

And I don’t know how to feel anymore.