MOST every American man’s adult life begins when he accepts that he is, before anything else, a failed baseball player. And that’s fine. The world needs ditch diggers, doctors, lawyers and presidents, too. A boy learns that his dad – unless he’s a real schmuck – is going to love him even if he can’t hit a curve ball.
Female baseball fans often came to love the national pastime through men, too. Specifically, bat-wielding, uniformed men to whom they might have initially sang, “Take Me Out to . . . Dinner.”
Yankees fan Rob Gelardi knows this.
“Yes, I did have an agenda, because I knew I was going to be watching a ton of baseball,” says Gelardi, who “introduced” his girlfriend Melissa Hess to baseball through Derek Jeter. He thought the shortstop would act as a point of entry and attract her to the sport overall.
It’s the “gateway player” theory. And it worked.
The couple started watching the Yankees together in 1996, Jeter’s first full season with the Bombers and the year the Yankees won their 23rd World Series title.
“I know most women are gaga for him, but for me, it was his upbringing,” says Melissa, citing the Captain’s polite disposition, sound work ethic and ambassador mentality.
“On one hand, he’s pretty boring and never gives the press what they want by saying anything controversial. But he really understands what he is to New York and to baseball.”
She also admits, “It doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eyes.”
Although the Yankees and the Mets are blessed with many potential gateway players, the technique will work with non-NYC teams, too many potential gateway players, the technique will work with non-NYC teams, too.
Philadelphia transplant Ellen Hurr first got into baseball when David Justice was an Atlanta Brave, though she lost interest after he left the team and Halle Berry left him in 1996 – five years before his move to The Bronx.
“That opened the floodgates,” says Hurr, who, by then, had even started paying attention to her hometown Phillies, whom she admits, weren’t a very good-looking team in the mid-’90s.
“They were such characters,” Hurr recalls. “Justice and [Atlanta teammates] Andruw and Chipper Jones, they were just good looking. Other players I got to like for substantial reasons.”
There was nothing substantial about Kristen Rasmussen’s love of the Dallas Cowboys – proving that the gateway player can be used in football or any other sport.
“It was all looks,” admits Rasmussen, whose drug of choice was Troy Aikman. The dreamy Super Bowl winner had claimed her heart when she was in junior high and would watch the NFL’s “Quarterback Challenge” with her brothers.
Rasmussen, who recently moved to Chicago from New York, says her ardor for the team dimmed somewhat when Aikman retired in 2001, and she’s now a fan of the Minnesota Vikings.
But not all player-induced fanettes play the field.
Take Melissa. She added Gelardi’s name to her own in 2002 – on home plate at Abner Doubleday Field, just a relay toss from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. She even got legendary Yankee Stadium announcer Bob Sheppard to introduce their wedding party via recording.
Since then, the Gelardis have attended at least a dozen Yankees games together, visited four other MLB ballparks, and left Manhattan for the suburbs, where they’re raising their 9-month-old son, Dash, and 2-year-old daughter, Cio – and passing along their love of the game.
Melissa recommends that men whose girlfriends are slow in warming up to the Mets’ or Yankees’ opening-day rosters, might rent the 1988 Kevin Costner film “Bull Durham” before NY’s home teams start their seasons on March 31.
“It’s incredibly sexy for women and exciting for men,” she says, warning that some challenges may prove simply unwinnable.
“If your girlfriend doesn’t like baseball then – you may have a problem.”