I think in a lot of ways, baseball is an ideal sport for me. It’s polite and gentlemanly in its way, but it’s tense and exciting, too. It’s orderly and statistical, but it’s also unpredictable. Fans are smart and passionate. The whole history of the sport is riddled with triumph and heartbreak, with cheating and honesty, with colorful characters, villains, and heroes.
Sounds kind of like a romance novel, doesn’t it?
I think that my writing a baseball romance was an inevitability. Beyond the obvious intersection of my interests here, a sports romance has one other key element: setting. I love a vivid setting in a novel, one that lives and breathes as much as the characters do. I want to know what everything looks like, smells like, feels like. I love nitty-gritty details. That was something I was conscious of as I wrote. The novel takes place in New York City primarily—my two heroes are both players for the same fictional MLB team—but it also takes place in stadiums, on fields, in locker rooms.
As a writer, I like to have a clear picture of the setting, so I draw maps and diagrams. I knew which parts of the stadium were where: the distance from the locker room to the field, the locations of the executive offices, the parking lot. My fictional stadium is magically located roughly where Ebbets Field once stood, which I never say in the book, but I knew which roads the characters would have to drive on to get to Manhattan. I did a ton of research, too, to get the cadence of speech right—how do baseball players talk to each other? how do sportscasters talk about baseball—and to make sure all my terminology was right. I watched documentaries, I read several books, I listened to baseball podcasts, and, of course, I watched a ton of games. (Not a hardship, by the way!) Immersing myself in the world of baseball was really key to my creating what I thought was a convincing setting. And hopefully, it’s a setting in the same way New York is a setting, so that the reader sees it as color and detail and not as an overwhelming amount of information!
Kate McMurray is a NYC-based writer, editor, and baseball fanatic. She writes m/m romances and reads lots of books. She also likes crafts and plays the violin and lives in Brooklyn in an apartment over an ice cream parlor. Kate’s baseball novel, Out in the Field, is available now.
Website: www.katemcmurray.com
Twitter: @katemcmwriter
