Alex Osborn just wanted a chance, at long last, to prove he could pitch in the majors. He got his chance -- and took another chance as well -- maybe with the wrong woman.
Size: 185 KB (34,655 words)
Genre: Erotica
Sex Contents: Some Sex
Tags: Ma/Fa, Consensual, Romantic, Heterosexual, Interracial, Slow
Review by Quasirandom [other reviews by Quasirandom]
Reviewed:
Disclaimer: I don’t like baseball, but I do enjoy Tony Stevens’ baseball stories. (Mitsuru Adachi is the only other comparable author I’ve met.) His ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ series is Great Stuff, being sweet and sexy romances with young adults where it just so happens at least one partner is involved with the game.
This story is installment #4, but that number means little — the series has a shadow of an overall arc, but each story stands alone (usually: see below) and can be read in any order. You can also read it knowing little (like I do) to nothing about baseball — the sport is important in the story only because it’s important to the characters, and the emotional significance of sportsball events is always made clear.
Thanks to stints in the minor-league teams of a couple different franchises, Alex is finally, at 31, beginning the season in the Majors. He’s a spot relief pitcher, used only as needed for a batter or two, which makes him the 25th guy of a 25-man roster — a precarious position. So he’s understandably wary of dating Maria, his boss’s stepdaughter, and that’s without the issue of her not even being 20. With determination on her part, however, things start to click between them.
This one … I never really warmed to this one, and ultimately it never really gelled for me. Part of it is the scenes in third-person interrupting the first-person narrative, which ultimately didn’t tell us much that we couldn’t have gotten from Alex. Part of it is the racial issues aren’t handled as deftly as in “Put Me In, Coach!” Part of it is, about three quarters of the way through, it stops being an independent story and becomes by default simply an installment in an ongoing series — the romantic conflict just quietly dissolves into the background, leaving only the game, and the last few chapters thanks to (SPOILER ALERT) a late-season injury Alex literally does nothing but watch his teammates. It’s no longer his story, nor hers-and-his — it’s a yarn cut from the larger cloth.
Which is disappointing. It’s otherwise as well-written and enjoyable as other installments, so the time spent reading it is not exactly a loss. But I can only recommend it if you’re reading the whole series, and even then it’s probably best if you’re going in order.
Oh, and one final note: this story is Premium, which makes it yet another reason to support this site by getting a Premier membership so you can read it yourself.
