DNF @ 10%

Despite loving baseball I’ve never read Liz Tomforde, I knew I had a reason but I didn’t exactly remember why. I kept seeing this book and it’s been sitting in the back of my mind - characters in their 30s/40s, set in Chicago, a woman working in baseball, a man who’s been wary to love, I love all these things.

Right away, alarms were going off 💀 I can suspend a good amount of disbelief because to read 99% of baseball romances out there I have no choice but to do so, but there are multiple baseball mistakes, along with a noted absence of baseball lingo. The sport is full of funny sayings and superstitions and I felt none of the heart and soul the sport has.

So at this point I Google Tomforde and 🤡 it turns out the reason I unfortunately forgot I’d decided to never read her is because she (a white woman) was criticized very justifiably for how she handled race in her books, instead of doing anything real about it she doubled down, did some sneaky edits to address the most glaring aspects, and blocked a bunch of people on social media. She was publishing on KU at the time, and had a deal to go trad with Berkeley, but this incident was so bad that they cancelled her six-figure deal. There are threads on Reddit detailing this further.

The book opens with Reese specifically saying things are not so financially dire that she has to sell shares, but that the money the club is losing is coming out of her pocket. If this team has won a World Series in the last 7 years, is good enough to consistently make the playoffs, and has the media market shares of Chicago, there is 100% plenty of money to go around. A MLB owner complaining about budget at that level is ENTIRELY them whining poor because they’re not pocketing every possible dime they could be. That’s quite literally a billionaire doing typical billionaire shit (There are a few owners who aren’t billionaires and only hundred millionaires, but my point remains.) and there are so many better ways to go about a storyline like this. The owners in baseball culture are not the good guys right now, and the author needed to try hard to pull off a redeemable character.

Making this character a woman alone doesn’t cut it, especially since the author made the choice to have Reese be the first ever woman owner and general manager. This is not true to history? What a bizarre thing to steal and erase from real women who broke those barriers in real life. One Google search can get a list of women who have owned MLB teams and a few more can get pages and pages of information on the deep history women have in the sport.

It would have been perfectly fine for all the author’s purposes for Reese to be the first woman in their franchise. To give a nod to the real women who have gone before with other teams, who fought hard to get to the positions they did and have a seat at the table while showing via Reese that it’s still an incredibly challenging uphill battle for women to navigate these spaces. For the author to push a feminist narrative that she wants to show women succeeding in traditionally masculine professions while ignoring real life representation rings so hollow.

With the way the author dealt with race in the past I have no interest in giving her the benefit of the doubt on gender. Representation matters, and feminism isn’t feminism at all without intersectionality and a drive to fight the internalized patriarchal bias we all have. I won’t be reading any more of this author.