Sports, to me, are very personal. They represent a connection to my family — sports nuts in the Bay Area who wear 49ers gear to family holidays. As a fan, they are a way for me to feel an emotional range that has nothing to do with my real life consequences; or, on a good day, they are a way to distract me from my real emotional abyss. Sports have given me friends, they have given me a challenge in learning how to deal with constant skepticism due to my gender, they have helped deepen my connection to my extended family, and most notably for the trajectory of my life as a whole: they have given me a career.



I didn’t have a “favorite player” growing up in the way that many of you did. I enjoy reading about how every baseball fan my age loved Junior; I love it even more when my friends talk about the random somewhat-memorable players who they wanted to be instead. My maternal side of the family is all about baseball. At home, my dad only cared about...