Veronica Kahnle didn’t think she could have both, but she couldn’t imagine life without either. She’d been dating her now-husband, Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle, since 2011, the year she began working, initially as an intern, and later as a licensed mental health counselor, at Four Winds psychiatric hospital in Saratoga, N.Y. The couple had been keeping up a long-distance relationship for a few years, first from Charleston, S.C.; then from Florida; then from Trenton, N.J.; and then from Colorado.



As Tommy entered his 2015 season, and Veronica entered her fifth year of calculating time differences and checking box scores and buying expensive cross-country flights, she was faced with a choice: Do I leave the job I earned my master’s degree to get? Or do I stay in Saratoga and put my marriage at risk?



She’d never envisioned herself as a baseball wife. She says she needs to be working, to retain some degree of independence and identity, but...