Dear Yuletide Author 2022

[firstlovelatespring]

Dear Yuletide Author,

Thanks in advance for writing for me! I’m firstlovelatespring on ao3. I decided to go for a bit of a theme this year — I’m requesting Moneyball (2011), The Natural - Bernard Malamud, and New York Mets RPF.

For all my requests, I’m generally very interested in the setting of baseball. Go ahead and ascribe emotional meaning to baseball actions and all that. What I’m not really interested in is stories about coming out or being outed, to the public or to team members. I don’t mind if a teammate or two is aware of the situation, I just don’t want this to be the focus of the story.

Things I like:

• Happy endings, unhappy endings, ambiguous endings
• Getting together, breaking up, established relationship, relationship firsts, pre-relationship
• Third or first person point of view
• Pining of any flavor, including unrequited
• Antagonistic or competitive relationships
• 5 times
• Forced proximity, from “having to play on the same team” to “being stuck in an elevator together”

I’m not really interested in PWP, but I don’t mind the presence/absence of smut in general. For these fandoms, I’m more interested in the emotional meaning of sex scenes than in any particular details.

DNW
Setting-change AUs (i.e., making them not in baseball)
Death of requested characters (except Roy Hobbs)

Moneyball (2011)
Billy Beane, Peter Brand

The book Moneyball is about the art of winning an unfair game. The movie Moneyball is about that too, but it is also about the love story between Billy Beane and Peter Brand. I love them as an unlikely duo that are forced to work together, to great success and begrudging mutual fondness. Moneyball is also the first movie where I fully understood the appeal of Brad Pitt. What’s sexier than sabermetrics?

I’d love missing scenes or anything canon-typical for them. I also think 5 times would work particularly well here, with all the repetitiveness of the baseball season, 162 variations on a theme.

The Natural - Bernard Malamud
Roy Hobbs

Now, I put in an exception to my death DNW for Roy Hobbs because you can do anything you like to him, up to and including death. He’s been through a lot.

In terms of prompts for this book... anything, really. Subject Roy to more events and ailments. Kill him, injure him, break his heart. Have him fix things with Memo and end up deeply miserable behind a white picket fence. Or, maybe fill in some of the time between when he got shot and when he ended up on the Knights?

The one thing I’m not so interested is fix-it fic; I think Roy is really defined as a character by this inability to grow up, being physically 35 but still kind of frozen at 18. So like... he can evolve into having new miseries. But let the man be miserable.

New York Mets RPF
Jeff McNeil, Francisco Lindor

When Jeff McNeil was called up, I fell for his shaggy hair and high batting average. He quickly became one of my favorite players, despite his squirrelish looks.

I was a little more skeptical about Francisco Lindor. I’m always skeptical about huge, long-term free agent deals, and I’d never even heard of this guy before, him having been in the American League. Well… that skepticism didn’t even last until the end of spring training. He won me over by the end of a single in-game interview. Gary Cohen called him effervescent, and I agreed.

The rat or raccoon argument of 2021 was what got me thinking about this ship, instead of just separately enjoying my favorite players. What were they really arguing about in the tunnel? I'd love to read the fallout from that, or anything leading up to it.

I’d also love to read moments during the season, in the dugout or on an airplane, or hanging around during a rainout. I could buy them having a somewhat difficult relationship, especially in 2021. Or having a sort of normal and boring dislike for each other. Or one being totally indifferent, while the other is privately pining. I really don’t mind if you don’t get them together, whether that’s gen, pre-slash, pining, rejection, etc.

So, they’re both married. Any of these options for dealing with that is fine with me: not mentioning it either way, explicitly pretending they were never married, or including angst about cheating. What I don’t want is a big presence of the wife (or kids) in the story, or a story that ends with either of them planning to break off the marriage. I also don’t really like an acknowledged arrangement where the wife knows about things with other players and is cool with it. Basically, you don’t have to mention infidelity, but if you do, I want the guy to feel bad about it.