Faye Webster’s “Dream with a Baseball Player,” my dream with a tennis player

Faye Webster, like many young adults, has known the pain of a crush on someone who didn’t even know her name. Unlike most, she confessed her love to a celebrity crush through her song “A Dream With A Baseball Player.” She does not divulge the player’s name in the lyrics, but she tells the press — from Interview Magazine to ESPN — that it’s Atlanta Braves generational standout Ronald Acuña Jr.

The slow, dreamy song feels like a late-night conversation with a friend, but Webster sings it directly to her love. It feels fitting to profess my current athletic crush alongside Webster, a queen of unrequited love ballads with off-putting lyrics.

I won’t write his name, and I almost hope he never reads this, but I feel much lighter (and a little humiliated) confessing to my pro tennis player crush.

“I saw you last night in my dream / That’s still the closest you and I have been / That’s kind of sad, don’t you think? / I think so” 

The “sadness” of an unattainable crush has two meanings: The loneliness hurts and the juvenile nature of an unrequited devotion feels embarrassingly pathetic. My crush keeps me staring at the only TV in the bar playing the U.S. Open, and checking minor international tournament scores.

To my crush: I’m sad we’ve never met. I’ve never even seen you play in person. 

A celebrity crush doesn’t, and shouldn’t, consume one’s mind as much as a real-life one who we could encounter at any turn, but they are sadder. Yearning grows as the relationship stays wholly one-sided. A one-sided love is both beautiful and depressing, both because and despite the fact it will remain a perfect dream. 

“How did I fall in love with someone / I don’t know?”

Webster’s love for Acuña is not life-changing nor marriage material, but a special type of dream-state love. Love isn’t just in commitment, intimacy and passion — it exists in the opening line of Webster’s single “Kingston”: “The day that I met you, I started dreaming.” Love gives hope, warmth and joy where there was once boredom and sadness. Love is behind the best kind of crush.

Webster wrote “A Dream with a Baseball Player” while alone, bored and watching baseball to the point where she thought she wanted to be a player. “But I’m not, so I guess the next best thing was having a crush on one,” she revealed in a press statement. 

She told Pitchfork that she came to love Acuña because they were the same age and she found him cute. “He’s also the best player they have — so that matters,” Webster said. My crush, too, is my age, a top athlete and objectively handsome. 

We move from an attraction to a loving crush through emotional connections to someone — seeing their character, commitment, personality, talent and principles revealed through their actions on the field/court/pitch/diamond and off. There is beauty and romance in every sport.

Tennis player who I hope never reads this, I think a 149-mile-per-hour serve is beautiful.

Faye, I agree that Acuña’s 190 career stolen bases stat is beautiful. 

“How am I supposed to ever be with him / When he and I don’t speak the same language? / But we have conversations in my head”

We are closer than ever to professional athletes, with social media and post-game press providing glimpses into their personalities. We can imagine conversations with our celebrity crushes pieced together with interviews, highlight reels, Instagram captions and clips we see of games. Still, because we do not truly know them, we can build a vision of our love that is perfectly lovable. 

We both speak English. Still, I’m not your type (historically) and I cannot foresee us together beyond daydreams. You are on tour, I am looking for a 9 to 5 job. But I have an idea of your personality that I hold close and sort of love. In the least creepy way, I see you often through TikToks that my roommate and I share. We both love your boyish overconfidence.

Regardless of the type of TikTok — near-cringy thirst trap edits, peeks into a player’s humor and sportsmanship or stunning highlight reels from tournament page admins who know their audience — edits show why we fall for a celebrity athlete. We can see our crush as joyful, sad, angry, loving and caring through edits set to music from romantic Clairo to bass-heavy Yeat. We love athletes because of their beauty, strength, talent and commitment to the game — and because they are lovable, with emotions, humor and loves of their own that we are offered peeks into. This lets us create fantasy versions of real people.

“I could just meet him and get it over / Or I’ll just keep wearing his name on my shirt”

Meeting a celebrity moves them into reality, and even if they remain attractive, this alters the pining, hopeful, dreamy love. Wearing a jersey is enough to feel close to them.

You don’t have a jersey, and I don’t wear your sponsor brand, so I wonder if you’d know I’m a fan if we met. I would probably go silent or say something weird. I hope we meet. And I hope we never meet.

Webster finally met Acuña when a Braves employee invited her to sing during the seventh-inning stretch in 2019. “When I did that, I was just like, ‘Alright, I think that was it. I think that’s what I needed to complete this chapter,’” she told Interview Magazine. The crush seemingly disappeared when Acuña became real.

“Whatever I need just to help me cope”

A celebrity crush may be an embarrassing coping mechanism for managing day-to-day reality (and sometimes abysmal love lives), but it’s also logical. A crush that is not fully attainable can’t hurt you. It’s a defense mechanism. Your love is innocent and removed from reality. It exists in a dream world where nothing can cause you pain, as long as you don’t get really obsessed.

I am not obsessed with you, but I have a better day when you win a match. Sports are an escape from our realities (for those who are not professional athletes). They are truly human: showing magnitudes of joy, power, companionship, independence, grit, struggle and triumph. In “Challengers,” a film that spawned a new tennis obsession and drew plot lines between tennis, sex and attraction, junior star Tashi (Zendaya, “Shake It Up”) calls tennis a relationship and compares it to love. It is easy to get emotionally invested in the sport. When I watch tennis, I feel love. I also feel a little giddy, because I have a crush.

A celebrity crush gives us something to dream about. I don’t know if my tennis crush is the funny, kind, perfect person I imagine he is, and he does not have to be. I can daydream. And I can check the score for the Swiss Indoors Basel tournament and cheer him on. 

Daily Arts Writer Kaya Ginsky can be reached at kginsk@umich.edu.

The post Faye Webster’s “Dream with a Baseball Player,” my dream with a tennis player appeared first on The Michigan Daily.