Baseball-loving actress Alyssa Milano said she was charmed by some of the game’s top players, and understands why some jocks would take steroids to gain a competitive edge. In a new book, the baseball devotee and lover of all things Dodgers including Joe Torre, who wrote the foreword said her obsession with the national pastime led her to go around the horn with several players who got way past first base.
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Carl Pavano apparently performed better with Milano than he ever did with the Yankees.
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The “Charmed” star said her love affair with baseball began around the same time she moved with her father from Staten Island to Hollywood to star in the sitcom “Who’s the Boss?”
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“To be completely honest, after Barry [Zito] and I broke up, I swore off baseball players,” Milano confides in the book, “Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic.”
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Then, Penny came along …
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“Brad had me at, ‘Let’s go down to the clubhouse.’ ” After introducing her to several players, Penny took her to the stadium’s indoor batting cages, where she hit a line drive off the hard-throwing hurler.
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While away from her mom and brother, Alyssa and her dad bonded by watching baseball. “Other women dream of papaya facials and mango pedicures,” Milano writes. “Give me a hot dog, a pitchers’ duel and a late-inning suicide squeeze, and I melt like hot pine tar.”
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Milano hangs out in the Shea Stadium dugout with former Met Kaz Matsui – who she has not been linked with so far.
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Her favorite baseball memory is of injured Dodger Kirk Gibson’s clutch Game 1 homer in the 1988 World Series. “They say there are three words that will reduce most any woman on Earth to a blubbering heap of joy,” Milano writes. “With me, it takes only two: ‘Kirk Gibson.’ ”
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Not even the steroid scandal could sully her love of the game, comparing it with actors’ use of miracle enhancers. “The big difference between injecting Botox and with taking human growth hormone is that there are no rules against Botox,” Milano says.
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Although she loves the game as it is, Milano said she would make a few changes if she were baseball commissioner.
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Milano said she would set aside 10,000 affordable seats in every ball park, ban beach balls, abolish the designated-hitter rule and remove home-field advantage in the World Series as an All-Star Game incentive.
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Alyssa Milano’s book: “Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic.”
