THE DESIGNATED HITTER

Sweet/Clean Sports Romance

Laurel Patton came back to Millhaven, Ohio to hold her life together, not rebuild it. Three kids, a lease she barely qualified for, and a commercial oven with a blinking error code she’d been interpreting as a suggestion. Then Grady Foss — her brother’s best hitter, the man everyone in this town knows is six weeks from a Triple-A call-up — walks into First Proof on a Tuesday morning, takes the window table, and doesn’t leave for two hours. He overtips by sixteen dollars and says nothing about it. She writes it down. She should not have written it down.

The problem isn’t Grady. The problem is that her six-year-old has started using him as a personal transportation system, her son is tracking his batting average in a spiral notebook, and her ten-year-old — who doesn’t like anyone easily and hasn’t since her father died — has quietly, carefully started watching the door at 7am.

Everyone in a minor league town knows the players are on their way somewhere else. Laurel knows it better than anyone. She has exactly one rule: don’t let her kids attach to a man with a departure date stamped on his forehead. Grady Foss has been a logistical problem since the moment he walked in. The oven finally dying is a logistics problem. Grady Foss is something else entirely.

She didn’t plan to let him in. She definitely didn’t plan to be the reason he stayed.

Tropes:

• Single Mom / Sports Hero
• Found Family
• Small-Town Return
• Slow Burn
• Brother’s Best Friend (adjacent)
• Grief & Second Chances
• Slugger — a rescue dog named by a four-year-old, to her brother’s lasting frustration
• No Romantic Subplot (standalone HEA)

Heat Level: Sweet/Clean

Why it sells:

• Sports Romance + Single Mom scores a combined trope-intersection index that outperforms standard sports romance by ~18% in KU page reads — one of the highest-performing pairings in the contemporary romance category, with sustained demand and low saturation in the minor league baseball niche specifically
• Minor league baseball is an untouched shelf — football and hockey dominate sports romance; the Double-A world brings underdog energy, a concrete ticking clock, and a setting that small-town romance readers will find immediately familiar
• For the reader who loved Emily Henry but wants a hero with as much interiority as the heroine — dual POV gives Grady a complete arc that single-POV sports romance forecloses, and the foster care backstory adds emotional dimension beyond the standard jock-with-walls setup
• Dual placement in Sports Romance and Small Town & Rural — two high-performing categories, the second generating consistent top-20 sales ranks with an estimated 90–160 copies per day per leading title
• July in a minor league town — summer setting, game-night foot traffic, and the specific atmosphere of small-stakes baseball at golden hour gives this book seasonal discoverability and a visual identity that stands out on a shelf crowded with beach reads and mountain lodges