Fever Pitch sets up a triangle between a 30-year-old Boston schoolteacher and his two loves--one a beautiful business consultant, the other a baseball team called the Red Sox. Lindsay Meeks, the business consultant, falls for the person Ben Wrightman is when the Sox aren't playing--a funny, kind, thoughtful boyfriend, and a beloved educator. She calls him "Winter Guy."

But try though she might, she just can't tolerate "Summer Guy," the Ben who blows off her invitation to join her family at Easter to go watch the Red Sox take spring training in Florida. "They need me," he says, which seems self-evident to him and utterly baffling to her. Worse yet, he declines an invitation in September for a free weekend jaunt because the Angels are coming to town.

"Here's a tip," she tells him. "When your girlfriend asks you to go to Paris, you say yes."

This all comes as a particular shock to Lindsay because she feels initially that she's being charitable to Ben by going out with him. She's a hard-driving, high-earning overachiever who spends all her free time working out obsessively and dismisses his overtures because of his lower social standing (her friends refer to him dismissively as "the schoolteacher"). But she is head-over-heels by the time baseball season begins, and suddenly she finds herself no longer the most important person in his life and no longer the most important person in their relationship.

The romance heads toward oblivion the night Ben misses his first home game at Fenway Park in 11 years to accompany Lindsay to a friend's birthday party--a raucous event followed by a moment of profound intimacy. The problem is that the game turns out to be the greatest comeback in Red Sox history. His subsequent meltdown seems to be a dismissal of her, and it breaks Lindsay's heart.

To defend himself, Ben defends his fanaticism for the Red Sox. "Have you ever cared about anything for 23 years?" he demands. Lindsay replies that, 23 years ago, she was seven years old--and that if she were still obsessed with marrying Scott Baio she would think there was something very wrong with her.