Shortstops to F-stops

Baseball held no special appeal for photographer Andrea Modica—until she started going to the games of her local farm team, the Oneonta Yankees. Suddenly, there grew a fascination with these "big, brawling, macho guys." The idea i to photograph them came to her in a dream. "And I'll tell you Isomething," she says, "I woke up in a sweat." Now her stark, gruffly erotic images of the Yankees have been collected for a book and exhibition. Minor League, to be published in June by the Smithsonian Institution Press with a concurrent exhibition at Manhattan's Julie Saul Gallery, is a beguiling look at the peculiar camaraderie of these players. Modica says she has been particularly astonished by players who were said to have metaphorical "marriages on the field." "Somehow," she muses, "the notion about their being 'married' showed up in the photograph."