One morning two weeks ago, Giana Manzi woke up to a flurry of text messages buzzing her bedside. When she reached for her phone, she understood the commotion.
“Well, Rocco got a new job,” she thought.
Manzi and new Twins manager Rocco Baldelli have never met, so the barrage of alerts might seem odd. They are both Rhode Island natives, however, and Manzi inherited the former ballplayer’s old 401 area code phone number. (It’s a small state.) A diehard baseball fan, she had tracked Baldelli’s career—mostly with the Rays with a brief stint on her beloved Red Sox—as any Ocean State resident might, so she knew why this was big news.