To watch Jocelyn Alo at bat this year was to fall into a sort of magical thinking.
Maybe you knew the facts, everything that made her the best slugger in the history of college softball, with remarkable power on display in her fifth and final season at Oklahoma. Maybe you knew the statistics—numbers that seemed to push against the limits of possibility. Alo—was named SI’s 2022 Athlete of the Year, along with Aaron Judge—finished the 2022 season with a .515 batting average and .646 on-base percentage, and she set NCAA career records for home runs, total bases and slugging percentage. Maybe you knew the story, how much she and her family sacrificed for this when she was growing up in Hawaiʻi, propelled by an early understanding of how precious her talent might be. Maybe you knew none of the above. Maybe, instead, you simply found the feeling through diffusion, unable to resist how a stadium thrummed with raw, kinetic anticipation whenever she stepped into the box.
And then came the magical thinking. No matter how much or how little you knew about Jocelyn Alo, you watched her come up to the plate, and you suddenly believed. It was not just that her success as a hitter felt automatic. (Though it often did.) No, it was something more specific, more ambitious: It was that a home run felt inevitable.
