Softball Champ Jennie Finch Expecting

The Olympic gold medalist and her husband, Casey Daigle, are having a baby

Olympic gold medal-winning softball ace Jennie Finch and her husband, Casey Daigle, are expecting their first child in April – and they already know the baby will be a boy.

Finch, 25, has been married to Daigle, 24, an Arizona Diamondbacks minor-league pitcher, since Jan. 15 of this year.

“Casey is thrilled, and from Day 1 (of the marriage) he couldn’t wait to be a father,” Finch, who helped the U.S. Women’s Olympic softball team take the gold medal last year, said at a press conference last week.

The day after the couple met in 2002, Daigle sent Finch four dozen roses – then asked if she’d go out with him. “I said no because that was too creepy,” Finch later told Sports Illustrated magazine. “But he hung around, and we got together.”

That they did: Daigle popped the question to her on the softball field at the University of Arizona, where she had starred before her ’02 graduation.

“He blindfolded me and took me to the mound and said, ‘You have been the queen of the diamond for four years. Now I want you to be the queen of my heart,'” recalled Finch.

Daigle, who played for the Class AA Tennessee Smokers and in the Arizona Fall League this year, assures fans that motherhood won’t take his wife away from the game. “We’ve talked about hiring a personal trainer, and she wants to play about three weeks to a month after she has the baby,” he said, as quoted by the Chicago Sun-Times.

As for a sports career for the impending arrival: “First, we want him to be healthy, and if he’s athletic, that’s great,” says Daigle, who stands 6’6″ (Finch is 6′). “But we always kid around that if he’s a 7′-chess player, that’s fine.”