Alex Rodriguez Wanted To Date Jennifer Lopez In 1998

Retired baseball player Alex Rodriguez has been dating Jennifer Lopez since February of 2017, and the two became engaged earlier this year. But according to new video unearthed this week, Rodriguez had wanted to date Lopez for a long time before they actually met.

Intentional Talk, an MLB Network talk show, recently showed a video from 1998, in which a young Rodriguez was asked about his “dream date.”

“Jennifer Lopez,” Rodriguez said. “Hopefully you can find me a date with her.”

In 1998, when the video was taken, Rodriguez was 23 years old and still playing with his first team, the Seattle Mariners. That was also the year that Lopez, then 29, starred in the film Out of Sight, a year after she starred in Selena. Her debut album, On The 6, would arrive the following year.

Rodriguez would marry Cynthia, his first wife and the mother of his two children, in 2002, while Lopez divorced her first husband, Ojani Noa, earlier in 1998. She later took up with Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, not long afterward.

After MLB Network posted the video, Rodriguez reposted it to his own Instagram account, with the caption “I just had a feeling,” and “always knew, J-Lo.”

Lopez replied “OMG… i love this too much.”

According to a timeline posted to Harpers Bazaar, Rodriguez and Lopez actually met for the first time in 2005, at a baseball game when Rodriguez was playing for the Yankees, and Lopez was married to Marc Anthony. The game was between the Yankees and the Mets at Shea Stadium — Anthony sported a Mets jersey, while Lopez wore a Yankees hat.

The two reconnected in 2017 when they saw each other at a restaurant. They began dating not long afterward when the former Yankee texted the movie star and asked her to dinner.

Even before that, Lopez had sent a signed photo to Rodriguez at some point in the late 1990s, and Rodriguez posted it to Instagram last year, writing that “#TBT to almost 20 years ago when a big time global pop superstar signed a pic for a young ball player.”

The two have since purchased properties together in New York and Malibu. Their New York home is where Rodriguez, infamously, was photographed on the toilet last month, most likely from the building across the street.

In an interview this week with Good Day New York, per The Inquisitr, Rodriguez said that he wasn’t suing over the photo, and joked that “I have to invest in some good blinds.”