The first game back after the All-Star break has the feeling of coming back to school after winter vacation: everyone’s a little heavier and forgets what exactly it is they’re doing there.
After playing in Cincinnati, Swordfish Park seems particularly enormous, a huge cavern of a place with a staring concrete roof and a handful of fans. Their reactions, which are mostly collective groans, echo off it. They held a concert there over break; the already-patchy outfield still bears scars of where the stage was set up.
It’s mid-game, and Womack is on the mound. He’s one of their more experienced pitchers, if having three years of big-league service time makes anybody experienced. But by the fourth inning, his sinking fastball isn’t fooling the Arches’ lineup. They’ve loaded the bases with three blooper singles, each spinning past the Swordfish second baseman into the wide plains of Miami’s infinite outfield.
Zach calls time, tipping up his mask and jogging out to the mound.
“Save it,” Womack says, when he gets there. “I do not need Zach Glasser therapy right now.”
Womack’s a few inches taller than Zach is, Black, skinny enough to be swallowed by the bright teal of their home jerseys. He has a complex windup that reminds Zach a little of a pinwheel but when he’s locked in, he’s locked in. Right now he mostly looks sweaty and pissed off. He moves the glove from his mouth so Zach can see him talk, revealing a scowl. They’re facing one another, Zach’s mitt up shielding them on one side, and Womack’s glove on the other, a concession to the runners occupying the bases, who are also apt to steal signs and relay them to their team’s batter.
“No therapy, I swear,” Zach lies. “I was gonna say we should maybe go heavier on the sliders.”
Womack gives him a look like he doesn’t believe Zach either. “Sliders. Sure, Glasser, let’s throw some sliders.”
Zach doesn’t leave right away, instead waiting for the umpires to start inching closer like they’re gonna come to break up their confab.
“You gonna get the hell off my mound?” Womack says finally.
And Zach conceals his grin behind his mask, jogging back behind home plate, and throwing the set of signs to indicate a slider.
They end up losing the game, one where Zach strikes out, lines out, flies out, and pops out, four frustratingly quick at-bats that seem over before they’ve begun. He has to answer for the team’s anemic showing when the beat reporter for the Herald sticks his phone in Zach’s face and asks about it. “Sometimes stuff goes your way,” Zach says, “and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s baseball.”
“Thanks,” Womack says, after the reporters have dispersed.
“You mean for not selling you out to the press?”
“My sinker wasn’t working.”
“Shit happens.” Zach’s legs hurt, the roof not fully insulating them from the heat. His knees have started making noises when he first gets up in the morning. He mostly just wants to dunk himself in the hot tub and go home. “It’s probably just rust from the break. I should get going.”
“Nah, I threw almost every day over break. Ball just felt weird coming out of my hand.”
“What’d Pinelli say?” Zach says. Though Womack spent most of the game at the other end of the dugout from their pitching coach, talking over pitch selection with Zach.
“Said it was probably rust from the break. But I mean—” Womack glances around at their teammates, most of whom are already changed and heading out “—it’d be cool if you could do some work with me during my next throwing session.”
“Maybe you should ask Pinelli.” Because it would mean additional work on top of trying to coax three good pitches out of pitchers who can only really throw two.
“You know when you’re in school and the teacher figures out early on you don’t need as much help as the rest of the knuckleheads in your class. And so she leaves you alone, even when you need something?”
“I was one of the knuckleheads, but I’ll take your word for it.” Zach suppresses a sigh. “All right. Let me know when.”
Zach goes home, marking the day off on his printed-out calendar, a slash line through it. He watches a TV show that he doesn’t really pay attention to before flipping to a cooking show that he also mostly ignores. He hurts, his body registering all its small indignities as he settles into bed, aches that no longer respond to heat or ice or their massage therapist. He looks for his Tiger Balm, but remembers he finished his last tin before the break and hasn’t gotten around to getting more. He digs an ancient tub of Vicks out of his medicine cabinet and spends a few minutes rubbing some on the meat of his hip where a knot has coalesced and won’t release.
When he first moved to Miami, he spent most of his time getting to know the new team. They’re rebuilding and are made of the kinds of players common on rebuilding teams: a parade of rookies promoted too young from the minors, most of whom were quickly demoted once it became clear they couldn’t cut it against big-league pitching. And players like him, ones aging out of the game or still clinging to its fringes. He got to know the city some, even going to synagogue a few times, mostly to appease his parents’ insistence that he couldn’t meet someone “nice” sitting around his apartment. Made a list of restaurants and went to them, sometimes with teammates, sometimes with their coaching staff or trainers, the kind of meals where he just ordered the first thing on the menu, absent the rituals of Eugenio’s explanations.
Dated, or rather, fucked, hookups that rarely lasted longer than the offer of a shower or a glass of water. And he worried that they might recognize him, until he realized that even the most die-hard Swordfish fans—all three of them—probably couldn’t. Something he probably wouldn’t have the luxury of if he moved back to Baltimore or someplace else more baseball-oriented.
The Vicks helps, though now he smells like a cough drop when he gets in bed. He’s drifting to sleep when he gets a notification on his phone from a guy he sometimes hooks up with, responding to a text he sent before the All-Star Classic, seeing if he was around that week.
Sorry I was out of town, it reads. You up now? There’s a picture accompanying it. Zach clears both it and the text message in case one of his teammates decides to snoop on his phone.
He opens up the thread with Eugenio and stares at it as if willing it to change, for ellipses to appear, indicating that Eugenio is typing. But nothing happens.
His hookup texts again, a teasing message telling Zach not to leave him on Read, and Zach says, Not a great time, and doesn’t respond any further.
A few days later, Zach heads out to the bullpen for Womack’s throwing session. It’s a Monday, a fact he only knows because he marked off Saturday and Sunday on the calendar. A humid Miami morning, the kind that feels even more airless in the stadium, its roof already drawn in anticipation of afternoon rain.
Womack’s there warming up. He uses a modified windup, a small leg kick preceding the impossibly long stride of his legs.
“How’s your elbow?” Zach asks. Though most pitchers have the same aversion to the words elbow discomfort that middle schoolers have to saying Bloody Mary in front of a bathroom mirror, lest it should appear.
“Elbow’s good,” Womack says. He adds, “No, really,” in response to Zach’s look of skepticism. “I’d say something if it wasn’t. Maybe not to Pinelli, but I’d let you know.”
Zach clips on his gear and goes and squats sixty feet away from Womack, who throws a few warmup tosses before saying he wants to start with sinkers.
His sinker isn’t a particularly fast fastball—it sits in the low nineties but has a heavy sink action like rolling a bowling ball off a flat roof. The kind of pitch Zach never really has to frame. The kind of pitch that makes him wonder what he’s doing on the team at all, since the coaches tell him what to call for and he only sometimes has to steal strikes.
“Looks fine to me,” Zach says, after he catches a few with placements around the bottom of the would-be zone. “But if it’s bugging you, let’s see what the Rapsodo has to say.”
The Rapsodo sits on one of the tables. It resembles an old flash-powder camera, a lens poking out of its casing capturing pitch data. A tablet lies next to it displaying the kind of numbers that used to stymie Zach until Eugenio explained them. Some of which indicate that Womack was right: his sinker is behaving differently than it was before the break.
“You having shoulder pain or anything that’d change your arm slot?” Zach asks.
“No, nothing like that.”
“Next set, maybe think about your arm position. Like don’t even change it, just, I don’t know, think about it.”
“Put some intention into it? You sound like my yoga instructor.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
By the end of their throwing session, Womack’s joking with Zach, telling him about what he did over break—which involved an ill-fated trip to a paint-your-own-pottery place with his girlfriend—and about their upcoming series against the Pittsburgh Rivers.
“I caught Garza up in Cincinnati,” Zach says.
“You think we didn’t all watch you at the All-Star Classic?”
“I, uh, normally don’t bother watching it.”
Something about that makes Womack laugh and throw a handful of gum from one of the nearby buckets at Zach, who flings a towel at him in retaliation. “But for real,” he says, settling, “what was it like?”
“It was fine, I guess.” And Zach struggles to find words to summarize how un-exciting it was. How his heart beat against his ribs going out, catching in front of all those fans, expecting a playoff atmosphere, only for it to feel like a scrimmage. “I thought it’d be different. Just a lot of buildup and then, I don’t know. It felt like spring training.”
“Spring training?”
“You know, kinda pointless ultimately. My parents couldn’t make it, and I guess most players bring an entourage or whatever. It probably would have been different with other people there.”
“You really didn’t have a good time?”
And Zach’s mind flashes to Eugenio sitting next to him on the dugout bench and at the restaurant, ordering drinks, wrapping his arm around Zach’s shoulders. Eugenio lying next to him in his hotel room bed, sated and content, before he walked away.
It must show on his face because Womack’s looking at him, eyebrows raised.
Zach’s throat feels dry, even in the Miami humidity, a scratchiness that a swig of water doesn’t calm. “I guess, sometimes things don’t work out how you expect.”
Days go by. The closer the series against the Gothams gets, the slower time seems to go. Zach goes to the ballpark, works out, hits off a tee, hits in the cages, does fielding drills, lifts. He rides the bench for a third of their games, maybe getting one pinch-hit appearance in the late innings or maybe just standing at the dugout railing and spitting.
He hasn’t texted Eugenio, and Eugenio hasn’t texted him, but it wasn’t unusual before the All-Star Classic for them to go months without sending anything.
One night, after a game against the Millers, he sits in bed, squinting at the glare of his phone screen in his otherwise dark bedroom and reading through their text thread with one another. The thread itself only goes back two years, a total of fewer than twenty messages, though that’s mostly because Zach purged them on his road trip from Oakland to Miami. He sat in various hotel rooms that dotted long stretches of highway, scrolling through them, screenshotting a couple before deleting the rest.
He pulls up the screenshots now. A lot of them are hotel room numbers for when they were on road trips together, Eugenio coming to Zach’s room to “discuss game-planning,” the entirety of their relationship in a set of three-digit numbers and thumbs-up responses.
Now the thread is mostly a string of texts from Eugenio followed by Sorry wrong person, and then the number from Zach’s Cincinnati hotel room. Dots appear while Zach has the thread open, Eugenio typing, and Zach sits and stares at them until they disappear again.
He considers what he could write, as if it could be distilled into a text message. That he’s alone, floating, in a city barely above sea level. That he might not have the guts to say anything to Eugenio during their upcoming series. That Eugenio could fly back to New York with nothing different between them, and that Zach might let him. The thought of it makes him ache.
It’s possible Eugenio is sitting in whatever New York loft he probably lives in thinking the same thing. Or he could have accidentally opened the text thread and typed a message intended for someone else before catching himself. It’s possible he’s moved on, leaving Zach adrift.
Zach looks at the thread, at the dots that have disappeared, and then at the walls of his bedroom. The shelves in front of him are scattered with the detritus of his playing career: dated game balls, his baseball card encased in clear polymer, a picture of the Elephants clinching a postseason berth, everyone radiantly happy and soaked in champagne. Looks at them, and the spaces between them, now gathering dust.
He opens up a search tab on his phone browser, pausing for a second before typing in therapists. And then revising it to therapists coming out Miami, not expecting much to appear. The top search result is advice for therapists on how to help their patients, but the next leads to a set of names and numbers, a few reviews from clients willing to put their names—or at least their user handles—to them.
He could call. It’s late, and any office is liable to be closed. He could leave a voice mail, asking them to call him back.
And risk getting a return call at the ballpark the next day, telling Womack or Pinelli or any of their bullpen pitchers that it’s a call from a doctor, not a team doctor, and that he’ll be back in a second. Hoping the walls are thick in whatever room he ducks into, that his phone for once interfaces correctly with his hearing aid. Asking if they do appointments by video so he doesn’t have to go to a building with their name listed on a letter board in the lobby. Of beginning the session and having the therapist go, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who plays for the Swordfish?” Thinking about it puts a metallic taste on the back of his tongue, an invisible compressive loop around his chest, restricting his breath.
He doesn’t call. But he clicks the phone number associated with one of the therapists, a clean-cut guy who looks like he does triathlons in his spare time and has rave reviews. He lets his phone dial the number and cancels the call, then saves it to his contact list as the guy’s name before revising it to Todd Miami.
He reopens his texts to the thread with Eugenio, types and hits Send before he has a chance to stop himself. See you soon.
He’s about to close the thread, silence notifications, go to sleep, when his phone flashes an alert, a text that just says, Wrong person?
No, Zach replies. A pause, three dots appearing and then disappearing, before Eugenio responds.
Looking forward to seeing... And there’s delay, Eugenio typing. Another message comes through ... Miami pitching.
And Zach laughs loudly, echoing off the walls of his apartment, sound filling in all the empty spaces before it fades.