One True Outcome Read online

  One True Outcome

  KD Casey

  Contents

  Content Notes

  1. Mack

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  8. Jamie

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  12. Mack

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  16. Jamie

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Fire Season

  Also By KD Casey

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Content Notes

  A veteran player on a new team. The rookie who hero-worshiped him growing up. The unwritten rule they’re about to break.

  * * *

  Content notes: Includes discussion of prior parental death due to cancer (off-page) and medical debt; on-page depictions of anxiety and chronic pain due to injury including ablism; casual drug use/drinking; and a power differential between characters (which is discussed/negotiated as part of the story). The characters are ten years apart; the younger character is 26. There is a brief discussion/depiction of structural homophobia that does not involve slurs.

  * * *

  For complete content notes, go to https://www.kdcaseywrites.com/content-notes.

  ©2022 KD Casey

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go. —Yogi Berra

  1

  Mack

  Mack knows something is up when their manager, Covington, calls him into his office after their game against Boston—a game in which Mack recorded no hits, no walks, and no spectacular defensive plays. He did, however, manage to re-tweak his perpetually sore shoulder. So a typical showing for him.

  His postgame plans were to chill in the cryotherapy chamber, say some words to the press that approximate graciousness, sign a few things for the fans who still want to talk with him, and go the hell to sleep.

  All of which Covington interrupts when he calls Mack’s name. None of the other guys say anything. That might be worse than a summons itself. Mack does not drag his feet. That’d be childish for a rookie; he hasn’t been one of those in more than fifteen years. If he’s walking slowly, it’s because his shoulder hurts and not because he’s trying to delay the inevitable.

  The visiting manager’s office in Boston is small, clean, unadorned, with only a desk and two chairs, one of which Mack sits in. On the wall, there’s a set of schedules and signs with rules for player conduct—what they can wear during interviews or smear on their bats. That any player who intentionally fails to give his best efforts towards winning a baseball game shall be declared permanently ineligible to play. What about unintentionally? The muscles in his back throb in time with his pulse.

  Covington, who all the guys call Covey, is old even for a manager but still imbued the vitality of the former player he was. The lines around his eyes deepen as he gives Mack a tight smile.

  Mack gears up for it. Another trip to the injured list. Because his on-field play has gone from merely bad to abysmal. Because the press has been discussing the particulars of his contract, which went from flagship to boat anchor somewhere in its second year.

  “This is a hard conversation for anyone,” Covey says.

  Mack drums his fingers against his chair. The chair is too small for him, or he’s too big for it; the arms dig into him on both sides. He gets the slightly absurd urge to leap up out of his seat if only to show that his shoulder, which aches when he moves, is fine. Even if Boston’s fielder tagged him when he reached first base almost in pity as if he didn’t want to point out how slow Mack was getting down the baseline.

  This pattern is at least predictable: Mack gets injured or “injured.” The team benches him and summons a replacement from the minors, a big-eyed kid for whom baseball still holds charms and mysteries. When Mack gets reinstated, they’ll inevitably go the way that fringe players go—sent down or traded, but at least with a big-league check in hand. Rinse, repeat.

  It’s been almost ten years since Mack signed his contract with the Baltimore Oysters. He was twenty-seven, an age at which he knew everything about everything. At thirty-six, he’s sure he doesn’t know anything or he wouldn’t have let himself dedicate a decade of his life to playing in Maryland. In the summer.

  “This is a hard conversation for everyone, including me,” Covey says.

  Mack’s pulse, which was slow from his post-game cool-down, speeds up.

  “I won’t try to soften this. We’ve known each other too long for that. The team’s decided to designate you for assignment.” Covey lets that humiliation sink in for a minute.

  Because the only thing more humiliating than being designated for assignment—being left out on the curb for any team who wants to claim him—is wondering if another team will even bother showing interest. Or if his professional career is coming to an end in a dingy office in the visitors’ clubhouse in Boston.

  “It’s a tough thing for me to say or, I imagine, for you to hear.” Covey sounds genuinely upset, enough that Mack gets the strange urge to console him. To thump him on the shoulder and tell him that it’s going to be okay. Because, of course, it will be—for him, the team, the number-crunchers in Baltimore’s front office who’ve been clamoring to get rid of Mack for almost a decade.

  “You’re always gonna be a legend in this game,” Covey adds.

  Mack doesn’t say anything, just a mumbled thanks, along with an assurance that he’s fine, even if he feels held together by fraying trainer’s tape. He swallows that thought, along with the looks of his teammates, as he leaves the clubhouse. A few nod at him, but none approach, and he’s grateful for their distance.

  He takes a car service back to the team hotel. Covey told him he could stay as long as he likes, that the team paid for the room until the end of their road trip. As a “sign of respect.” Like money would be an issue. Because no one begrudged Mack his fat contract until he gave the team only lean production in return.

  It’s worse because they’re on the road. He doesn’t even have the pleasure of getting drunk in his own house. Instead, he pays a guy staffing the front desk, who he mentally classifies as a “kid” but who’s probably twenty-five, to bring him a six-pack and a bottle from the hotel bar.

  Mack tips him a hundred bucks and ignores how the guy’s shirt emphasizes the neat taper of his waist. He’s also looking at Mack like Mack will fulfill all his big-league fantasies.

  Buddy, I’m not even living out my own big-league fantasies.

  Mack gives him another hundred, signs the receipt with a scrawl indecipherable enough that it probably won’t end up on eBay, and closes the door with the guy on the other side of it.

  Getting drunk in a luxury hotel room lost its charm during Mack’s third year in the majors. He opens a beer then a second, so he doesn’t have to get up to get himself a refill. He drinks and examines the wall for cracks. It’s an old habit born from insomnia in too-short beds, his aging first-baseman’s body rendering everything doll furniture.

  He spots a spiderwebbed crack in a high corner and wonders if he’d even get a warning if the whole ceiling caved in. Or if it’d be sudden. Like his career.

  Officially, there’s a
waiting period between getting designated for assignment and his actual release from the team. His agent calls. “They could still trade you.” Said with the tone like he knows they won’t.

  A charity he works with in Baltimore calls. “We’ve, of course, been appreciative of your support over the years.”

  “I was gonna continue,” Mack says. “That is, if you still want me to.”

  There’s a long sigh of relief over the phone. “That’s good to hear.” And Mack’s about to hang up when they add, “We’re sorry to lose you on the Oysters.”

  At least someone is. “Thanks,” he says, then disconnects the call.

  His mother calls. “Matthew”—and she’s the only person on Earth who still calls him that— “come down and play shuffleboard with me. There’s a tournament going now. We’ll clean up.”

  He laughs mostly so he doesn’t cry. “You hate shuffleboard.”

  “But I like winning. These fools won’t know what hit ‘em.” Because she has perpetual beef with the other residents of the retirement community she moved into a few years ago. “Come down. Enjoy Florida.”

  He should arrange a flight, but that feels like too much. It’s all too much, especially when he gets a push alert on his phone informing him that former league MVP Matt Mackenzie has been designated for assignment by the Baltimore Oysters.

  “I fucking know that,” he tells his phone, then goes to get another drink.

  Eventually he fades into a beery sleep. He wakes up a few hours later to dry heave in the bathroom, not from being drunk but like his body is trying to reject everything that’s happened that day. He’s not crying. It’s just baseball. It’s not worth crying over. But he calls down to ask the front desk if they’d please bring him another box of Kleenex. Just in case.

  When he wakes up for real, it’s morning, and for the first time in his baseball life, he has no particular place to be.

  He lazes in bed, ordering room service and being grateful it isn’t the guy from the front desk who delivers it. He answers the door in his shower shoes and the hotel-provided robe like an octogenarian getting the newspaper as the most exciting part of his day.

  He eats while watching TV, though it becomes clear that the main story on sports news is him. They show old interviews and postgame pressers where this reporter or that asked him about his on-field performance, and he had to come up with an answer that didn’t sound like an excuse.

  His shoulder hurts, even if the heaviest thing he’s lifted in the past twelve hours is a glass. Not the deep throb of post-game soreness but pain that’s become the background hum of everything he does. He could call down for more beer. Instead, he gets a bucket of ice, fashioning a dripping cold pack that offers only limited relief.

  Eventually he gets sick of watching his past-self sweat it out in front of the cameras. Lucky bastard. Because past him was a ballplayer and present him isn’t. He switches to movies, the kind he watched with his mom growing up: dull comedies, explosive action flicks. A few romcoms, glancing around like other people in the room will give him a hard time. But of course, he’s alone.

  He spends exactly one day like that. Maybe he’s too old to hold a bad temper. He drifts, shoulder soothed by the ice, mood buoyed by love stories that end well for the characters but leave him watching the scroll of the credits, wondering what he’s supposed to do now.

  Afternoon tips into twilight, which blends into night, and night fades into the next day. The Oysters president calls. He has the same apologetic tone Covey used, telling Mack that he’ll always be a member of the Oysters organization, something that would sound more sincere if Mack wasn’t essentially being fired.

  He’s not officially a free agent for a few more days. But when he gets off the call, he sits there waiting for his phone to buzz again, for teams to call him up and offer him another space on the roster. For baseball to beg him to return. Nothing comes. Why should it? His shoulder, for once, doesn’t ache. That’s the worst part of it: He’s uninjured enough to play if only someone gave him a chance. Like he didn’t spend the last decade with those kinds of chances.

  He gets his other phone from his suitcase, the one he uses for social media. He scrolls through his pictures until he finds one of Baltimore Harbor and adds a brief Instagram caption thanking the fans, the organization, the city, even if he feels chucked away as a sucked-dry crab claw. After he posts it, he turns the phone off so it doesn’t yell notifications at him and sticks it back in his luggage.

  He absolutely does not cry in the hotel shower. Or in the steamed-up bathroom afterward, the kind of crying that’s more like desperate, slightly asthmatic sobs that leave him with a trashcan of wadded-up Kleenex, a hotel bill slid under his door and the flashing question of what to do next.

  2

  The following morning, Mack’s halfway into chartering a plane to Florida when he gets a call from a number he doesn’t recognize. Probably some enterprising reporter hoping to scare him into an honest quote. He picks up anyway. There’s nothing anyone can say that’s worse than the stuff swimming through his head.

  Whoever is calling greets him with a slightly bewildered, “Mack?”

  “You called me.”

  “Mack, it’s Myra from the Miami Swordfish.” She doesn’t give a last name, but she doesn’t need to. Because there’s only one Myra in baseball, and she’s no less than the Swordfish team president.

  “We were wondering,” she continues, “if you had some time to fly down here to discuss your potential future with the team. We know you must be getting a lot of interest, so please don’t feel like you have to answer immediately.”

  Mack mutes the line so he can laugh at that, a laugh that sounds like the metal top ripping off a can. He clumsily reactivates the sound, fingers too large for the buttons on his phone screen.

  “I am getting some interest,” he says. Which is technically not untrue since “some” includes this call. “Send the details to my agent, and we’ll follow up from there.”

  It’s the kind of lie he’s told a hundred times over his playing career while he ping-ponged on and off of the injury list—that his shoulder hurt even when it didn’t. Or that it didn’t hurt even when it did. Stuff that got him labeled injury-prone, then worse: a bust.

  Though if Myra is calling, someone must see something in him. She affirms his agent’s details. “We’ll be in touch soon.”

  He flies to Florida on a tiny pill of a charter plane. Their flight path makes a wide swoop over the blue expanse of the Florida ocean before depositing him on the tarmac at Miami-Dade International. It’s hot, hotter even than the worst days in Baltimore, a kind of humid airlessness that makes him understand snowbirds who only come to the city when it’s not baseball season.

  A handler from the team greets him, ushering him into a town car that lurches through Miami traffic. She apologizes for the road congestion like it’s her fault, and he wonders about the kinds of assholes she’s responsible for ferrying around if that’s her reaction. Or the sort of asshole she expects him to be.

  “I thought I was gonna have to take an Uber,” he says, “and I always end up in a two-door. So this is better.”

  She gives him an amused look like she’s trying to imagine him fitting into a normal-sized car—which is admittedly difficult with his height and bulk—then offers him champagne hidden in one of the side compartments.

  At the stadium, he cycles through a series of meetings. Myra, who lays out the contract terms they’ll offer. PR, who ask questions that fall into two categories: If he’s willing to do charity events, which he is, and if he has anything embarrassing about his personal life. “Just that it doesn’t exist.” He hopes it sounds like a joke.

  The coaching staff discusses his potential role as a tandem first baseman and occasional pinch hitter. And, of course, they welcome his expertise at the plate and whatever wisdom he’s willing to impart to young hitters.

  Don’t end up like me, kids.

  They parade him into th
e clubhouse changing area that’s lined with expensive wooden stalls, each with a padded leather rolling chair parked in front of it.

  “We hope you don't mind.” Myra gestures to a stall with his name on a placard above it, a set of Swordfish gear that will either be his or the world’s least valuable collectibles. “I’ll leave you to get acquainted with some of our players.”

  And there’s a guy hovering near his stall, shifting his weight between his feet like he doesn’t want Mack to know he’s hovering.

  Mack doesn’t recognize him, but he’s built like a catcher, stocky, especially in his lower half. Short for a ballplayer—certainly shorter than Mack at 6’5”—and at least a decade younger. He has olive skin, sandy brown hair that glints under the clubhouse lighting and an open expression, like the game hasn’t yet worn him down. They haven’t even said anything to one another, and Mack gets the urge to tell him to hold onto that while he can.

  He’s also looking at Mack with the wide-eyed recognition that fans get at events where Mack has to do most of the talking or, alternatively, just politely nods when they tell him about that time they saw him way back when.

  “Hi,” Mack says. Because otherwise, this is will just be in a staring contest. He nods to the stall the team created for him, which feels slightly like a grade-school diorama, something made to be disassembled. “This is a pretty nice setup. Which one’s yours?”