Unwritten Rules Page 2

  “Here they all come.” Eugenio points to the other catchers who didn’t show up early, recognizable by their familiar catcher-esque body shapes. They’re accompanied by dozens of players who will get winnowed down to a twenty-five-man roster, the rest the chaff of middle inning relievers, defensive replacements, and guys hoping for a good enough showing to be trade bait if another team needs someone at their position.

  Zach nods toward the field. “We should probably find out whatever meeting we’re having.”

  “Sure.” Eugenio gets up, pulling two cups of Gatorade from the cooler. He has large hands, which envelop the cup he offers Zach. Their fingers brush. Zach keeps his eyes on the horizon of incoming players, and not on Eugenio, who moves to stand next to him.

  “You volunteering to fetch Gatorade for the rest of the season?” Zach says, trying for the slightly aggrieved gravitas of a veteran player.

  A tone that doesn’t work when Eugenio laughs. “Assuming I make the opening-day roster, sure.”

  Zach didn’t expect his easy agreement, surprised enough that he glances to where Eugenio is looking at him, amused.

  “This the first year you’ve had a rookie to boss around?” Eugenio says.

  “No,” Zach lies.

  Eugenio laughs at that again, the kind of laugh that will be either very easy or very difficult to listen to for the next six weeks of spring training, especially when he nudges his shoulder against Zach’s. “You might want to work on that.”

  “What?”

  “Being an authoritarian. It doesn’t seem to come naturally.”

  “Um, thanks?” Zach says, a little bewildered.

  “C’mon. Can’t give the other guys a hard time for being late to a meeting if we’re also late.”

  And Zach gulps down the rest of his Gatorade and follows Eugenio out to the practice field to whatever the morning holds.

  * * *

  In baseball, faking effort for appearance’s sake is called eyewash. Bust it down the first-base line in the late innings of a blowout game: eyewash. The hitting coach blustering harder when the general manager is around, like huffing and puffing will make guys better at the plate: eyewash.

  The entirety of spring training, pretty much all eyewash, with the amount of effort that guys put in inversely proportional to the likelihood of them actually making the team.

  Zach spent spring training the last few years trying, urgently, desperately, to make the final roster without pissing off the veteran players by trying too hard in front of them. He woke up this morning optimistic that he wouldn’t have to do the same, that this would be his year. But sitting in the pitchers-and-catchers meeting, surrounded by coaches and training staff and other players, a feeling blooms in his gut.

  He looks up Eugenio’s triple-A stats on his phone, hand over the screen in case his teammates catch him at it. The guy can unfortunately hit both for contact and for power. And field—he threw out more than a third of runners trying to steal second base. And run, or at least run decently for a catcher, meaning he can jog. And and and and and... He’s also apparently the kind of guy who’s everyone’s friend, because he’s already sitting with the other players and telling a joke that has everyone laughing, while Zach tries not to glare at them.

  Morgan comes and finds him after the meeting. Finds him, hugs him, and uses their relative difference in height—she’s about a foot shorter than he is—to flip him, though he’s mostly pretending when he lies on the floor, exaggerating his breathing like she knocked the wind out of him.

  “Most people just say hi, Morgan,” he says, after she offers him a hand up. “If you need to assert your dominance over these assholes or whatever, could you at least wait until it’s whole-team report?”

  “Who says I won’t do it again Monday?” She gives him an actual hug, though pounds on his back with enough force that it could bruise later. She’s gotten her hair buzzed in the offseason, an undercut with a little knot of a bun, and laughs when he rubs his hand over it, telling her it looks good.

  “I could say the same thing to you. You’re up, what, fifteen pounds?”

  “Twenty,” he admits.

  She pokes him in the arm like she’s expecting him to be wearing a muscle suit under his clothes. “Wow, what’d you do?”

  “Picked up heavy stuff and put it back down, so that my team’s strength and conditioning coach didn’t yell at me for slacking ass in the offseason.”

  “You could have just asked me for pointers. Though I guess you did okay on your own.”

  They sit and talk for a while about their winters. She shows him pictures of her wedding, which Zach attended dateless—despite his parents’ cajoling to bring someone—and various underwater photos taken during her honeymoon trip to Fiji. She fiddles with the silicone band she’s wearing on her ring finger, gray with a tiny rainbow emblem printed on it. It must be recent, because she doesn’t yet have a tan line when she adjusts it.

  “What’d you do?” she asks after he’s seen the tenth photo of a nurse shark.

  “Mostly saw my family, guys from back home. Did my throwing at the high school near my parents’ house. You know, normal ballplayer shit.”

  “Jeez, Glasser, anyone ever tell you that you need to have some fun? Though I heard arbitration went well for you.”

  “It was, uh, contentious.” Zach glances around. Because of course Oakland made him argue for every penny above his base salary in front of a panel of arbiters, rather than just giving him the pay bump most guys get once they have the service time to qualify for one.

  “Yikes,” Morgan says, though it occurs to Zach he’s making twice whatever the rookies are and five or six times what she is as a coach. “You get a chance to meet the new guy?” She nods over at where Eugenio’s sitting, already in the midst of a card game.

  “Yeah.” He tries, and fails, not to sigh as he says it. “We’ve met.”

  “Oh, it’s like that?”

  “I looked up his numbers. He’s pretty good.” Zach can’t actually say “I came in excited about finally securing a roster spot and now there’s some guy here to take it” without sounding like an asshole, and so he says, “Tell me how I’m gonna keep all this weight on,” instead and listens as Morgan details her plans for their strength training for the season.

  “Seriously, though, if you’re gonna do shit like putting on that much muscle, call me,” she says, after telling him about some seminar she took on dry needling.

  “It’s my normal offseason stuff.” Though that’s a lie. Because Zach spent his time going from the gym to his parents’ house, and then using the gym to escape his parents’ house, and then using the gym to escape the inside of his under-decorated apartment and the feeling of not knowing what to do with himself when he wasn’t playing baseball. A restlessness that evaporated in the dry Arizona air as soon as he landed.

  “I do know what I’m doing,” she says. “Just in case you’re paying some scam artist without a degree who tells you that platelet therapy or howling at the moon is gonna make you hit good.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not. I just didn’t want to bug you with the wedding and everything.”

  She looks around at the room, at the clusters of guys greeting one another, talking over each other, jostling, one-upping. No one comes over to say hi to Zach, which isn’t that strange because he’s already seen most of them, either at the ballpark or at the rental complex a lot of the team is staying at. But no one comes over to see Morgan either. Something noticeable even if she’s clearly pretending not to notice.

  “Really,” he adds, “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Okay, I guess I can forgive you.”

  “Thanks for being all magnanimous and shit.” Which makes Morgan laugh and punch him in the arm.

  * * *

  Eugenio brings him breakfast the next day. He’s out in the bu
llpen early, greeting Zach when he arrives, and they stretch side by side in the early morning cool. Whatever first-day nerves he had dissipated, because he’s quieter than he was the day before, grunting vaguely at Zach while he stretches, taking occasional sips from a cup of coffee.

  “I’m not really a morning person,” Eugenio says after a while.

  “Sure,” Zach says. What ballplayer is, given night games and long travel schedules?

  “I brought food if you want it.” Eugenio nods to a paper bag sitting up on a shelf next to a tangle of green canvas stretch-out straps. Inside there’s something encased in aluminum foil, a few packets of hot sauce, a pile of napkins already absorbing a puddle of orange grease.

  “You didn’t have to.” Because Zach assumed this was one of those things guys promise to do and don’t follow through on.

  “I said I would.”

  The foil is still warm, meaning Eugenio hasn’t been there much longer than he has. Zach unwraps it and takes a bite. “It’s good.”

  “You thought it wouldn’t be?” And the way Eugenio says it is a little familiar, like they’ve known each other for more than a day. “It’s got eggs, potatoes, cheese, machaca—it’s like rehydrated beef.”

  Zach swallows another mouthful. In the offseason, eating was a chore, a means to putting on weight. But this is good: eggs, purple potatoes, flavorful without being too spicy, which is a plus since catching whatever double-A pitcher they’ll pair him with will be enough heartburn for the day. “Where’d you say this was from again?”

  “How about you bring me coffee tomorrow and we’ll call it even?”

  “What’s wrong with the clubhouse coffee?” Zach asks, mostly to be difficult, because clubhouse coffee tastes like turpentine.

  And Eugenio clearly vacillates between not wanting to correct Zach and wanting to tell him, in excruciating detail, what’s wrong with it, enough that Zach laughs a little. Eugenio smiles an unfatigued smile at that.

  “I’ll bring some tomorrow. How do you take it?” Zach expects a long list of instructions, possibly involving roasting styles and pour-over preferences.

  “Espresso. Lots of sugar.”

  And, yeah, Zach can probably handle remembering that.

  They do, in fact, pair Zach with a double-A pitcher. He’s a kid, twenty-one at most, so nervous he practically sweats the ball out of his own hand. Zach doesn’t necessarily put his mask on for bullpen sessions—especially when they’re at half velocity, aimed more at developing command than speed—but he does for this one out of self-preservation.

  The kid’s name is Johnson, and he has the look of a replacement-level middle-inning reliever, tall and white with a bad haircut. He’s also clearly jittery as hell, because he can’t seem to throw anything anywhere near where Zach is set up, to the point where Zach doesn’t bother scrambling after any of the balls to get his glove around them. Johnson supposedly has a plus fastball and is working to develop his secondary pitches—but every guy in affiliated ball has the same. Still, if he’s in double-A, there must be something there, even if it’s not in evidence right now.

  Johnson goes into his windup, delivering what should be a high fastball. But it sails over Zach’s head and ricochets off the fence behind him with enough force that Zach has to dodge it as it bounces back.

  “Fuck,” Zach says, mostly to himself.

  Johnson hears him, because his face starts to crumple into that mixture of disappointment and rage particular to pitchers—red splotches on his cheeks, sweat at his forehead and coating his arms.

  Zach flips up his mask and climbs the incline of the bullpen mound to talk with him. “Take a deep breath.”

  The kid looks like he’s ready to pop off. Zach puts a hand between his shoulder blades, angling them both so that they’re facing away from where the coaching staff are standing.

  “If I don’t...” Johnson begins and then trails off, though Zach can fill in the blanks. If he doesn’t pitch well, he’ll get assigned to minor-league camp in the first round of cuts. He probably will be anyway, given his age. But every guy comes to camp with that hope burning in his belly, that flicker of if I’m just good enough, if I just do things perfectly, then maybe they’ll make an exception.

  He doesn’t say any of that to Johnson, mostly because Johnson probably already knows, and that’s another thing weighing on him when he should just be focused on his fastball command.

  “Hey,” Zach says, “you know, they want to see your pitching.” He flicks a hand toward where the coaches are standing behind them. “But they also want to see how you can handle yourself when shit doesn’t go your way.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Johnson doesn’t shrug off the hand Zach has between his shoulder blades, and Zach can feel him breathing, practically counting as he inhales through his nose, holds it, and blows out through his mouth. So Zach’s not the first guy to tell him that he needs to keep it together.

  Johnson does, eventually, and when Zach sets back up, he sends him a fastball good enough to turn any scout’s head—high-nineties, right at the edge of an imaginary strike zone.

  “Nice.” Zach pounds his fist into his mitt. “Now let’s see a few more.”

  By the end of the bullpen session, Johnson’s hitting Zach’s glove where Zach tells him to and, even better, laughing when he misses. Baseball takes, if not a cool head, at least a short memory, and Zach gives him a fist bump and a swat on the ass after.

  Eugenio’s standing there as Zach sheds his gear; he looks like he wants to say something, but he pauses when Zach reaches to pull out his hearing aid. It’s itchier than normal, irritating his ear canal, trapping sweat that would otherwise evaporate off into the desert air. Zach mostly wants to take a Q-tip or five hundred to his ear. Wants to go and hit off a tee and then take cuts in the batting cages, do some weights, and then get out of there before the coaches make him do something silly, like bunting practice.

  He puts his hearing aid back in, wincing as it adjusts to the ambient noise. “Did you need something?” he asks Eugenio. He means it to be a little cutting, a little veteran player dismissing the rookie.

  Eugenio is facing him, which is better than most guys, who go back to talking from behind their hands all of five minutes after Zach asks them not to. But whatever authority Zach is hoping to assert is undercut by the amused tilt of Eugenio’s mouth.

  “See, that was better. I almost believed it,” Eugenio says.

  “Um, okay.” And Zach hustles out before he can ask Eugenio why it is, exactly, he’s smiling at him like that.

  Chapter Three

  After they’re done for the day, Zach drives back to his rental unit, part of a complex with a common pool. He floats for a while, does laps, takes a midafternoon nap in his room. When he wakes up, a bunch of guys are standing around the grill outside.

  It’s cool in the evening; it surprised him his first year, the way the desert could only hold so much heat before breathing it back to the sky. It’s brown everywhere like the hills in Marin County where he sometimes drives, just to get out of Oakland, to feel like he’s not in a constant clatter of urban noise. Nothing like Baltimore where he grew up, the insult of the February slush, the temperature above freezing but still cold enough to make him miserable.

  He pulls on exercise leggings, shorts, a long-sleeve T-shirt—a baseball player’s uniform when he’s not playing—puts on sneakers, though he checks to make sure that no local wildlife has crawled in them.

  Outside he finds half their starting rotation, a handful of relievers, and a few other catchers on the patio, though Eugenio isn’t there with them.

  A few packs of chicken are sitting out, along with a pile of unshucked corn, a tub of store-made potato salad, a stack of tortillas, and a half-moon of fresh cheese. Near it, a clump of cilantro stands in a red Solo cup full of water.

  “What’s with the—” Zach nods to the cila
ntro.

  “Morales swears that’s the best way to keep it fresh.” It’s Hayek, their third starter, who is, as ever, accompanied by Montelbaum, their fourth. “No idea if it does. That shit tastes like soap.”

  “Where is Morales, anyway?” Zach asks. Because it would be better to have Eugenio there than to have him somewhere else. To see what he’s like with a few beers in him or to observe his chemistry with their pitching staff and for exactly no other reasons. At least none Zach will admit to.

  Montelbaum leans over, plucks a piece of cilantro, and eats it, stem poking out of his mouth like a skinny green straw. “Tell him to come over if you want to see him that bad.”

  Like Zach meant something by it, something obvious and unguarded.

  He doesn’t get a chance at a denial, because one of their pitchers brings out speakers and starts blasting reggaeton loud enough to feel through the concrete. A few guys dance, and more start clowning on the guys dancing, and more start clowning on the guys who are clowning on the ones dancing. He grabs a beer from a cooler full of them, uncaps it with a bottle opener sitting out, then does another for Braxton, their first starter and the team’s biggest star, who has an empty.

  Braxton’s sitting on the periphery, away from the noise, scrolling through his phone, unperturbed by Hayek and Montelbaum, who are now fake wrestling on the concrete patio, or by Johnson, who is assembly-lining chicken by the grill. He grunts a word of thanks for the beer, which from him is practically an open declaration of love.

  “Hey,” Zach says, and Braxton rolls one of his massive shoulders in a move that means, generally, “What’s up?” and “How’ve you been?” and, “My offseason was great, thank you for asking.”

  Zach sits, drinks his beer, watches the sun lower itself, the shimmer of light at the horizon. Around him, guys talk shit and rile each other up, the cadences familiar even if he can’t discern the particular insults.