Page 29 of The Show

This would be no different.

If I had to build a team, I would build the best. Mediocre was not in my vocabulary.

“I’m not going to enjoy beating them. You both know it’s going to kill me.Killme.”

“Yeahhh,” Murray agreed and rubbed his head, “but you’re still going to do it...”

“Course I am,” I grinned, while my friends - still sitting on the floor - both rolled their eyes, well used to my dramatics.

I waited for the twinge of anxiety to pass and I let out a silent apology to my dad, even though Gramps and Lauren were right; my dad would have been proud. Deep down I knew it, and I knew he would have understood that this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, even if I was reticent.

“Okay, now we finally have that out of the way, you need to figure out how to make it a decent team.”

“Yeah.”

I dropped back down, resting my elbows on my bent knees while I pulled at the grass – a well-known thinking technique.

Murray tried a different tack - stroking his chin. Rafe didn’t move from his position, arms behind his head. I wasn’t convinced he hadn’t fallen asleep.

We stayed so silent you could almost hear the whirring of our brains between the distant roar of plane engines crisscrossing their white plumes of jetstreams high in the sky.

“You know, Raferty, this is basically real-life fantasy league, not to mention Pennington has always been the best out of us at Xbox, even though I would never admit it to his face.”

“I’m still pissed he stole Lux Weston off me. I’d have won The Show last year with him,” Rafe mumbled with his eyes closed, his hangover clearly getting the better of him.

“I didn’t steal him! I traded him fair and square.”

That had him sitting up with a frown directed straight at me. “No, you didn’t! It was a total con. I lost my top spot because you traded me Boomer Jones who then got injured.”

“Raferty,” I reached over and ruffled his hair before he could smack my hand away, “you’re mistaking me for someone with the ability to see into the future. How was I supposed to know Jones would bust his knee?”

“I thought you knew everything about baseball,” he grumbled, then lay back down, his arm over his eyes. Maybe his hangover was worse than I thought, not that he’d ever been able to handle a hangover of any size. At college, Murray and I had made him a DANGER: DO NOT APPROACH sign to hang round his neck.

Murray shot Rafe a look of annoyance, then turned back to me. “Okay, so where do we start? Who’s in your fantasy league again? We need to create a twenty-six-man roster, then build it out to forty.”

“Watson, Reeves, Weston…” I started listing them off on my fingers…

“You have Stone Fields and Saint Velazquez. They were another two you stole, sorry ‘traded’, with me,” Rafe mumbled from under his arm.

“True, you do.” Murray picked up his phone, and started typing into it. “I’m listing it out. Who’s still at the club worth keeping? The trade window is closed, which means we know who we’re working with and can come in with the element of surprise before it opens again. You need to use what’s left of the off season to get your ducks in a row, Pennington. You’ve got a lot of work to do, and a lot of conversations to have.”

I blinked in surprise at Murray. For someone who usually tolerated my love for baseball at best, he was reeling off a catalogue of jobs as though he’d been thinking of them all summer. If he didn’t already have an incredibly successful hedge fund to run, I could do with him as the Lion’s General Manager, seeing as Trenton Furst - the current General Manager - sucked balls.

“Hey, you want the G.M. job?”

“Can’t,” he shook his head, like it was a serious offer. “You should take that job, then the rest of staffing we’ll start on later. Have you been down to the club yet?”

“No. Better add that to the list too.”

Living in denial for the past three months had meant I hadn’t really thought about the enormity of what I was taking on, too consumed with not wanting to own this club. But in reality, that was only a fraction of the actual job. Having loved the game for as long as I could remember, I knew that baseball was life for so many of New York’s residents. That it flowed through their veins thicker than blood. Lauren had been right about something else yesterday too; The Lions did have loyal fans, and it would crush them if I did nothing. And I knew exactly what it was like to be a fan whose club disappointed them, and whose players weren’t always the best.

That was not the club I wanted to own.

I would build The Lions to be a fans first club.

Which meant I needed to get the front office team onside before my ownership was leaked.

And I only had one month to do it.

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