Page 12 of Unwritten Rules
“He said that guys like me always have a temper. You ever get that feeling like it doesn’t matter if you win, you just want the other guy to lose?”
“Only all the time.”
“I just get sick of it, pretending like I don’t hear stuff like that.”
Zach considers the number of times he’s heard teammates talking to each other about him, even if he’s in the same room. About his batting average. About his game calling. About if he can even hear the umpires, as if umpires didn’t also use hand signals. “Yeah, that’s the way it is sometimes.”
Something flickers in Eugenio’s face, like he’s going to argue that it doesn’t have to be that way. Or like he’s going to throw a cooler or punch a locker or do any of the things frustrated players do. The ones that would prove the umpire right about him. It flickers and then he suppresses it under a neutral expression, a vague half grimace that’s somehow worse than anger. “I should probably go and apologize to whoever.” He pulls himself out of his chair and even that looks kind of exhausted.
“I told them I’d talk to you,” Zach says. “You can probably say something tomorrow. Give D’Spara some time to let his bad mood blow off.”
“Oh.” Eugenio sits back down.
“If you want to rest here, I can wake you up when the game is over.”
“I’m too keyed up. But thanks.” Eugenio shuts his eyes, like he’s going to fall asleep, regardless of what he said.
Zach goes to the kitchen and gets two bottles of Gatorade from the fridge. He sets one by Eugenio, who’s now sitting with his face buried in his hands. Zach hovers a hand over his back. He contemplates pressing his palm to the muscle between his shoulder blades, like he did with Johnson to prevent a meltdown.
But it’s possible Eugenio would take it to mean something else, here, away from the traffic of the dugout, from their teammates, some of whom will likely clamor back soon. Because it does mean something else, at least to Zach. Just nothing he can say. And so he drops his arm and goes to see about the rest of the game.
Chapter Five
Zach gets to the ballpark early the next morning with his usual coffee order seated in a cardboard holder. It’s a cool day, the Phoenix Mountains sitting in the distance, the grass on the diamond freshly watered, the whole place smelling like possibilities and clean dirt.
He expects to find Eugenio out in the bullpen, eager for coffee and with breakfast and opinions on the right number of hot sauce packets that Zach should apply to it, which is usually one more than Zach actually does.
Instead, the bullpen is empty. Zach kills time, drinking his coffee and ignoring the conditioned spike of hunger he now gets when he swings open the bullpen gate. A half an hour later, Eugenio still isn’t there, but the rest of the guys are filing in—Johnson, Montelbaum, a few players who’ll be in the rookie instructional league this season, who all still look at the practice fields the way tourists look up at buildings in New York.
Zach goes to the kitchen to scavenge for breakfast. Morgan is there, staring at the shake she has going in the blender like it holds unrevealed secrets and not protein powder.
She pauses the blender when she sees Zach. “What’d you tell that kid Johnson?”
“Shit, what’d he do?”
“Just came begging for a job.” She pulses the blender a few times, then glances around. “Listen, I would prefer if we just got dinner or something. I don’t particularly want to talk about it here.”
And it must be serious if he’s gonna need to buy her a whole cheeseburger to discuss it. “Yeah, okay.”
He thanks her when she hands him a glass of portioned out shake. It tastes like chocolate-flavored limestone. “Have you seen Morales?”
“He’s been in there with the Big Man. For a while.” She nods toward the closed door of their manager’s office.
Eugenio comes out a few minutes later, face carefully neutral. He swallows the cold espresso that Zach brought him in two swigs, working his jaw to get rid of the taste.
“Glasser” comes a booming voice. And it must be serious if their manager is hollering for him.
“Good morning, sir,” Zach says, once he’s in the office, and the Big Man—whose real name is Courtland—rolls his eyes. He’s old, even for a manager, in his seventies, and scrawny as an underfed chicken. He’s got a deep voice that seems to start in his toes and a tendency to let umpires have it at the slightest provocation, though he didn’t intercede yesterday with Eugenio. After four years with the team, Zach’s not really sure if he likes him, but he’s a little afraid of him, which is probably the more important thing.
“D’Spara went to the doctor for something or other this morning,” Courtland says.
“Is he all right?”
Zach gets a hand wave in response as if medical problems are something that young people have invented to get out of their responsibilities, even if D’Spara is pushing sixty.
“I’m not here to talk about D’Spara being a hypochondriac. I asked the pencil necks—” which Courtland calls the analytics guys, sometimes to their faces “—to put together some numbers about our catchers’ framing abilities.”
He pushes forward a packet of papers, some of which have an indecipherable scrawl across them. Zach looks through them—they’ve fixed the color coding but haven’t simplified the charts into ballplayer-ese—and spends a long minute trying to interpret the list of catching metrics before going, “Uh, okay.”
