Page 5 of Unwritten Rules
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 ofif 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.
