Page 50 of Unwritten Rules
“I’m sure it is.” Because Zach spent his first year living in the same kind of place he lived when he was in the minors. The shower had mold-stained grout and the fridge leaked, but it was a short drive to the ballpark. “You haven’t been scouting places?”
“It felt like bad luck.” Eugenio pats down his pockets, then takes out his phone and texts something. Zach’s phone flashes where it’s sitting on his bedside table. “Come by and see it. I’ll cook. Let me know what you want to eat.”
“I could think of something right now.” Zach paws at him, and Eugenio laughs, insisting that he needs to go. “Hey, when you made me that tarte thing, were you trying to tell me something?”
Eugenio gives him one of those looks he sometimes gets when they’re game-planning, the kind that says that Zach should extract some meaning out of whatever chart they’re looking at that he’s clearly missing. “Yes, Zach, I was trying to tell you something. What do guys normally do when they’re interested?”
“Um, there’s usually not a lot of ambiguity. You know, if someone wants to hook up.”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
“It hasn’t really come up much.” Which feels like too much to admit, even if Eugenio already knows, and Eugenio leans down and kisses him, and promises to come over the next day.
They play their home opener against Chicago, splitting a four-game series with them. A few more wins against the soft meat of the Seattle Pilots, and then another series, and another. They divide games more or less evenly—if Zach starts two against Anaheim, Eugenio has the next two against Detroit, each taking two for four-game sets, one DH-ing while the other one catches.
The team’s playing well enough that commentators start to take note of it. Zach’s mom sends him articles clipped from the physical edition of theSan Francisco Chronicleshe gets, bright highlighter circles around his name when he’s mentioned, like he can’t read the paper online.
And so Zach puts his head down and plays. Because baseball is like that. An endless number of games, a grind, a pleasure. When he looks up, it’s May, and they’re winning more games than they’re losing, and Eugenio has brought him another plant.
“Since you didn’t kill the last one.” He puts a basil plant on Zach’s kitchen counter next to the nested stack of mixing bowls, a canister of various cooking utensils Zach doesn’t know the functions of but bought when Eugenio mentioned wanting to cook.
The plant is in a black plastic pot covered in purple foil, which Zach unwraps, moving the aloe, bright green and fat with water, over on the windowsill to accommodate the basil.
“Looks good,” Eugenio says. “You’ll have to water it more frequently than the aloe.”
Zach looks up care instructions on his phone. “I’m worried I might actually kill this one.”
“Just pay attention to it.” Eugenio puts his hands on either side of the counter, leaning into Zach’s space. His breath smells like bubblegum and sunflower seeds, and his hair is still a little damp from his post-game shower. “It’ll tell you what it needs.”
“That right? What does it need right now?” Zach glances over to the basil, which is sitting on the ledge, leaves soaking in the late-afternoon sunshine.
“I could think of a few things.” And he laughs when Zach pulls him down the hall and into the bed Zach increasingly thinks of as theirs.
They’re wrapping up a planning meeting, looking over scouting reports for their next series against Detroit, when Morgan snags him by the back of his shirt. “Hey, you got a sec?”
Zach studies the debris of their meeting: printouts, some annotated with Eugenio’s notes, some defaced by his own, a few different iterations of a graphic that the stats department has brought to show them. His gut churns a little at whatever Morgan might want. “I’ll come find you in a minute.”
“Which of these is better?” one of the analytics guys says. And despite Courtland calling them “pencil necks,” he looks more like a linebacker in a set of business-appropriate khakis, occupying one side of the table with Zach and Eugenio squeezed on the other.
“They’re all saying the same thing, right?” Eugenio says.
“In this one,” the analytics guy continues, like he didn’t hear him, “we decided to represent the ground ball percentages and flyball percentages separately from a hitter’s likelihood of making contact, and in this one we combined them.”
“They’re saying the same thing, right?” Zach narrows his eyes. Next to him, Eugenio is leaning away from the table, his arms crossed.
“Exactly,” the guy says, sounding pleased.
“So, what Morales just said.”
The analytics guy glances between them, like he’s surprised to see Eugenio there.
And Zach opens his mouth to say something else when Eugenio taps his foot against his, shaking his head slightly as if to tell Zach not to belabor the point.
“You sure?” Zach asks, trying to lower his voice in the otherwise echoingly quiet room.
“Don’t,” Eugenio says tensely, his expression that neutral he gets when he’s truly pissed off. “It’s fine.” He shuffles and reshuffles the stack of papers in front of him. “We good here?” And doesn’t wait for a response before getting up and leaving.
“Looks like the big leagues are agreeing with him,” the analytics guy says.
