Page 51 of Unwritten Rules
And Zach is about to ask him what the fuck that’s supposed to mean when Morgan ducks her head in.
“You done?” she asks.
“Yep,” Zach says. And he shuts the door on the way out a little more forcefully than he needs to.
Zach follows her through the warren of the clubhouse: training rooms, equipment rooms, massage rooms, the cryotherapy chamber that Gordon uses religiously after every game, the hot tubs where a few guys are boiling off aches from a workout.
A handful of players sit around playing cards; a few more argue over a half-filled sudoku puzzle. Someone’s taking a nap—Giordano from the look of the skinny white feet sticking out from under a blanket—on one of the couches, Braxton sitting next to where he’s lying, his head against Braxton’s thigh like that’s a just thing they do. Like that’s something any of them could do without getting comments.
By the time they get outside, Zach’s heart feels like he’s trying to run. His hands are damp, and he wipes them on his chest, every excuse he’s ever thought of—”It’s not like that” and “How did you know?” and “Please don’t say anything”—sitting in his mouth.
“Please don’t tell anyone I asked for your help with this,” Morgan says. “I mean it.”
“I won’t.” And Zach’s shoulders, which have been up by his ears, untense.
“I haven’t even asked you anything yet.”
They’re standing in the makeshift area that serves as a bullpen, tucked into the sidelines on the edge of the field. Morgan gets a tripod, one of the portable ones D’Spara uses to record pitch mechanics, and fumbles with the setup before clipping her phone to the mount, twisting the knob to secure it. “I need to get some video of me pitching,” she says.
“Do you want me to, like, hit Record or whatever?”
“I want you to catch me.”
“I’ve never actually caught softball pitching.” He looks around for a bag of large, neon-yellow balls and finds only baseballs. “I mean, I might have at some point in high school, but not since then.”
“This wouldn’t be softball pitching.”
“Um, all right. I guess let me go get my gear.”
When Zach comes back, Morgan’s up, stretching, the kinds of stretches relievers do when they’re told to get loose in the middle of a game, striding off the mound and whipping a towel to check her release point. He’s never seen her throw overhand before; she does a leg kick, power pushing off her back leg, sending the towel gripped in her hand in an arc halfway between true overhand and a sidearm release.
“You got a good motion,” he says. “When was the last time you pitched?”
“Last week.” But she doesn’t elaborate.
And it’s one thing to know that, to see the windmilling softball motion in videos that the local TV channel sometimes plays before airing interviews with her. It’s another to see her take the mound like she’s any other guy.
He gets his gear on and squats where he normally would, but it occurs to him that softball field dimensions are probably different, the distance between the pitcher’s circle and the plate shorter. “Should I, uh, move in?”
“No, there’s good. I’m gonna start the camera.”
“What’re you gonna throw?” he asks, and then clarifies when he sees her glance at the bag of balls, “Fastballs, sliders, whatever.”
“Fastballs. Then some curves. I got the Rapsodo going too.” She nods to the portable video system they have to analyze pitches. “Phone’s mostly for backup, in case they just want video.”
Zach doesn’t ask who “they” is, instead squatting down behind the plate and thumping his glove. She throws him a few warmup tosses and then sends him a fastball.
It’s a slow fastball—probably sitting somewhere in the mid-seventies but practically glacial since he catches pitchers who hit triple digits. But it’s not terrible either: Well-aimed, movement that would entice hitters to chase, more refined than what guys throw in high school, though at about the same velocity. A good pitch for an amateur, one better than what he would see in a rec league game, maybe even as good as one thrown in an independent league game. Strange to see from someone who isn’t a baseball player.
She throws him a few more, and he fields them, tossing the balls back like they’re playing catch. She holds up a hand after ten pitches. “Now for curves.”
Her curveball is—Zach’s caught a lot of good curveballs over the years, Braxton’s Cy Young–winning curveball first among them, and hers isgood. Good in a way that makes Zach whistle. It sits somewhere in the mid-sixties, sufficiently slow to play off her fastball, but floats, looking relatively harmless, a pleasant butterfly of a pitch, before making a sharp, devastating drop.
“Jesus,” he says, after a particularly good one. He gets up, drawing a cup of Gatorade from the cooler, handing another to Morgan. “I’m glad I don’t have to face that.”
Something in the way he says it makes Morgan twist her mouth, and she towels her hands, applying rosin and clapping it off. “I have a spike curve too, if you’re still up for it.”
She throws her spike curve, named for the way the pitcher’s finger sits in a spike against the ball; it comes in harder than her standard curveball with an even sharper break to it. The kind of pitch, if he tried to hit it, he probably couldn’t.
