Page 78 of Unwritten Rules
Dated, or rather, fucked, hookups that rarely lasted longer than the offer of a shower or a glass of water. And he worried that they might recognize him, until he realized that even the most die-hard Swordfish fans—all three of them—probably couldn’t. Something he probably wouldn’t have the luxury of if he moved back to Baltimore or someplace else more baseball-oriented.
The Vicks helps, though now he smells like a cough drop when he gets in bed. He’s drifting to sleep when he gets a notification on his phone from a guy he sometimes hooks up with, responding to a text he sent before the All-Star Classic, seeing if he was around that week.
Sorry I was out of town,it reads.You up now?There’s a picture accompanying it. Zach clears both it and the text message in case one of his teammates decides to snoop on his phone.
He opens up the thread with Eugenio and stares at it as if willing it to change, for ellipses to appear, indicating that Eugenio is typing. But nothing happens.
His hookup texts again, a teasing message telling Zach not to leave him on Read, and Zach says,Not a great time,and doesn’t respond any further.
A few days later, Zach heads out to the bullpen for Womack’s throwing session. It’s a Monday, a fact he only knows because he marked off Saturday and Sunday on the calendar. A humid Miami morning, the kind that feels even more airless in the stadium, its roof already drawn in anticipation of afternoon rain.
Womack’s there warming up. He uses a modified windup, a small leg kick preceding the impossibly long stride of his legs.
“How’s your elbow?” Zach asks. Though most pitchers have the same aversion to the wordselbow discomfortthat middle schoolers have to sayingBloody Maryin front of a bathroom mirror, lest it should appear.
“Elbow’s good,” Womack says. He adds, “No, really,” in response to Zach’s look of skepticism. “I’d say something if it wasn’t. Maybe not to Pinelli, but I’d let you know.”
Zach clips on his gear and goes and squats sixty feet away from Womack, who throws a few warmup tosses before saying he wants to start with sinkers.
His sinker isn’t a particularly fast fastball—it sits in the low nineties but has a heavy sink action like rolling a bowling ball off a flat roof. The kind of pitch Zach never really has to frame. The kind of pitch that makes him wonder what he’s doing on the team at all, since the coaches tell him what to call for and he only sometimes has to steal strikes.
“Looks fine to me,” Zach says, after he catches a few with placements around the bottom of the would-be zone. “But if it’s bugging you, let’s see what the Rapsodo has to say.”
The Rapsodo sits on one of the tables. It resembles an old flash-powder camera, a lens poking out of its casing capturing pitch data. A tablet lies next to it displaying the kind of numbers that used to stymie Zach until Eugenio explained them. Some of which indicate that Womack was right: his sinker is behaving differently than it was before the break.
“You having shoulder pain or anything that’d change your arm slot?” Zach asks.
“No, nothing like that.”
“Next set, maybe think about your arm position. Like don’t even change it, just, I don’t know,thinkabout it.”
“Put some intention into it? You sound like my yoga instructor.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
By the end of their throwing session, Womack’s joking with Zach, telling him about what he did over break—which involved an ill-fated trip to a paint-your-own-pottery place with his girlfriend—and about their upcoming series against the Pittsburgh Rivers.
“I caught Garza up in Cincinnati,” Zach says.
“You think we didn’t all watch you at the All-Star Classic?”
“I, uh, normally don’t bother watching it.”
Something about that makes Womack laugh and throw a handful of gum from one of the nearby buckets at Zach, who flings a towel at him in retaliation. “But for real,” he says, settling, “what was it like?”
“It was fine, I guess.” And Zach struggles to find words to summarize how un-exciting it was. How his heart beat against his ribs going out, catching in front of all those fans, expecting a playoff atmosphere, only for it to feel like a scrimmage. “I thought it’d be different. Just a lot of buildup and then, I don’t know. It felt like spring training.”
“Spring training?”
“You know, kinda pointless ultimately. My parents couldn’t make it, and I guess most players bring an entourage or whatever. It probably would have been different with other people there.”
“You really didn’t have a good time?”
And Zach’s mind flashes to Eugenio sitting next to him on the dugout bench and at the restaurant, ordering drinks, wrapping his arm around Zach’s shoulders. Eugenio lying next to him in his hotel room bed, sated and content, before he walked away.
It must show on his face because Womack’s looking at him, eyebrows raised.
Zach’s throat feels dry, even in the Miami humidity, a scratchiness that a swig of water doesn’t calm. “I guess, sometimes things don’t work out how you expect.”
