Page 11 of Unwritten Rules
“You doing okay?”
“I’m fine,” Eugenio says through clenched teeth. He gears up, clipping on his leg guards and putting on his chest protector, his catcher’s cap, mask up on his forehead. One of his hands is shaking.
“Don’t throw up on home plate. We’ll need a good strike zone from that umpire at some point.”
Eugenio doesn’t laugh, and Zach doesn’t know what he should say, since there isn’t really a way to summarize “I want you to be good so you can stick around, but not so good that I get traded or demoted,” so he just says, “Breathe.”
Eugenio pauses from what he’s doing, glancing up and giving him a half smile. And when he gets out to the plate, he doesn’t throw up, but he does kind of fuck up.
He gets two quick, merciful outs, and Zach is momentarily grateful for the utter apathy with which many players take their first few spring training at-bats.
The next Friars hitter doesn’t agree, though.
Out on the mound, Johnson rosins his hands between pitches, clapping them together in a white burst of powder. Eugenio signals for a low strike. Or it would be if he didn’t jerk his glove up to make it look more like a strike when he catches it. It’s noticeable: to Johnson, to the batter, to Eugenio, and definitely to the umpire, who calls it a ball instead. Eugenio says something to him, which isn’t unusual—guys often ask umps for locations of where they thought a pitch crossed the plate in order to better understand the zone—and the ump steps back, and, shit, they should not be antagonizing umpires over the first strike zone of a long season.
Johnson throws another strike to the same location, and Eugenio does the same thing, pulling the ball higher into the strike zone to frame it as a strike, which it already was—a noticeable flapping motion with his mitt, as if to say to the ump,hey Blue, you asked for a strike, so let me show you what one looks like.
D’Spara is standing on the steps to the dugout, observing the whole thing, a clipboard balanced on his stomach. He’s wearing a look of increasing despair, a frown stamped under his prodigious mustache.
Johnson goes into his windup, rotating the ball in his glove obviously enough that even Zach can tell that he’s tipping—letting the opposing batter know what kind of pitch is coming based on the way his fingers are splayed around the ball.
“You seeing this?” D’Spara says. “What a fucking cluster.”
Johnson throws, and it’s a curveball coming out of his hands, a curveball as it nears the plate, a curveball as it dives below the strike zone into Eugenio’s waiting mitt, and the Friars batter—who’s a light-hitting shortstop mostly in the lineup for his defense—doesn’t so much as spit at it. Three balls, no strikes.
D’Spara gestures the sign for a walk at Eugenio, hands going through the familiar signals. Eugenio has to see it. Hell, even the other team must recognize it. Yet Eugenio calls for another strike, one that the Friars hitter fouls back, off the netting separating spectators from the field.
And it happens again. D’Spara motions for a ball; Eugenio calls for a strike; the Friars hitter fouls it away. And again. It turns into one of those at-bats that goes on so long that Zach tries to tune it out, the kind they show on SportsCenter as if to say “Isn’t baseball slow? Isn’t baseball boring?”
Next to Zach, D’Spara is chomping on a handful of Tums that smell like mint and artificial fruit.
“I can talk with Morales,” Zach says.
“You better, because what the fuck?”
The Friars hitter finally strikes out. Eugenio comes back into the dugout, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t get a drink of Gatorade or unclip his gear or do anything more than disappear into the tunnel leading to the clubhouse.
And Zach considers the possibilities of the conversation he’s about to go have, including reassuring Eugenio he’s secure in a roster spot that Zach is also competing for, and then follows.
When he gets to the clubhouse, Eugenio is in the process of dumping his gear in a careless pile next to his stall. “I know,” he says, before Zach can say anything.
Eugenio goes into the kitchen suite, one where clubhouse workers and catering staff already laid out food for after the game, and Zach can hear him run the water from the sink. When he comes back, his cheeks and forehead are wet, along with the ends of his hair, like he dunked his entire head.
“I know,” he says again, and he drops into the chair in front of his stall. Zach watches him spend a long minute looking at where his jerseys are hung up neatly, at where his batting gloves are stacked, his spikes and tape and all the other various things that make up their uniforms.
“When I first came up,” Zach says, “I would just sit there staring at all the stuff with my name across the back. Like, if I looked away, even for a second, it would all disappear.”
“Yeah, I feel that.”
“You don’t seem like an asshole.”
Eugenio looks at him.
“I mean, baseball’s full of assholes. You don’t seem like one.”
“Wow, thanks.” Eugenio lets out a long breath. “Sorry. Fuck. I thought the ump was going to toss me.”
“Seemed like you were getting close to that.”
