Page 107 of Unwritten Rules
“Huh, that’s quite a question.” Which isn’t an answer, but she’s studying the top corner of the screen like she’s assembling her thoughts. “I don’t think it was any one thing. Just a collection of little things that all built into a big thing.”
She has one of those static images as a background, a picture of the rolling California hills, brown Mediterranean scrubland punctuated by the occasional audacious green. Something flickers—someone else coming into the room, a tall woman who looks vaguely familiar to Zach, though he can’t place her—and Stephanie turns back to look at her, muting her mic and shaking her head, before continuing.
“I expected to have some big burn-it-all-down moment,” she says, finally. “That there would be music playing as I walked out, or an explosion, and it just wasn’t like that. Because I knew that if I left, things would be even less likely to change—that they don’t change without people changing them.”
“I’ve been thinking about retiring,” Zach says. “Maybe doing some coaching.”
“It’d be a shitty way to go out. Do you still want to play?” She asks it not like a publicist or an interviewer, but someone who’s known him for a long time.
She has frown lines around her mouth—perhaps deepened by however how many times she’s planned PR strategies for players who say and do awful things and rely on other people to clean up their messes. The kind he should have for all the times he stood and watched while stuff like that happened to Johnson, to Womack, to Morgan. To Eugenio.
“Hypothetically,” he says, “what does it take to have a burn-it-all-down moment?”
Stephanie smiles; her teeth look like a shark’s unwavering grin. “They don’t happen by accident. Usually, something that combines a public statement, community outreach, and enough dirt on enough guys who might make your life hell to repay the favor.”
“Wow. Just like that?”
“That’s public relations, baby.” And she laughs when he laughs. “You just gotta know—there are guys who’ll have your back in private but, point a camera at them, and they won’t say two words. And some who’ll do the opposite. Talk a big game but not do shit when cameras aren’t rolling. It helps to know who’s who ahead of time. Start small, like you said, with someone you trust and then we’ll work up to it.”
And Zach thinks about all the guys he’s caught, changed next to, exchanged slaps with in the dugout. The handful of ones who were quick to shout slurs and the vastly greater number who didn’t say anything when they heard them. “I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. But I want to be at some point.”
“You’re in a better position than a lot of guys,” Stephanie says, and she ticks off a list on her fingers. “Older but not decrepit.”
“Thanks.”
“Passably handsome. Don’t have a reputation as a hothead or a showboat. And most importantly enough fuck-you money if this doesn’t work out.”
“What do I do if it doesn’t?”
“Do what people like us usually do in these circumstances—if they won’t make space for you, you make your own space.”
There’s a knock on the door, Maritza poking her head in, holding two cups, one of which she hands to Zach, which contains not coffee but a few fingers of amber liquid.
“I may have liberated some whiskey,” she says.
“Well, if you’re both drinking,” Stephanie says, and there’s a motion on screen, her moving to get up and then returning with a glass though it’s barely noon on the West Coast.
Maritza raises her cup and Zach knocks his against it gently, then they both aim theirs toward the screen.
“What’re we drinking to?” Stephanie asks.
“To starting small,” Zach says, “but not staying there.”
They play down the last games of the season. Zach doesn’t look at the erasable whiteboard hanging in the Union clubhouse, their magic number falling into the single digits. He doesn’t listen to New York sports radio for many, many reasons while he’s driving. Instead, he rolls down the back windows enough to feel the increasingly cool September air, and thinks about October and what comes after.
He texts Morgan one day, an hour before he has to go to the park, asking for details about the tournament and if she has any interest in him running a catching clinic. If she’d be open to having Eugenio there as well, or if they’d both be distractions.
Less than a minute later, he gets a series of exclamation points so long it fills the screen of his phone.
I take it that’s a yes
Yes that’s a yes. It’s a YES.She sends a few links—who will be there, what she’s doing to get big-league coverage for the women’s teams, what their outreach plan is.
I’m excited too
Convince Johnson to come.
Let me see how his wrist is.Mostly, he complained to Zach in a series of garbled voice-to-text messages about having to use his nondominant hand to brush his teeth. Which probably meant he was feeling better if he was up to whining.
