Page 34 of Unwritten Rules
She doesn’t say anything for long enough that he thinks maybe the call froze, her face unmoving on the screen. Then proceeds to tell him, in detail, about some webinar she took on different recovery techniques and by the end of it, he’s a little bored, his breath coming slow and even.
“Thanks,” he says, when she’s done.
“You gonna tell me what this was about?”
“No, but thank you.” And then he hangs up and drives to the park.
When he gets there, Marti’s in the bullpen chatting with Eugenio. “Glasser, head-shrinker wants to talk to you.”
Zach drags ass stowing his gear, drinking his coffee, eating the breakfast sandwich he got at the coffee shop. It has chorizo and eggs, neither of which tastes like much. He looks over at the shelf where Eugenio used to leave him a breakfast sandwich, which holds only a bunch of towels, and then counts seconds as he chews. “Have you already been to see him?” he asks Eugenio.
“Yep.” But Eugenio doesn’t elaborate.
Marti starts giving Zach looks when it’s been twenty minutes and Zach hasn’t done anything more than eat breakfast.
“I’m going, I’m going.” And then proceeds to drink his coffee for another few minutes.
Their mental skills coach is a guy named Todd. When Zach first met him, he was expecting Robin Williams fromGood Will Huntingmaybe, or a coach with a clipboard who referred to mental exercises asdrills. Definitely not Todd, who tucks his polo shirts into his chinos.
Todd’s door is open when Zach gets there, but he knocks anyway.
“Hey, Glasser, how’ve you been?” Todd gets up from behind his desk, coming around, giving Zach a back-pounding hug.
“Good, good. How was your offseason?”
“Great.” And maybe Todd got his teeth bleached, because his smile seems whiter. “Did a little running, got my laps in, you know how it is.” Because Todd does triathlons. His office is full of pictures of him in a body-hugging suit atop a bicycle, crossing the finish line of a race, possibly to make himself more relatable to athletes who play a sport they eat during. “You look good yourself. How’s camp going for you?”
“You know how it is.” He sits, waiting to see if Todd will accept that as an answer. There’s a pause, and Zach busies himself reading the titles of the books on the nearby bookshelf, seeing what the smallest lettering is that he can still make out. “Just happy to be here,” he says, finally.
“This is your fourth year with the team. Does it feel any different?”
“Same as ever,” Zach lies. “Eager for the season to start, trying to get my reps in before then.”
Another pause. Zach studies the contents of Todd’s desk: a box of tissues, a stack of what look like coloring books for adults, a set of objects that look like they’d be hard to break if flung against a wall.
“I like to check in with guys before the season,” Todd says, “just to make sure everything’s going well.”
“Fire away.”
“Have you been sleeping okay?”
“Sure.”
“Food treating you all right?”
“Yep.” Zach tries, and fails, to not pop thepinyep.
“Girl problems?”
“No.”
“Boy problems?” Todd says it with the same tone, the same inflection that he had the previous. As if that was something normal, permitted. As if that wouldn’t mean a PR mitigation strategy, whispered implications in the clubhouse that Zach is unfit to work with pitchers, unfit to play the game itself.
Todd’s inflection hasn’t changed, but his expression is different—leaning, curious, like Zach might reveal something messy about himself in the neat cage of his office.
“No.” Zach keeps his voice neutral, the way the school’s speech-language pathologist taught him when he was first adjusting to his hearing aid, volume carefully modulated. He considers adding something else. Do other guys bristle at that? Grow incensed at even the possibility they could ever be thought of that way?
“Problems with the other players?”
