Page 7 of Unwritten Rules
“Thanks,” Johnson says, like Zach has laid some kind of profound wisdom at his feet and not an extended version of “you win some, you lose some, we’ll get ’em again tomorrow” bullshit that Zach feeds the media. “You want me to grab you some food?”
And Zach laughs and shakes his head and goes to fix himself a plate.
Zach is almost to the ballpark the next day when he realizes that he didn’t stop for coffee so has to double back. There’s a coffee shop about ten minutes away, an independent place, and Zach doesn’t know Eugenio that well, but he guesses he probably has opinions about Starbucks. It’s a place in a strip mall, because a lot of Phoenix is a strip mall, or at least the parts Zach sees.
It’s the kind of place that has funny names for their drinks, like Mocha My Day, and the guy behind the counter looks offended when Zach just orders a coffee and a double espresso.
“You sure that’s all?” the guy asks. He has chipped nail polish, a set of bracelets wound around his wrist, and he’s looking at Zach openly, approvingly, in the way that guys usually don’t unless it’s at a bar. One where they know the other guy won’t take it the wrong way.
“Coffee’s good. Can you put some, like, liquid sugar in the espresso?” And Zach turns away before the guy can respond with more than a nod.
Zach carries the coffees out to the bullpen when he gets to the ballpark. Eugenio’s already there. He thanks Zach and then seizes the coffee cup Zach gives him with both hands, before gulping half of it down in one go.
“I didn’t know how sweet to make it,” Zach says.
“It’s perfect.” Eugenio looks more tired than he should for their third day of spring training, circles under his eyes and a little dehydrated, lips dry in the Arizona desert air.
“You doing okay?” Zach asks, though he probably shouldn’t, in case Eugenio is the kind of guy to bristle at it.
Eugenio shrugs. “Just didn’t sleep very well. The rental place I’m staying at is too loud. Or kind of too quiet. It’s hard to explain.”
“Sure.” Though Zach has no idea what that’s like, having perfected the ability to sleep on pretty much any flat surface at some point in the minors. “You know, you don’t have to be the first guy here. Makes the rest of us look bad.”
“Now that was better. Almost felt like a red-ass veteran was saying it.”
“Thanks, I think?”
Eugenio laughs at that, a nice laugh, and brushes his shoulder against Zach’s companionably and drinks more coffee. “It takes me a while to wake up.”
And the combination of it conspires to make Zach think what he’d be like first thing in the morning, his bare shoulder brushing Zach’s.
“Mostly,” Eugenio continues, “I just don’t want to be groggy by the time we have to meet for game-planning. And I don’t want to take equipment in the weight room from anyone else.”
“Don’t know if you noticed, but it’s the majors. There’s plenty to go around, even with all the minor-league guys here. And they’ll be gone soon enough.”
Eugenio drinks the rest of his coffee, crumples the cup, and makes a shot into the trash can. “I just don’t want to be one of them, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Zach says, because what’s he supposed to say to that? If it’s him or Eugenio, obviously he’s going to pick himself.
“Yesterday, with Johnson or whatever. You think he stands a chance of not being sent down first thing?”
Zach shakes his head. Because Johnson will probably be gone in the first round of cuts.
“But you went and calmed him down anyway.”
“It’s like half the job. Besides, you know. He’s a kid. Probably away from his family for the first time. You know how rookies are.”
Eugenio laughs that big laugh of his and Zach thinks, just for a second, what it’d be like to feel that laugh more than he hears it, to feel it vibrate against his back or his chest or under his hands. He doesn’t trust whatever expression he’s wearing to cover up what he’s thinking so just takes a long drink of coffee and says, “Did you bring me breakfast or what, rook?” mostly to hear Eugenio laugh again.
They have their first real, long, excruciating game-planning meeting later that day. The analytics guys do their analytics-guy thing; there are charts; there are graphs; there are heat maps; there are statistics.
“Okay,” Zach says, looking at a zone profile for a hitter, “blue means call for a pitch there and red means don’t call for a pitch there, right?” He’s mostly doing it to wind them up, but also because one of them went on a long tangent about probabilities that Zach tuned out.
Eugenio is taking notes; he has neat handwriting like computer font, unlike Zach, whose seventh-grade teachers demanded he type everything because his printing is that bad. “Look at the percentages.” He leans over, pointing at something on a chart sitting below the heat map.
Up close, he smells like cologne and ballpark shampoo. Zach’s fingers leave dents in the paper he’s holding, and he looks down, concentrating on the heat map he’s supposed to be looking at and not on the warmth of Eugenio in his space.
“Yeah,” Zach says, “that makes sense.”
