Page 22 of Diamond Ring
Well, buddy, it felt pretty fucking terrible.
“You’re gonna ask about that changeup,” Jake says before the reporter can say anything. “Ball got away from me. Guess it hit Angelides’s wrist. Stuff happens.”
“Just to clarify,” the reporter says, “are you saying you missed your spot or Angelides deflected it?”
It should be a matter-of-fact clarification. Jake could say,Yeah, my bad, and have it be on him. Sometimes you have to wear one, a bad pitch, a bad outing, an entire lost season—but it feels like too much for Jake to carry alone. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the replay.”
Next to him, Alex’s expression goes thunderous. A pulse of muscle jumps in his jaw. His arms are crossed, challenging the limits of his T-shirt sleeves. He looks well and truly pissed off, something Jake has seen aimed at opposing pitchers and bar patrons who get too close, but never at him.
The reporter turns to Alex. “Angelides”—he pronounces Alex’s name wrong and Jake can practically hear him grind his teeth—“any thoughts?”
“The pitch missed its spot.”The pitch. As if it was thrown by a machine and not Jake. As if it magically appeared from sixty feet away to deflect off Alex. As if this was something blameless. Except Alex is absolutely blaming him.
“I didn’t miss.” Because Jake can’t let them run with that. Can’t let them print, in headline typography, that it’s his fault. Not with his parents in town. Not when narrative will probably replace the truth.
“Why would I put my wrist where the ball was supposed to go?” Alex snaps.
“I wouldn’t have thrown it where your wrist was.” Jake isn’t yelling—or doesn’t think he is—but for some reason everyone is looking at them.
“Typical.” Alex’s voice comes through his teeth. “You get all the glory, I get all the blame.”
To his credit, the reporter doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look at either of them like they just wrote the lede of his story. Their media training is mostly about not getting caught doing the stupid shit that ballplayers do, but the number one tenet is to not let clubhouse conflicts go on the record. It doesn’t get much more on the record than fighting in front of a guy with an active recording device and who writes articles most of the Bay Area reads.
Gordon wades over to them through the sea of boxes. “Everything good?” he asks in a way that makes it clear he knows it isn’t.
Alex doesn’t say anything else, wearing that intractable scowl of his.
“Angel?” Gordon prompts.
“We’re fine,” Alex grits out.
Jake could agree, could defuse the situation and say he threw a bad pitch. The words stick in his mouth. Bad enough that they lost, but it’s not just his loss. Once he threw the ball, it was literally out of his hands. Baseball’s chief cruelty is that it makes you believe in miracles, only to have everything spin away.
His vision blurs. A combination of anger and tears. His arm aches—he didn’t ice it down like he should have yesterday—but then the rest of him does too.
Alex must realize he isn’t going to just eat the loss. He picks up his duffel, repositions his chair in front of his stall. Its wheels give a loud ungreased complaint. “Tell ’em to ship my shit to me.”
That’s the last thing he says directly to Jake. For a long time.
Chapter Seven
November
Jake
The story runs, because of course it does: a fractured Oakland clubhouse smarting from its Fall Classic loss. He and Alex sound practically gladiatorial, even if the most they did was glare at one another.
Unsurprisingly the team doesn’t take it well. Stephanie calls him. Normally she likes him, mostly because he flirts with her without intention and doesn’t give her excess grief. Except for now.
“We were thinking you could do a promo spot,” she says. “Something that’d prove there aren’t issues between you.”
But there are. “What did Angelides say about that?” Jake asks.
“He hung up on me.”
“If he’s not gonna do it, I guess I’m not sure why you’re asking me.” And Jake doesn’t hang up, but Stephanie takes the hint and lets him go.
Jake’s parents stick around for a few days, though he doesn’t feel much like going anywhere. He runs in the morning, begins the slow torturesome task of putting back on lost weight. His arm twinges. Something he should probably talk about with the team docs, but he can’t muster the energy to drag himself to the park. It’s nothing: overuse, exhaustion. His mother assures him time will heal it as it does most things, and it’s easier to agree than to press the point.
