Page 56 of Diamond Ring
Mike: Sure. I’m free most of the day on Thursday
Jake checks the team schedule on his phone. Thursday’s an off-day, two days from now. All he’s doing that day is a throwing session with Alex he doesn’t want to think about.
Ben: Thursday’s good. You pick a place.
Can’t wait to meet you.
Chapter Fifteen
April
Alex
Jake’s already set up along the first-base line when Alex rolls in on their off-day. A few other players are milling around, Charlie an imposing figure jogging the outfield, Gordon next to him, the morning wind carrying their conversation away from Alex. Maybe it’s lead-by-example clubhouse nonsense that has them here early, even if both of them have enough laurels to rest on—save world championship rings. Or maybe it’s just an inability to sleep late that Alex got afflicted with sometime after his twenty-ninth birthday.
Gordon waves him over and Alex goes, jogging catcher-slow, Charlie hanging back so it’s just him and Gordon, watched by the empty outfield seating.
“Hey Angel”—a nickname that he allows Gordon and almost no one else, mostly because Gordon actually knows how his name is pronounced—“you think you’d have time to talk with Toni today?”
Right, the documentary, which Alex very much does not want to do. “Maybe. What time?”
“They’re gonna do some filming tonight.”
“I can’t,” Alex says. “I have a thing.” Adate, though he doesn’t really want to have theI date menconversation while standing within earshot of Charlie. “Maybe another time?”
“It’d mean a lot to me if you did,” Gordon says.
And fuck, it must be important if Gordon’s breaking out the MVP-level guilt. “I will,” Alex promises, then flees to the sidelines to watch Jake finish his warmups.
He waits as Jake goes through standard pitchers’ stretches, nursing a cup of coffee and a taped-over thumbnail, the latter from a curveball that Alex misplayed fielding with all the grace of a catcher in his mid-thirties. The coffee with an extra shot is also Alex’s fault, though he regrets it less, having stayed up too late messaging Ben, who he’s meeting tonight at a bar Alex selected, one of his and Jake’s old haunts that’s miraculously still in business. A reward for if Alex survives the next hour with Jake, who takes a long, grimacing pull from his own coffee cup.
“Sorry,” Jake says. “Stomach’s not great this morning.”
At least that switches Alex into full-on catcher-concern mode. “You think it’s a stomach bug?” Because teams pass around digestive ailments and clubhouse flu from March to September.
Jake shrugs, a shrug meaningnoandwhat can you do?that Alex wishes he couldn’t recognize after a decade apart. “Just sometimes have trouble eating first thing.”
A statement at odds with Jake’s fondness for breakfast foods. Lots can change in ten years, including his willingness to disclose anything beyond the essentials, because he doesn’t say anything else. It throbs, vaguely, like Alex’s thumb—something brought on by age and his own doing.
He drops his stuff and spends a few minutes stretching, a process that’s a little less easy each time he does it. An irony of catching: the better he gets at the mental side of the game, the less his hamstrings will let him play it. Still, it’s easier to point his grievances toward his tendons and fascia and not toward Jake, who’s warming up forty feet away like getting any closer will trigger another fight.
Or not a fight. A disagreement followed by Jake’s easy collapse. Which is somehow even more infuriating.
After a few minutes of stretching, Alex concedes he’s stalling. Jake must decide the same because he chucks the towel he’s been warming up with to the side, then grabs a ball from a bucket.
They’re supposed to work to improve Jake’s fastball velocity. But what would improve his velo is the same thing that would improve Alex’s hamstrings: being young again. All Alex can really offer is a willing target. So he squats, pivots on one knee, pounds the familiar leather of his mitt—and hopes that this goes, if not well, at least not poorly.
Jake does his soft tosses from forty feet away, then moves backward. “Fastballs now,” he says and throws one. Or an approximation of one, a fastball that’s slow by any standard and glacial by big-league ones. Cautious. And they might not be on great speaking terms, but Alex has a duty to care for the pitching staff.
During their first season, Jake, in a particular fit ofJake-ness,tried to calculate how many pitches he threw: warmups, drills, days off at the park near Alex’s apartment, the two of them semi-anonymously tossing a ball back and forth in the Oakland sunshine. He added everything up with an actual spreadsheet, the formulas of which he tried to explain to Alex, who pretended not to understand mostly to watch Jake run a hand through his hair in exasperation.
A memory that took on a new cast when all those pitches added up to Jake’s arm going out. Something Alex should have said something about—and didn’t.Of course the team wouldn’t overwork him.Of course Jake wouldn’t grin through a too-heavy workload then ask for more.
With that, a question ten years in the making. If Jake was hurt their first season and Alex, in his eagerness, missed it. If he’s hurt now.
Or if he’s simply not as warm as he should be, given the morning cool.It was chilly the night we kissed in your backyard. A zap of a thought that makes Alex’s shoulders go stiff. If Jake notices, he doesn’t say anything.
He signals to Jake, then pulls himself out of his crouch. Approaches the tilted pitching mound like he might a formidable incline on a hike. Jake’s expression is tight, mouth a flat line.
