Page 1 of Breakout Year
1
Eitan
Breaking: Last-minute trade launches Crooks third baseman from Midwest to center stage…
* * *
Eitan vowed to spend no more than five minutes with his ear against this door.
Wait here and don’t do anything rash. What Isabel, the Cosmopolitans media relations handler assigned to handle him, had said before she left.
Rash probably included listening in on the conversation murmuring in the next room. But in fairness, the people on the other side of the door—reporters assembled for a New York Cosmos press conference—were all talking about him.
The door was cold. The hallway smelled like ballpark: fresh grass and old sweat. The ceiling tiles hung low. A taller ballplayer might have to duck, but Eitan was all of five-ten. Okay, five-nine. In cleats.
He opened the timer app on his phone. The countdown had almost expired its three hundred seconds—hardly any time at all. Was there a certain limit that turned overhearing into eavesdropping? I get five minutes…unless I hear something good.
His timer dinged. Fine. He would behave. He peeled his ear off the door. Isabel had been gone…a while. What did she expect him to do?
Be patient, probably.
He was twenty-seven years old. He was new to the Cosmos organization. Isabel had seemed nice, if harried, though everyone in this city seemed harried. It had been a long day, even if it was only mid-afternoon. So he could be patient. Probably.
He tried not to bounce on his heels and almost succeeded. He counted the ceiling tiles, an old hard-to-shake habit. He adjusted and readjusted the Cosmos jersey he was wearing over his hastily ironed dress shirt.
Rivkin. The word—his last name—popped through the slim barrier of the door. Followed by trade. Followed by controversy. Well, now he had to know what they were talking about.
He pushed the rim of his ear against the door. Press hard enough and you could feel the pulse in your head—his heart beat steady but rabbit fast.
Eavesdropping was probably rude, but so was his team—his old team—trading him with one minute to go on trade deadline day. He’d already put his phone in airplane mode. That had been step one in getting through this. He’d texted his parents, his former teammates on the Cleveland Crooks, and his agent, Gabe—in that order—then silenced all his other calls.
Now his phone sat brick-heavy in the pocket of his bright blue suit pants that clashed with the dark navy of his new jersey, because those pants had been bought specifically to match his Crooks gear. Of course you wore the wrong outfit. A thought he couldn’t ignore, unlike the notifications he’d managed to tune out since the news hit. Common sense would say not to check them right before he met with the press. He took out his phone, switched out of airplane mode, waited for it to acquire signal. Voicemails, texts, WhatsApp, TikTok…
Connor, his best friend on the Crooks, had posted a goodbye on Insta with photos of their time in Cleveland together, arms draped around each other under the stadium lights. The rest of it, though—fuck, reading those notifications would have been a mistake any time but was especially one right now.
He was frowning over them when Isabel reappeared. “What’re you doing?” she asked by way of greeting. She was almost as tall as he was, in a blazer bearing not so much as a wrinkle, with black hair that she’d marshaled into a short ponytail. In the five hours he’d known her, she’d tried to handle him with that same kind of exactness. Given what had happened with Cleveland, he didn’t really blame her.
He held up his phone, which buzzed. And buzzed. And buzzed. “Being inundated.”
“Set your phone back in airplane mode.” And she waited until he actually did it before asking, “Are you ready?”
She’d said the same thing in the town car on the drive in from JFK that morning, and before and after each of his various meetings with Cosmos personnel, most of which were fairly brief get to know the new team kind of things that distracted him from having been unceremoniously lobbed off his old one. Not lobbed. Traded. Though standing in the narrow corridor about to face the press, he wasn’t exactly sure there was a difference.
“I think I’m good to go?” he said. It came out as a question.
She frowned—that PR-person frown he’s come to know and…if not appreciate, at least understand. “If they ask you something that you don’t want to answer—and rest assured, they will—just say how happy you are to be in New York.”
“I am happy to be in New York.” Even if he’d already calculated the number of days remaining before he could leave.
Another frown.
“Really.” He put on his best smile. He’d had his teeth whitened earlier in the season, the dentist zapping away tea stains in stratigraphic layers. He would either look good on camera or like he was trying too hard. “I am happy to be here. I am happy to be talking with the New York sports media.”
Isabel snorted. “No one is happy to be talking with the New York sports media.”
He laughed, then ground his finger into the dimple poking its way into his cheek. “See, happy.”
Isabel almost cracked a smile. “Sure. Just not so happy that Cleveland gets in their feelings about it.”
