Page 4 of Breakout Year
If he couldn’t make a good decision, he could at least make the right one. It’d mean another beleaguered phone call with Gabe, the second in twenty-four hours. All of the other ballplayers who’d come out were retired or unsigned, no one who was looking for a big payday come free agency. Just Eitan, with a mic in front of him, managing to say the exact wrong thing.
He should change the subject, redirect, roll back the last two days of his life. But what was a little more gasoline on a public relations fire?
So he smiled, big and challenging. “It’s so good to be on a team where everyone can be fully who they are—myself included.” And he let the room absorb that for all of five seconds before he added, “Really, I’m just so excited to be in New York. What else you got for me?”
2
Eitan
Cleveland River Rivkin Fire? Crook-Turned-Cosmo Rips Hometown in Press Conference Disaster
* * *
Eitan was barely two feet out of the press room and back into the narrow hallway when the story blew up. No, blew up was an underestimate. It exploded. Foolishly, he took his phone out of airplane mode to find every reporter texting him all at once.
The team owner followed him into the hallway. Looked at Eitan the way someone might an apple they’d brought home from the store without noticing a very obvious bruise.
He extended his hand. Eitan shook it, once, gave his best, “Glad to be here, sir.”
Glad to have you would have been the natural response. None came. The owner pumped his hand once more, then walked off, muttering something that sounded a lot like November, the month by which Eitan’s contract would be up.
The GM came out next. He had his phone in hand as if he was already fielding calls. He probably was. He indicated the phone, then pointed to the concrete hallway floor. A command. Stay here. As if Eitan’s body didn’t suddenly weigh a thousand pounds. Of course, he was going to stay there. Going home to Cleveland, a place so distant it might have been the moon, wasn’t an option.
Isabel returned. “So sorry, but we have to go,” she said to the assembled reporters who were all competing to press themselves into the hallway before she shut the door in their collective faces. For a moment, neither she nor Eitan nor the GM spoke. Then the GM just said, “Fix it,” before walking off, talking into his phone in that low, front office crisis management voice Eitan knew all too well.
Isabel stood there, ramrod straight, until the GM was out of view, then sagged against one of the walls. Dark strands of her hair had somehow come loose from her ponytail, like she’d been pulling them in exasperation. Her blazer was rumpled. Eitan had initially clocked her as being around his age, but in that moment, she looked very, very young. “Well,” she said, standing back up, “the only way that could have gone any worse was if they’d painted a tunnel on a cliff face and you’d run right into it like Wile E. Coyote.”
“I didn’t want any of that to happen.” Eitan tried for an oops. If he didn’t treat this seriously, maybe she wouldn’t either. It came out closer to a sigh. Mostly because this was serious.
Isabel was rubbing the space between her eyebrows with both thumbs. Then she shook her head. More of her hair came loose. A few strands began to curl. “Forget I said that. I should’ve asked how you were doing.”
Like I just did a bellyflop off a high dive. The kind of numb that preceded a full-body sting. “I’m okay. I’m sure I’ll have a different answer tomorrow.”
“Listen,” she said, “the team’ll be back from their road trip by then. Go to your hotel, order room service, don’t look at anything online, and when you do, definitely don’t respond.”
“Do you think I have impulse-control issues?” he said, mostly to get her to glare at him, which she did.
“New York takes some time to adjust to. Try to keep it together, okay?”
Time. What he didn’t have: not with his contract expiring in the fall.
So he let her walk him out—flanked by several members of security—through the clubhouse changing area with his new stall, now loaded with dark blue and yellow jerseys. Down another long hallway, this one danker and more dimly lit than the one outside the press room, until they finally reached the players’ parking lot.
A black car-service SUV appeared from somewhere, its windows tinted dark enough for Eitan to catch a glimpse of his own reflection. Isabel wasn’t the only one who’d worked their hair into a disarray. Great.
He loaded himself in, gave the cross-streets for his hotel. At least the driver didn’t pretend not to know who Eitan was; he also didn’t seem to care. He said his name was Joe, and after Eitan asked, “What’s good to do in New York?” Joe was happy to manage the rest of the conversation as they took the parkway back toward Manhattan. A quick drive, or what should have been, if one lane wasn’t clogged by an accident, the other jammed with cars all merging…slowly.
Start, stop, start, stop, start, stop.
The car lurched forward; Eitan’s stomach did the same.
He reactivated his phone long enough to check his texts. Nothing from Connor or from the Crooks group chat beyond their goodbyes after the trade had been announced.
Gabe had sent a series of voice memos, beginning with, “Jesus Christ, kid, this is why we draft public statements and vet them by the relevant parties involved, including me, your agent, who you pay for shit like this,” and ending with a declaration that he was going to go drown himself in a bottle of Pepto and that if Eitan needed anything, he could call.
He thought about calling. He knew what Gabe would say: the stuff he’d already said, but at increasing volume. Worse, because he was right.
Instead, Eitan sent a desperate I’m okay to his parents. Easier than writing I’m sorry I messed this up for you.
