Page 93 of Breakout Year
“Them too.”
“Yeah.” Eitan rolled his shoulders, rubbed his hands together to warm them. “But when they said not interested…”
“Eitan, you’ll have your pick of teams.”
Just not the ones in the place I most want to live. “Who’s coming by first?”
Gabe rattled off the list again, beginning with St. Louis. Teams would come, make their case as to why Eitan was the third baseman of their future, and he’d be offered a staggering amount of money. Generational money. He should be more excited. He knew that.
Waiting for a team who was—Eitan checked his phone—officially two minutes late, he turned the question of why he wasn’t more excited over in his mind. He missed Akiva. He thought, reading between the scant lines of Akiva’s texts, Akiva missed him too. Liking each other wasn’t the problem. Everything else was, beginning with Akiva being either rooted or stuck in New Jersey, depending on how you looked at it.
Everyone Eitan had talked with had said that his being upset over the breakup would fade—that things that burned hot and bright were bound to fizzle. He just didn’t want them to.
He checked his phone again. St. Louis was verging on really late. Well, not a great first impression, but these meetings were busy. Stuff was bound to run over. He spent a few minutes looking through St. Louis’s roster. His hit tendencies mapped well to their ballpark. They were a little light on starting pitching, but you couldn’t have everything.
Gabe’s phone buzzed. He examined it. Frowned. “Looks like they aren’t coming.”
“What?”
Gabe shrugged, but his face was grim. He offered up his texts, displaying one from St. Louis’s general manager, a declination that simply said, Sorry, have to cancel.
“They want to reschedule, right?” Eitan said, even as his stomach clawed with the answer. They weren’t coming. They weren’t coming even if Eitan was the best free agent on the market, one a decent amount under thirty and relatively unburdened by any particular injury history, ankle aside. One without a family to consider in making decisions about where to move.
Gabe typed something. Received an almost immediate response. “They’ve decided to go in another direction.”
Like toward an objectively worse ballplayer. Fine. Well, fuck St. Louis. He’d liked the city when he’d played there—the people were nice and baseball-interested, and the barbecue was good—but not enough to not resent whatever the hell this was. If they didn’t want him as he was, he didn’t want them either. “Who else is coming?”
An hour later, two more teams had cancelled and a third wasn’t returning Gabe’s texts. Eitan tried not to squirm. Despite the cool, his shirt was probably wrinkled, his hair done for. Every buzz of Gabe’s phone made him jump.
Finally, finally, representatives from the Texas team rolled in. They sat in a row opposite Eitan. For a moment, he felt like a bug under glass. Gabe had assured him that these meetings tended to be excessively friendly—“They want you to play for them, after all”—but there was something in the set of their general manager’s shoulders Eitan didn’t like. Also, he was wearing a cowboy hat inside an Anaheim hotel. Who did that?
“We felt this conversation was easier to have in person.” The GM had an exaggerated drawl even if Eitan recalled vaguely that he was from Boston. He motioned for a manila folder that was handed to him by an aide, which he slid over to Gabe.
Eitan imagined any number of things in that folder: a list of transactions he’d paid Akiva, a copy of the NDA. Screenshots from Akiva’s previous job. If he were straight, the implication he’d paid for sex wouldn’t be a big deal. Players sometimes did that, because people sometimes did that. No one would look askance at a large Venmo transaction between a player and his girlfriend.
It was possible these were paparazzi photos taken from a blurry distance, testaments to Dave’s talents as the Ansel Adams of being a creep. Maybe someone had taken their photo on the train, and Eitan was about to be hit with an accusation of public indecency. Who knew?
Didn’t your closer have a DUI charge that somehow went away? Eitan bit that back. There were any number of things ballplayers did that teams actively abetted or at least looked the other way about in the name of securing their talents. Whatever he’d done, Texas had deemed that to be worse.
Eitan plucked the folder from Gabe before Gabe had time to react. He opened the file. It took a moment to adjust what he was seeing: a photo of him and Akiva sitting in a café, their fingers held loosely together. Akiva had been talking about something—probably a book given the gleam in his eyes—and Eitan didn’t remember much other than that look. Not the flavor of the oat milk chai latte he’d been drinking or how the chair he’d been sitting on had a wobble in one leg. Only the lightness he’d felt being in the exact right place at the exact right time with the exact right person. Who he’d left a continent away to come and sit in this chilly little room.
“And?” Eitan said.
“We’re a team with a certain…” The GM paused. “We want to make sure our players project a wholesome image.”
Maybe it was his go-rounds with the New York media over the last few months, but for once, Eitan could hear the question underneath the question: Are you gonna keep being gay?
If he said no, they might offer him a contract. He could go to Texas. Be the guy on the left side of the infield, someone who hit second or third in the batting order. If he kept posting numbers the way he had been for much of his career, he had a good shot at being a Hall of Famer.
For that, he could tell them the whole thing with Akiva had been a lark, a hoax. For that, he could go to Texas, date, and keep quiet about it. Not hold hands in public. Not kiss over dinner just for the sake of kissing. Stuff his life into an opaque box and call it happiness. He could endure that, possibly. People did more for less.
He discarded the folder on the table. Gritted out, “Thank you so much for coming by. Have a wonderful day.” His hands were white knuckled. He waited until they’d left, and the door was closed, to pound a fist against the table, letting the impact send reverberations up his arm.
Gabe clucked that he could break something, but Eitan barely heard him. If he broke something, so what? Clearly, he’d given up everything for baseball when baseball was unwilling to give so much as an inch for him.
“I take it from your reaction that this is non-negotiable,” Gabe said mildly.
Eitan was shaking his head. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t seem to control his body. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. An understatement. “This is fucked up,” he said.
