Chapter Sixteen
Reece
As soon as the ball leaves my hand, I know I’ve fucked up.
It’s something pitchers don’t talk about publicly, the moment during a windup when the body knows it has made a mistake before the mistake is visible to anyone else.
The grip is a fraction off. The release point drops two inches south of where it should be.
And between the mound and the plate, there is nothing you can do about it, no corrections, no recalls, no apologies.
You stand there and watch what you’ve done, travel toward someone who is very much ready to punish you for it.
Marcus Webb hits it into the left-field bleachers.
The crack echoes through Wildcat Stadium the way everything echoes here on a Friday night—enormous, layered, final.
The crowd goes quiet for exactly three seconds.
Then the visiting fans erupt, and I’m standing on the mound in the bottom of the fourth inning with a three-run deficit and the creeping certainty that this is going to be a very long night.
Garrett jogs out from behind the plate, pulling up his mask.
“You good?”
“Fine.” The word comes out flat and automatic. I am not fine. I haven’t been fine in six days, and I’ve been pretending so hard the performance has apparently started bleeding into my mechanics.
Garrett studies me with the particular look catchers develop after years of watching pitchers self-destruct in real time. He’s seen the early warning signs before, but he is polite enough not to name them.
“Keep it low,” he says. “Work the corners.”
“I know how to pitch, Garrett.”
“You’re missing by four inches. I’m going to need you to know how to pitch a little better than you currently do.” He squeezes my shoulder once and jogs back.
The next batter steps in. I get two strikes on him with sliders, which is encouraging. Then I hang a curveball in the zone, and he drives it into the gap for a double. The runner on first scores standing up.
Four nothing.
I hear Coach Bishop’s voice from the dugout, and I don’t need to catch the words. The tone communicates everything.
The fifth inning is worse.
I walk the leadoff batter on five pitches.
Five. I don’t walk leadoff batters. I haven’t issued a first-inning walk all season.
I stand on the mound and stare at my hand as if it belongs to someone else, some other pitcher who hasn’t slept properly in a week, who picks up his phone fourteen times a day and puts it back down without texting the one person he wants to contact.
Mack comes out without being asked.
He doesn’t crouch. He stands beside me, looking at the outfield wall the way men look at things when they want to appear casual about something they’re absolutely not casual about.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“You walked Ferrera. Ferrera hits .211. He once got hit by his own foul tip and had to sit out a series.”
“Everyone has bad days.”
“Not you. Not like this.” He glances over his shoulder at the dugout. Coach Bishop is leaning against the railing, arms crossed, the picture of a man constructing specific sentences to deliver after the final out. “You’ve been off since Monday’s practice. The guys are noticing.”
“The guys can mind their own business.”
Mack turns to face me properly. Right now, there are about fifty thousand people in this stadium, and I’m having the quietest, most pointed conversation of my life in the middle of all of it.
“Is this about Ava?” he asks.
I don’t answer.
“Reece.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“And I said I don’t believe you, so.” He takes the ball from my glove, rolls it in his palm, and hands it back. “Whatever happened, whatever she did or didn’t do, you’ve got to compartmentalize it. Separate it. Put it somewhere it can’t reach your mechanics for the next four innings.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It never is. Do it anyway.” He starts walking back. “Also, get the ball down. You’re leaving everything up in the zone.”
He heads to the dugout to get his gear, and I face the next batter, a lefty I’ve retired six times in a row this season, and proceed to hang a slider so badly he can probably tell his grandchildren about it.
The ball lands eleven rows deep in right field.
Six-nothing.
Coach pulls me in the sixth.
He doesn’t yell. He never yells during the games, saving that for enclosed spaces with good acoustics.
He simply meets me at the dugout steps with a look I’ve seen him use on players who have done something genuinely disappointing, the quiet version, the one that lands heavier than volume ever could.
“Bullpen,” he says.
Rivera takes over. I sit at the end of the bench and watch him work and feel the particular shame of knowing I have failed at the one thing in my life I have never failed at.
Baseball has always been the constant, and the place where everything is negotiable except my competence. Relationships fall apart, endorsements come and go, my apartment feels empty at two in the morning, but the mound has always been solid.
My mound.
My ground.
Tonight it isn’t.
We lost 8-3.
The locker room afterward is the specific quiet of a team that knows better than to make noise. No music, no joking. Guys shower and dress with the efficient, heads-down energy of people who have been told without being told that tonight is not the night for post-game rituals.
Rodriguez passes my locker without saying anything. Martinez, who comments on everything, who once delivered a full monologue about the correct way to fold a jersey, keeps his eyes down and his mouth closed. Tommy from the bullpen gives me the kind of nod reserved for funerals.
I don’t want any of it. Not the sympathy, not the careful silence, not the understanding looks from men who have had their own bad nights and know to give a wide berth to someone having theirs.
What I want is to have earned my usual post-game routine, the easy noise of a win, the loose-shouldered relief of knowing a good performance is already behind you.
Instead, I sit at my locker and stare at the wall.
The wall, being a wall, offers nothing useful in return.
“Steele.” Coach Bishop’s voice comes from the doorway to his office. Not loud. Doesn’t need to be.
I follow him in, and he closes the door before sitting at his desk. I remain standing because sitting feels like an admission of something I’m not ready to admit yet.
“Sit down, Reece.”
I sit.
He opens my stats sheet on his laptop and turns it toward me.
I don’t need to read it. I lived it. Four and two-thirds innings pitched, seven earned runs, three walks, zero strikeouts in the fourth and fifth frames.
The worst outing I’ve had since my sophomore year of college, when I was pitching through a sprained ankle I hadn’t told anyone about.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“I had a bad night.”
“You’ve had one bad night in three seasons. This looked different.” He closes the laptop. “Are you injured?”
“No.”
“Arm fine?”
“Arm’s fine.”
He nods, tapping a pen against his desk in the slow rhythm he uses when he’s choosing words. “You know what I’ve noticed this week? You show up on time. You throw your bullpen. You participate in film review. You do everything I ask of you.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re somewhere else.” He leans back. “Physically present, mentally gone. I’ve had players come through here in the middle of divorces who showed up more completely than you have this week.”
I don’t say anything.
The pen taps.
“I’m not going to push on the personal side,” he says finally. “What you do with your life outside this stadium is your business. But when it follows you through that door and stands on my mound for six innings, it becomes mine.” He studies me. “Is there anything I should know?”
And there it is.
The question with the specific weight under it.
The one he could sharpen if he chose to, the one I’ve been dreading since Monday.
“No,” I say.
It’s the most honest dishonest answer I have.
He watches me for a long moment. Somewhere in the silence is the full knowledge he might have with the drive-by, the rumors, the things coaches know because they have been watching people be human under pressure for thirty years, and they recognize the patterns.
“Take tomorrow off,” he says. “Full rest day. No bullpen, no film. I want you fresh for Sunday’s game.”
“I don’t need—”
“That wasn’t a suggestion.” He opens his laptop again, signaling the end of the conversation. “Fix whatever this is, Reece. I need my ace pitcher, not this version of him.”
When I get back to the locker room, most of the guys have gone, so I shower alone.
The stadium has mostly cleared by the time I’m done, the way it does after a loss. The staff moves faster, and the lights in nonessential corridors are turned off early. I can hear the maintenance crew in the concourse, the distant hydraulic groan of the scoreboard cycling down.
I pull on my jacket and stand at my locker for a while longer than I need to.
The thing about tonight, the thing I’ve been turning over in the shower for twenty minutes, is that I can map exactly where I fell apart.
Not in the game.
Before it.
Long before it.
I have spent six days since Ava ended things doing what I always do when something doesn’t go according to plan.
I worked harder. I trained more. I ran distances that made no athletic sense.
I threw bullpen sessions until Mack physically removed the ball from my hand.
I answered interview questions, signed endorsement forms, said the right things to the right people, and came home every night to an apartment full of the right things that mean nothing.
I’ve been performing.
Not baseball. That, too, but I mean the wider performance, the ongoing one, the Reece Steele show that has been running continuously since I was nineteen years old and decided performing was the same as living.
Perform for coaches.
Perform for sponsors.
Perform for the crowd.