Chapter 16
The scouts arrived before the sun cleared the marsh.
Kirstin watched them from the deck above the field, coffee in her hand that she'd brought from home because she needed something to hold.
They came in rental cars, silver and white sedans that pulled into the facility lot one after another starting at seven.
They wore khakis and polos and sunglasses and they carried clipboards and radar guns and they talked on their phones while they walked, finishing conversations with front offices in other time zones before the workout had started.
Eight teams. She counted the cars. Some had two men, some had one.
A few shook hands with each other in the lot, familiar, collegial, the easy recognition of people who spent their lives circling the same fields and watching the same swings and comparing notes on the same arms. They all walked toward the facility with the same posture.
Relaxed. Professional. Not excited. Men who watched talent every day didn't get excited before they saw something worth getting excited about.
Addison was beside her. She'd been there since six thirty, before the first car pulled in, sitting in one of the two chairs Brady had put on the deck last spring. She had her own coffee. She hadn't said much.
"I'm glad you came," Addison said.
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
"Ask me after."
The field opened up below them, green and flat, the marsh beyond it gold in the early light.
The dimensions were full size. Luke and Brady had laid it out when they built the facility, regulation distances, a backstop and a mound and base paths measured to ninety feet because Luke Banks did not build half a field.
The cage was off to the right. The bullpen was beyond the left field line.
The whole operation sat on the back side of the building, hidden from the road, visible only from the deck and the parking lot and the marsh.
Brady was already on the field. Clipboard in hand, the radar gun on the bench beside the backstop.
He was talking to two of the scouts near the mound, gesturing toward center field, explaining something about the throwing program.
His voice didn't carry but his body language did.
Steady. Thorough. Giving them the medical context before they saw the arm so they'd know what to watch for.
Luke was in the cage, feeding balls into the machine, testing the settings. Cap backward. Coffee gone. He'd done this a thousand times on fields that mattered more than this one, except this one mattered because his friend was about to step onto it.
At seven fifteen, the back door of the facility opened. Beck walked out.
Spikes, compression shirt, batting gloves tucked into his back pocket.
Hat on, pulled low, the curls coming out from under it.
He stopped at the bench behind the backstop and set his glove down and picked up a ball and turned it in his hands, the same thing he always did, the seams under his fingers, the leather familiar.
He glanced up at the deck.
Kirstin lifted her coffee. He nodded. Small. Just for her. Then he turned and jogged out to center field and the workout began.
They started with fielding.
Brady hit fungoes from home plate. Grounders, line drives, balls in the gap, balls over Beck's head.
Kirstin had seen him run down fly balls before, at six in the morning when the field was empty and the only audience was the marsh birds.
This was different. This was Beck with sixteen pairs of eyes on him, radar guns pointed at the outfield, clipboards moving every time his arm released a throw.
He was fast. She knew that. She'd known it since the first week, watching him cover ground at the facility in the early sessions.
But knowing it and seeing it in front of scouts who evaluated speed for a living were different things.
He closed on balls in the gap with a burst that made two of the scouts stop writing and just watch.
His routes were clean, his reads instant, the ball arriving in his glove at the exact moment his momentum shifted toward the throw.
The throws came back. Each one tracked by the radar guns behind the plate. She heard the numbers called out by a scout from Houston who was standing near Brady.
"Eighty-nine. Ninety. Eighty-nine."
The numbers meant nothing to her. She turned to Addison.
"Those are really good," Addison said. Quiet. "A touch off where he was, but still elite. Top one percent of outfield arms in the league."
Kirstin watched. Brady was behind the backstop with his clipboard, and every time a throw came in he made a note and his expression didn't change. Level. Steady. Giving nothing. But his pen was moving fast, which for Brady was the equivalent of standing on the table and cheering.
The scouts were talking. Low, professional, the murmur of evaluation. She heard pieces of it from the deck, carried up in the warm air that was rising off the field as the morning opened up.
"Routes are elite. Jump is elite. Arm is back."
"Arm plus the bat? That's a lineup."
"Let's see the bat."
Beck jogged in from center field. His shirt was dark across the back from the work. He picked up a towel from the bench and wiped his face and took a drink of water and his eyes went to the deck again. Quick. Just a glance. She was there.
Luke walked out to the mound.
The first pitch was a fastball, middle-in. Beck turned on it and the sound was different from anything she'd heard in the cage.
In the cage, the crack of the bat was contained.
It bounced off the netting and the walls and it stayed in the enclosed space.
On a full field, with open air behind it and the marsh beyond that, the sound traveled.
It left the bat and it left the infield and it carried over the outfield grass and out toward the water.
The ball went with it.
A line drive that rose as it crossed the infield, still rising as it passed second base, still rising as it reached the outfield grass, and then it was gone, over the fence in left-center, clearing it by thirty feet, dropping into the tall grass where the marsh started.
She heard a scout say "Jesus."
Luke threw another. Beck's hands moved and the sound came again and the ball went to right-center, higher this time, the arc of it visible against the morning sky, the trajectory of something hit so hard that physics had to decide how far it was allowed to go.
Another. Line drive, left field, off the bat so fast the scout from Minnesota flinched. Another. Deep center, the ball climbing, climbing, dropping beyond the fence into the marsh grass where it would sit until someone went out there with a bucket.
Luke kept throwing. Beck kept hitting. The rhythm built, pitch after pitch, the crack repeating at intervals, each swing identical in its mechanics and different in where the ball ended up because Beck was placing them, moving from pull to center to opposite field with the precision of a man who wasn't just hitting a baseball but telling it where to live.
Then he stepped across the plate.
Right-handed box to left-handed box. He reset his stance, adjusted his grip, and Luke threw one and Beck turned on it from the left side and the ball went out to left-center with the same sound, the same carry, the same violence.
Opposite field from the left side. A scout behind the backstop said something to the man next to him and the man next to him put his phone down.
The scouts had stopped writing.
Not all of them. The scout from Houston was still tracking exit velocity on his gun. The man from San Francisco was on his phone, turned away from the field, talking fast. But the rest of them had gone still. Clipboards at their sides. Watching.
Kirstin had seen this once before. In the cage, standing next to Reeves, watching the bat move and feeling the first pull of something she hadn't been prepared for. Reeves had called it elite. He'd said the talent was never the question.
This was beyond the cage. This was a full field and real pitching and eight organizations watching a man hit a baseball into the Georgia sky over and over and the field couldn't hold what he was doing.
Luke threw one more. High and tight, a pitch designed to move a hitter off the plate. Beck didn't move off. His hands adjusted, his hips cleared, and he drove it to right field on a line that hit the fence on one bounce and rattled the chain-link so hard the scout standing near it stepped back.
Luke set the ball down on the mound. He pulled his cap off and wiped his forehead and put it back on backward and walked toward the backstop where the scouts had gathered.
A man from St. Louis, older, gray at the temples, the voice of someone who'd been doing this for thirty years, asked Luke a question Kirstin couldn't hear.
Luke's answer, she heard.
"No sir, that I never could match. That man was born to hit a baseball."
Twelve-time All-Star. Five Gold Gloves. Four hundred and seven home runs. Three thousand and ninety-seven hits. Fifteen seasons. And Luke Banks had just told a room full of scouts that Beck's bat was something he couldn't touch.
The scout from St. Louis wrote something on his clipboard.
The man from San Francisco was still on his phone.
The Houston scout was reading numbers off his gun to a colleague who was nodding and writing, eyes on the clipboard.
Two scouts were talking to Brady, asking about the shoulder timeline, about availability, about when Beck could be game-ready.
The word she kept hearing, drifting up from the field in pieces, was "complete." The arm was back. The bat never left. Eight teams had come to see if Ethan Beck could still play and eight teams had just gotten their answer.
Beck was at the bench, toweling off, drinking water.
He glanced up at the deck. Third time.
Addison put her hand on Kirstin's arm.
"I had the advantage of watching Luke play before I met him," Addison said.
"What do you mean?"
"It made it a little easier when the Sox came back after him. I understood exactly why they wanted him back. I just didn't want to share him."
Kirstin watched Beck drop the towel on the bench.
A scout from Tampa was walking toward him, hand extended.
Beck stood and shook it and the scout said something and Beck nodded and the scout said something else and Beck put his hands in his pockets and listened, patient, the same patience he brought to the porch and the beach and the bar.
"I don't think I want to share Ethan either," Kirstin said.
"I learned, even though he didn't go back, I didn't have to share him. I just had to do it with him. That's all he really wants." Addison turned from the field. "He's glanced up here at least three times. Something tells me that's all he wants. Is you with him."
The scouts were dispersing. Some back to their cars.
Some lingering near Brady, still asking questions, still writing.
The man from San Francisco had finally gotten off his phone and was talking to Luke near the mound.
The morning had opened up fully now, the air warm and heavy, the marsh bright beyond the outfield, the sky wide and blue.
Beck was walking toward the building. A scout from Washington fell into step beside him and they talked as they walked and Beck was polite, engaged, the professional version of himself, the version that had navigated clubhouses and media days and contract negotiations for a decade.
The scouts dispersed slowly. Handshakes in the lot. Phone calls from the front seats of rental cars before the engines started. The man from San Francisco was the last to leave, still talking to Brady near the backstop, writing something on a card and pressing it into Brady's hand.
Addison squeezed Kirstin's arm and stood.
"I'm going to find Luke," she said. "Stay."
Kirstin stayed.
The lot emptied. The field was quiet. The marsh birds came back, settling on the fence posts along the outfield, reclaiming the space the scouts had borrowed.
The morning was warm and still and the coffee in her hand was cold and she sat in the chair on the deck and looked at the field where Ethan Beck had just hit a baseball so hard that eight organizations had stopped writing to watch.
The door behind her opened.
She turned. Beck was standing in the doorway. He'd changed out of the compression shirt into a clean t-shirt. His hair was damp from a shower. No hat.
Beck sat in the chair beside her. Addison's chair. He leaned back and stretched his legs out and looked at the empty field.
"I see why you wanted me to come," she said.
"You do?"
"Yeah." She turned to him. "You were amazing out there, Ethan. I really had no idea."
He smiled. Shy. The boy version, not the ballplayer, not the professional who'd just shaken hands with scouts from eight teams. The version that showed up on the porch when she said something that caught him off guard.
"That's not why."
"No?"
He was quiet for a second. His eyes were on the field. The outfield grass, the fence, the marsh beyond it. The place where he'd been standing two hours ago with radar guns pointed at his arm and clipboards tracking every throw.
"I've walked off a lot of fields," he said. "A hundred. More than that. College, the minors, the show. Full stadiums. Forty thousand people in the seats." He turned to her. "And every time I walked off, there was nobody waiting for me. Not like that. Not someone who was there for me."
He stopped. He picked at a thread on the armrest of the chair.
"I don't know if I'm going to play again, Kirstin. I don't know what any of those guys are going to tell their front offices. I don't know if I'll ever walk off another field."
He met her eyes.
"I just wanted to see you first when I walked off this one. Just in case I never get to do it again."
The field was empty. The marsh was bright. The chairs were warm from the sun.
She reached across the space between the chairs and took his hand.
"You'll see me," she said.