2. Evan #2
Evan stretched his legs out on the coffee table and immediately pulled them back, the echo of his grandmother’s scolding in his ears.
There was a smudge of pasta sauce on the edge of the table and he wiped it off with his thumb and sucked it clean.
His apartment smelled like Italian food and the ocean outside his open window.
A seagull cried with musical self-importance and, on the TV, Boston’s relief pitcher shook off two signs before nodding at a third.
The catcher set his feet and framed the strike like he’d been born knowing how.
Chicago almost lost it in the eighth. A bloop.
A walk. Then a clean single to the right that made the crowd swell in a way you could feel in your ribs even through speakers barely above a hush.
CJ charged forward, set his feet, and fired the ball to third, the throw low and angry.
The runner slid into the tag, already howling his protest and arguing his case.
The third baseman was so calm he almost looked bored as he showed the ball to the ump like a magic trick.
The ump punched the air to signal the out and the broadcast booth lost its collective mind about “Hartman’s cannon. ”
“Cannon,” Evan scoffed. He leaned his elbows on his knees, shaking his head.
It was a good throw, maybe even a perfect one, but hearing all of the praise for CJ set his teeth on edge.
The words were said every time, as if they were gospel.
Evan knew better. Skill mattered, but sometimes the game was luck and timing, and tonight, CJ had both.
Top of the ninth, Chicago was up two. Three outs to write a city’s memory.
It was the kind of lead that looked safe on paper, but Evan had caught too many ninth innings to know better. Two runs were a heartbeat. One mistake pitch, one bad bounce, and the whole thing could unravel before anyone had time to blink.
The first out came on a lazy pop-up that barely left the infield. The next batter went down on three pitches, hacking himself into knots, then walking back to the dugout, shaking his head and throwing his bat like it had betrayed him.
That left one.
The ballpark had gone quiet in that way a crowd of forty thousand people on the edge of a moment does.
There were still pockets of noise, shouts and chants and the beat of a drum in the bleachers.
But under it all was the collective hush of an entire stadium inhaling and refusing to let go.
Coaches leaned against dugout rails, fielders crouched with their gloves low, and through the screen, it felt like the stadium itself was waiting to see what came next.
Evan watched the ball leave the pitcher’s hand in a clean white blur, and time stood still. In that split second between release and contact, nobody moved, nobody breathed. An entire season, entire careers and futures, hung in the sliver of air where fate had yet to decide how the pitch would end.
The crack of the bat was sharp and mean. The kind of sound you didn’t mistake if you’d ever played the game, that made your gut twist before you could even track the ball. Evan sat forward on instinct, watching the ball arc high and deep toward the far corner of right field.
And, of course, there was CJ.
He didn’t look like he was sprinting, but then he never did.
Graceful to the point that it looked like the field tilted to carry him where he needed to go.
Three long strides onto the warning track, a leap at the wall, glove stretching high into the night.
Leather snapped shut around white, just before the ball could punish the crowd for believing, and CJ came down with it, glove closed tight, knees bending on impact.
Out three. Game over.
Evan sat back slowly, spine sinking into the couch again like a return to gravity.
On the field, the Blazers poured out of the dugout and sprinted from the far reaches of the field, colliding in the middle in a pile of brothers.
Hats flew and champagne did what champagne does when it’s shaken hard on purpose.
Someone found the camera with both hands and shouted words that the network wouldn’t have time to censor.
The booth went feral and the crowd did too.
The broadcasters called it heroic, iconic, the kind of play kids would be recreating in their backyards tomorrow.
They replayed CJ’s catch, and Evan watched like it was new, even though he knew that leap well.
He knew the way CJ’s body had coiled and launched, and his reckless faith in his legs and his timing.
He’d seen it on college fields where the fences were chain link and the metal halide lights buzzed like insects.
Back then, CJ would make a play just as improbable, then whip off his cap and look straight at Evan, grinning, waiting for Evan’s approval like it meant more coming from him than anyone else.
The broadcast found CJ twice more in the chaos.
Once with his arms around a teammate’s shoulders, laughing with such unguarded joy that Evan’s chest ached as if he’d tried to run without warming up.
The second shot was him alone for half a breath, eyes closed, chin tipped up as if he’d slipped out of the noise and finally dropped a weight he’d been carrying since he was twelve.
Evan turned the volume down to nothing, and the apartment settled into quiet. His phone lit up, but he didn’t reach for it. It lit again, and because he was a masochist sometimes, he flipped it over and looked.
Matt Caldwell.
Not just his agent. His friend. And CJ’s.
The three of them had spent three years tangled together in the kind of friendship that could only be forged on bus rides, road trips, and the exhausting intimacy of college baseball.
Matt had been there for it all, and he was the only person who knew the truth.
When he’d caught Evan and CJ in the middle of the baseball field, he’d advised them to be careful, then tucked their secret away and never mentioned it again.
And when CJ had ended things and Evan had stopped talking about him entirely, Matt figured out how to stay friends with both of them.