This is the game.
The Fireballs are playing in the World Series. We start tonight.
“We’rehere,” I whisper to Diego and Max as we stand at the railing of our home dugout at Duggan Field. The stands have been draped with official banners and flags wherever they can find room to drape banners and flags.
Max claps D on the shoulder. “You have no idea how lucky you are to be doing this in your very first year in the show.”
“I know, Happy Max,” Diego replies reverently. “I know.”
I snap a picture of the empty field and text it to Waverly.
We did it.
She knows we did it. She knows we’re here. We’ve been talking every day, multiple times a day, usually for about four minutes at a time as one of us is rushing from one commitment to another.
She has back-to-back tapings to start the hype for her next album somewhere in LA all day today and probably won’t see this for a few hours.
I text the photo to my family group text next.
My mom replies with a crying emoji.
Everyone does. Mom, Dad, Grady, Annika, Annika pretending to be Miles, Pop, Nana, Tillie Jean.
Even Max, who’s standing right next to me.
“Whoa,” Francisco says behind me. “This is like,ours. It’s our home field.”
“We’re doing this,” Brooks says behind him.
“We are so fucking doing this,” Emilio agrees.
Four games.
We have to win four of the next seven games, and when—whenwe do—we’ll do what no one ever thought possible.
We’ll do whatInever thought possible.
I mean, I thought it was possible.
But I’d started to doubt I’d see it in my career. I’d started to wonder if the Fireballs were truly cursed and if I’d wasted the best years of my baseball career reaching for something that no one else around me believed in.
I’d started to wonder if Ididn’thave what it took to make it happen all on my own. If I wasn’t enough. If even my overwhelming belief in what was possible wasn’t big enough to overcome the obstacles.
But then I heard Tripp wanted to buy the team, and yeah, you’re damn right I made sure I spent as much time as I could telling him what I thought the team needed.
And then our former owner died, completely unexpectedly, and he left the team to a woman none of us had ever heard of. A woman who came in like a bulldozer, scaring the shit out of us with all of the changes she implemented on day one and kept making on days two, three, four, etc. What was hope at new management turned into temporary fear that she’d make it worse.
As if things could get worse.
But Tripp believed too, and he got himself a role as the team’s new president.
It was the only way the commissioner would agree to not move us to Vegas, and even then, we only had last year to prove we had what it took to stay in the league as the Fireballs.
And it turns out, Lila’s a lot like me. She’s never met a challenge she couldn’t take on.
With style.
And so the two of them found a way to work together to rebuild the coaching staff, invested in players, launched what everyone thought was an insane mascot contest that would ruin everything and instead brought fans back in droves, even fell in love and got married, and now here we are.
