Mack calls for a slider. I shake him off.
He frowns behind the mask. Calls for the slider again.
I throw a curveball instead, dropping it over the outside corner with the kind of late break that makes batters look foolish. It smacks into his glove at a location I aimed for before I wound up.
He stands, pulls his mask up, and gives me a look. “Everything okay?”
“Excellent.”
“You’re overthinking.”
“I’m thinking at the exact right level.”
“You shook off my sign.”
“I had a better pitch.”
“It’s a drill, Steele. You don’t need a better pitch in a drill.”
“Habits become outcomes,” I say, which is something Bishop says approximately four times a week, and Mack knows it, whichmeans he can’t argue with it. He pulls his mask back down, crouches, and calls the next sign.
I throw what he asks for.
What I don’t do, for the entirety of the morning session, is think about Bishop. I don’t look over at the dugout to see if he’s watching, track his movements around the field, or try to read anything into the fact he’s had three separate conversations with my pitching coach in the last ninety minutes, and each of them ended with a look in my direction.
Coach Bishop has a face made for poker. Thirty years of managing athletes have given him the ability to look at a problem with exactly the same expression he uses for everything else. I’ve tried to read him before and lost every time, so I’ve stopped trying.
The session ends. The team breaks for individual work.
Bishop finds me at the water cooler.
“Steele. My office.”
Not a question. Not an invitation. The two words carry the specific gravity of a man who hasn’t needed to raise his voice in about a decade because the tone alone does the work.
I grab my water bottle, cap it, and follow him off the field.
His office is at the end of the coaches’ corridor, past the equipment room and the analytics bay with its wall of monitors showing every pitch I’ve ever thrown in professional baseball. I glance at those screens as we pass, split-second movement data, spin rates, approach angles, and feel the familiar, strange sensation of seeing yourself reduced to information. Useful information. The most useful information I’ve ever produced. But still.
Bishop closes the door behind us.
His office looks the same as it always has. It’s functional and unsentimental, the kind of space that communicates exactly what’s important to the person inside it. Whiteboard withrotation schedules. A shelf of playbooks, spines cracked and annotated. One framed picture on the desk facing him, not the wall. It’s of Ava at maybe seventeen, laughing at something off-camera, entirely unaware of the shot. I’ve been in this office half a dozen times this season, and I’ve noticed the photo every single time and managed, every single time, to notice it without noticeably noticing it, which is an athletic achievement in its own right.
He moves around the desk and sits.
“You’ve seen the blogs,” he says.
“Yes.”
“SportsBeat, then three others. My name doesn’t appear, but Ava’s studio does.” He folds his hands on the desk. His knuckles are the knuckles of someone who played the game before coaching it—big, crooked, and carrying the history of a career. “Do you want to tell me anything?”
There it is.
The question is shaped like an offer.
I could. I could tell him everything right now and remove the slow pressure of this particular secret. If I’m honest, part of me wants to, because I’m not built for pretense and never have been. I play my position openly, say what I think about opposing lineups, and two years ago, I told my pitching coach to his face that his grip-adjustment advice was wrong.
But telling Bishop now, in this office, with Ava’s photograph three feet from his right hand and Lena’s photo sitting in my phone like a grenade, is not the same as being honest. It’s being reckless. And I promised Ava we’d talk first.
