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 haveneverfailed 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.
