Tonight it isn’t.
We lost 8-3.
The locker room afterward is the specific quiet of a team that knows better than to make noise. No music, no joking. Guys shower and dress with the efficient, heads-down energy of people who have been told without being told that tonight is not the night for post-game rituals.
Rodriguez passes my locker without saying anything. Martinez, who comments on everything, who once delivered a full monologue about the correct way to fold a jersey, keeps his eyes down and his mouth closed. Tommy from the bullpen gives me the kind of nod reserved for funerals.
I don’t want any of it. Not the sympathy, not the careful silence, not the understanding looks from men who have had their own bad nights and know to give a wide berth to someone having theirs. What I want is to have earned my usual post-game routine, the easy noise of a win, the loose-shouldered relief of knowing a good performance is already behind you.
Instead, I sit at my locker and stare at the wall.
The wall, being a wall, offers nothing useful in return.
“Steele.” Coach Bishop’s voice comes from the doorway to his office. Not loud. Doesn’t need to be.
I follow him in, and he closes the door before sitting at his desk. I remain standing because sitting feels like an admission of something I’m not ready to admit yet.
“Sit down, Reece.”
I sit.
He opens my stats sheet on his laptop and turns it toward me. I don’t need to read it. I lived it. Four and two-thirds innings pitched, seven earned runs, three walks, zero strikeouts in the fourth and fifth frames. The worst outing I’ve had since my sophomore year of college, when I was pitching through a sprained ankle I hadn’t told anyone about.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“I had a bad night.”
“You’ve had one bad night in three seasons. This looked different.” He closes the laptop. “Are you injured?”
“No.”
“Arm fine?”
“Arm’s fine.”
He nods, tapping a pen against his desk in the slow rhythm he uses when he’s choosing words. “You know what I’ve noticed this week? You show up on time. You throw your bullpen. You participate in film review. You do everything I ask of you.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re somewhere else.” He leans back. “Physically present, mentally gone. I’ve had players come through here in the middle of divorces who showed up more completely than you have this week.”
I don’t say anything.
The pen taps.
“I’m not going to push on the personal side,” he says finally. “What you do with your life outside this stadium is yourbusiness. But when it follows you through that door and stands on my mound for six innings, it becomes mine.” He studies me. “Is there anything I should know?”
And there it is.
The question with the specific weight under it.
The one he could sharpen if he chose to, the one I’ve been dreading since Monday.
“No,” I say.
It’s the most honest dishonest answer I have.
He watches me for a long moment. Somewhere in the silence is the full knowledge he might have with the drive-by, the rumors, the things coaches know because they have been watching people be human under pressure for thirty years, and they recognize the patterns.
