“Take tomorrow off,” he says. “Full rest day. No bullpen, no film. I want you fresh for Sunday’s game.”
“I don’t need—”
“That wasn’t a suggestion.” He opens his laptop again, signaling the end of the conversation. “Fix whatever this is, Reece. I need my ace pitcher, not this version of him.”
When I get back to the locker room, most of the guys have gone, so I shower alone.
The stadium has mostly cleared by the time I’m done, the way it does after a loss. The staff moves faster, and the lights in nonessential corridors are turned off early. I can hear the maintenance crew in the concourse, the distant hydraulic groan of the scoreboard cycling down.
I pull on my jacket and stand at my locker for a while longer than I need to.
The thing about tonight, the thing I’ve been turning over in the shower for twenty minutes, is that I can map exactly where I fell apart.
Not in the game.
Before it.
Long before it.
I have spent six days since Ava ended things doing what I always do when something doesn’t go according to plan. I worked harder. I trained more. I ran distances that made no athletic sense. I threw bullpen sessions until Mack physically removed the ball from my hand. I answered interview questions, signed endorsement forms, said the right things to the right people, and came home every night to an apartment full of the right things that meannothing.
I’ve been performing.
Not baseball. That, too, but I mean the wider performance, the ongoing one, the Reece Steele show that has been running continuously since I was nineteen years old and decided performing was the same as living.
Perform for coaches.
Perform for sponsors.
Perform for the crowd.
Keep the numbers clean, the reputation managed, the image polished, and never let anyone close enough to disrupt any of it.
I’ve been so busy managing the performance, I never stopped to ask who the audience was.
My father died when I was sixteen, and I’ve been pitching for his ghost ever since. Proving something to a man who isn’t here to receive the proof, across an argument I was too young to finish, through a game he never got to watch me master. Every career-high strikeout, everySports Illustratedcover, everychanting stadium, I’ve been converting them all into offerings for someone who can’t accept them.
I think about what Mack said to me once, weeks ago, in the bullpen when I was throwing too hard for too long and pretending it was discipline. ‘You can’t convince someone to stop being scared. You show them the alternative is worth the risk.’
I was thinking about Ava when he said it.
I wasn’t thinking about myself.
I should have been.
And then Ava happened.
Ava, who didn’t know my ERA when we met. Ava, who charged me the same consultation rate she’d charge anyone else and meant it. Ava, who looked at me on a mound in the middle of fifty-two thousand people losing their minds, saw a person she wasn’t sure she even liked yet.
She made me feel what it was like to be somewhere without performing. And I got so deep into it so fast, I didn’t notice I was doing the same thing to her I’ve been doing to everyone else. I was managing it, controlling it, thinking about optics, timing, and keeping it quiet long enough to figure out how to make it work with every other obligation already in the air.
I was pitching carefully, even with her.
And then the photographs dropped, she bolted, and I told myself the problem was Lena, the media, Coach Bishop, and every external force that made our situation complicated.
But the real complication was me.
A man who has been living for an audience so long that he doesn’t know what he wants when no one is watching.
