Maybe baseball wasn’t so boring, after all.
Pink
That’s going to leave one hell of a bruise.
So much for the abs of steel I was always bragging about. Nothing humbled you faster than a two hundred and sixty pound third baseman right to the ribs. Especially one you used to suck off.
Dimitri and I had played in the same college league between my junior and senior year at Penn. Our casual fling hadn’t made it past Labor Day, but we were both drafted the following fall—me to Baltimore, him to Charleston. Dimitri had definitely put on some muscle since the last time he’d been on top of me.
“You good, man?”
I glanced over my shoulder toward a freshly showered Bennett, another hulking body I would hate to run into at home plate—good thing he was on our side. Bennett was what some might call a gentle giant. Unlike a lot of the guys, Bennett tended to keep to himself, often opting to spend his nights in than go outwith the team. Something told me there were a lot more layers to peel back on that onion, when he was ready, of course.
“All good, Benny Boo.” I rubbed the sensitive skin above my belly button. “It takes more than a ripped Russian to take me out.”
Besides, the whole thing had been my fault anyway. It had been my wild pitch that had sent Bennett scrambling for the ball and Dimitri racing toward home. A couple of bruised ribs were a small sacrifice to make for the win—nothing a bag of frozen peas and a few days rest couldn’t fix.
“I don’t know,” Bennett said. “You went down pretty hard.”
“That’s what she said,” Roman shouted. Our first baseman might have had five years on me, but he had the humor of a twelve-year-old boy.
“Dude,” Soren said, shooting a pointed glare his way. “2006 called, and they want their joke back.”
I tuned out their ribbing and reached for the tattered notebook inside my locker. The one held together with lime-green duct tape and prayer. I flipped through the pages—flashing past a year’s worth of scribbled words and doodles—until finally, I landed on a clean piece of paper. There weren’t many of them left, just enough to finish out the season. After that, it would join the others.
All nine of them.
Baseball players lived and died by two things: superstition and routine.
A 90s alt-rock playlist. The number seven deluxe from Do Your Wing Thing. One hundred grounders during warmups, no more and no less. As far as I could tell, every ballplayer had their thing.
And while there might not have been any direct, causal links between wearing a lucky pair of dirty socks or unwrapping three Dubble Bubble packages—neverHubba Bubba—and chewingcounterclockwise, most sports psychologists agreed that there was some validity to athletic rituals.
“It’s a placebo effect,” Dani had explained to me during one exceedingly long bus ride back from Vancouver. “More than anything, superstitious behaviors can help players feel more in control, which more often than not helps reduce anxiety and increase confidence.”
In typical overachieving, only-child behavior, Dani had double-majored in sports psychology and multimedia journalism, which made living with her both exciting and infuriating. Mostly because she was usually right.
My game day rituals began with a squeeze of Blue Beary and ended with a self-evaluation in my notebook. It hadn’t always been that way, though.
The notebook had come in later, the same year my parents had split up and we’d finally rid ourselves of the likes of my father. Before then, every game had concluded with an inning-by-inning, pitch-by-pitch critique alongside my father.
“I have to protect my investments,”he would tell me and anybody else who asked.“It’s up to you to carry on the family name.”
So much for that archaic notion. I’d swapped his surname for my mother’s maiden name before the ink had dried on their divorce papers. His calls and visits had slowed after that. He’d stopped coming around altogether the second I’d had him barred from my high school’s athletic center.
Belles and I hadn’t heard a peep from dear old Dad since.
My coach at the time had suggested that I keep up my postgame ritual with one minor adjustment—namely, a notebook—so I did. I recorded everything. What worked, what didn’t, what I needed to work on with our pitching staff—it all went into the book.
And the best part was once it was written down, that was that.
My notebook didn’t berate me or call me names. It didn’t make me do drills until my knuckles cracked or drop me off six miles from home to walk off my “bad attitude.” The only person who could bad-mouth me and my performance—the only person who mattered anyway—was me and me alone.
And why would I do that? I fucking rocked.
“Got a minute, Jared?”
The sudden slam of my notebook echoed across the lockers. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust my teammates—my best friends, really—but these notes were for my eyes only. I wasn’t willing to share them with my coaches and teammates, so I certainly wasn’t going to show them off to thePortlandia Press’s senior sportswriter.
