Brooks gave me a nod, eyes warm but unreadable. “Thanks again, kit—”
His eyes narrowed. Mine widened.
I turned, walking away faster than I meant to, already regretting the words I hadn’t said. But just before I rounded the corner, I glanced back over my shoulder.
Brooks was still standing there.
And he was still watching me.
Brooks
Roasters 5–4
The TV screens behind me glowed with looping video clips. Pitch sequences, batting angles, field coverage charts—flashes of motion and heat maps that only made sense to guys who lived and breathed this game. Luckily, every person in this room did.
We were deep in pregame mode, the kind where nobody really blinked and nobody checked their phones. They knew better than that.
Well—mostof them did.
Roman had once tried to hide his cell inside his glove during a meeting, like I wouldn’t notice him tapping out a text with his pinky through the laces. I’d confiscated it and made him watch film with the rookies for a week straight. He hadn’t slipped up since.
They were a good bunch of guys, my best crop of players yet. Probably because all of them had been hand selected by me. It wasn’t every day that you were offered the opportunity to puttogether a franchise from the ground up, and when the Roasters’ front office had given me the green light, I hadn’t wasted it.
After signing my contract, I had spent months with my head buried in scouting reports, watching grainy footage from minor league parks in the middle of nowhere. I’d sat in half-empty bleachers at college fields, flown overseas to scout arms in the Dominican Republic, and spent a week in Japan watching my right-fielder take fly balls until midnight.
I hadn’t been after stars. I’d wanted grit. Guys who could take a hit and still show up the next day hungry. And somehow, I’d found them.
I clicked the remote in my hand and the screen shifted to a split screen of our batting order against the opposing team’s pitching rotation.
“We all know that there’s nothing worse than losing to a team you know you should beat,” I said, my voice calm but clipped. “Which is why we’re stacking today’s lineup with hitters. This list swings early and swings hard.”
The team’s ASL interpreter mirrored my words so our catcher, Bennett, could follow along. Bennett wore cochlear implants, but signing was still the clearest and most efficient way to communicate with him, especially in a clubhouse full of noise, chaos, and guys who forgot to enunciate.
“And you know what that means.”
“Work the count,” came a few voices.
“Exactly. Force the long innings. They don’t like playing behind, and their bullpen falls apart after the sixth. If we can wear down the starter by mid-fourth, we control the rest of the game.”
I moved to the side of the monitor, nodding toward a looped clip of an outside pitch their leadoff hitter chased three times last series. “Same goes for pitchers. Don’t be predictable. Mix your tempo, use the corners. Make them earn it.”
Roman snorted from the second row. “No pressure.”
Fucking loudmouth. You could hear our first baseman coming from a mile away, and it had nothing to do with his massive . . . feet. Then again, like most world-class shit-talkers, the guy also had one hell of a work ethic. He was secretly one of the hardest workers on the team. The kind of guy you’d want next to you in a bar fight or, better yet, a brawl at home plate.
“Garcia,” I said without looking at him, “try fielding something clean today and we’ll call it even.”
That earned me a couple of laughs. The kind that told me the tension was still there, but it was cracking a little.
We had a tough series ahead of us. The Vancouver Tridents had been knocked out of the playoffs last season earlier than expected, so we all knew they were hungry for another shot. We were, too. That World Series title wasn’t going to defend itself.
I turned the screen off with the remote. “Sinclair, you’re up.”
Soren “Sin” Sinclair, the team’s duly elected team captain, was on his feet before I finished saying his name. He gave me a nod as I stepped back, and then he turned to face his teammates.
The room went dead silent.
Not because Soren demanded it, but because that was what happened when Soren talked. People listened.
