“Come here for a second,” I say, waving a hand but not looking up.
Adriel takes his time, instead bantering with one of the other infielders, along with our strength and conditioning coach. My gaze briefly slides to Jayden, and his pursed lips reflect a certain amount of apology on his brother’s behalf. I flit my gaze back to Adriel and snap my fingers. I’ve always been a loud snapper.
“Pfft, I’m coming,” Adriel says, a half-hearted laugh bubbling out of his mouth as he drags his feet over to me.
“I’m sorry, is this an inconvenience?” I say, remaining in my seat to show I’m unaffected. It’s a façade, because inside, my pulse is raging, and I’m waiting for the group of men surrounding me to pepper me with jokes, to mock my reply to him. Thankfully, nobody does, and Adriel is forced to relent and let down his guard.
“What’s up, Coach?” he snaps. His lip ticks up, a bit of a sneer. How my father ever put up with him and his attitude, I’ll never know.
“You always like this?” I say.
A burst of air leaves his nostrils, and he says, “Fine, what?”
I make the same sound, shaking my head before balancing my iPad on my knees. Adriel steps in close, crouching with a hand on the back of my chair.
“Here’s the hit track for that round.” I filter the data and show him how only one of his swings was on target for a base hit. The others were likely line outs, or deep line drives for a fly out to left field. He moves his jaw and bunches his lips.
“So, like . . . how does this thing know?” He gestures toward the camera, then taps the iPad screen.
“Well, first . . . physics. It reads the launch angle, and I’ve programmed it with the highest percentage of fielding locations and the error percentages of the players you’ll face this weekend. So, it knows.Iknow.”
He flits his eyes to me, his mouth a hard line, and after a beat, his shoulder twitches in a faint shrug.
“So what?”
I laugh softly, then stand. He straightens up tall next to me. I nod to my side, urging him to step away with me. He’s always had an ego. And he’s always been the big brother. But when I was a kid, he was pretty good to me.
“You know this whole thing is a business, right?” I keep my voice low, my tone serious.
He shrugs, but utters a less abrupt, “Yeah.”
“Well, like it or not, you are a product that this organization is investing in. And if the live data doesn’t translate into them getting their money’s worth—aka runs—they are going to cut their losses. And the other teams you’re courting will lower their bids to pick you up. Because I gotta tell ya, Adriel. When team owners are deciding about spending millions, they are far less likely to shell out based on potential than hard facts. So, maybe consider taking a closer look at my little physics project here and then be open to a few adjustments.”
Adriel sways in his stance, his hands pushed in the back pockets of his baseball pants as he chews at the piece of gum he’s been annihilating since he stepped out on the field. Eventually, he gives me a tiny nod.
“Like what? Adjustments, I mean.”
My chest opens up. I’ve been holding in a lot of air, but I do that when I’m bracing for a fight. And I have had plenty to get where I am. No doubt there are a lot to come too. I’ll take this one small win.
I hold the iPad in my palm and pull up video from his last few at-bats in Texas. I pause the screen when he lets his bat dip over his shoulder, and tap on it.
“Yeah. It’s just a mental thing I started doing,” he says.
I figured.
I pull up a video from last season, when he wasn’t letting the bat fall so far over his shoulder, when he was hitting over three hundred. I freeze the frame and flip back and forth between the two, then pop my gaze up to his.
“It’s a millisecond in time, and that millisecond, when you’re facing a guy throwing ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . . over a hundred? It’s ages.”
I can tell by the way his eyelids flutter as he nods that my words are sinking in.
“Okay, yeah. I hear ya,” he says.
“Just pay attention to it. That one small thing. And see if we can get that millisecond back.”
His eyes meet mine, and he spits his gum off to the side before grinning.
“You got it, Coach.” He spins on his heels and heads back to the cage to take another round, and I hunt down his fucking piece of gum so it doesn’t get stuck on the bottom of someone’s turf shoe. I head to the dugout to toss it in the trash, then walk to the water cooler to wash my hands.
