Chapter Six
You’re in for a treat,” Gage said to Jackie as they made their way to their seats in the ballpark.
The stadium wasn’t as she’d imagined. Built so that it edged the San Francisco Bay, it had sweeping views of the water, and the light reflecting from the bay was amplified by a wide-open, clear-blue sky.
A few children clustered near the row of seats bordering the field, grinning and boasting as they compared player autographs.
“How do you get an autograph?” Jackie asked Gage. “I mean, when?”
“A perk of arriving early. The players sign before and after batting practice.”
One little boy had a glove so big it nearly covered his whole arm. She watched as the boy clutched the autographed glove to his chest as if it were a precious talisman. The stadium might have surpassed her expectations, but the look of rapture in the boy’s eyes she’d seen before, in a different stadium hosting a different game. She wished it was a time she liked to remember.
“Here, hold this.” Gage handed her a cardboard tray of the foulest-looking food she had seen in weeks. Some of the food that passed through the volunteer kitchen was close, but the plate of sticky orange cheese with triangles of chips floating in it won the prize. She couldn’t smell it though. The tray Gage held in his other hand reeked so strongly of garlic that it overpowered any other scent within ten feet. He balanced the tray of fries and a plastic cup of beer and pulled the stadium seat down with his free hand.
“Finally a realm that services your taste in food,” she said, handing him the tray.
“We missed the top of the first,” he said, not bothering to conceal his disappointment.
“I understand there are nine innings.”
They’d tried for an earlier start, but a fresh wave of rescues had thwarted their plans. Gage needed this break as much as she did, maybe more.
“You never know. But with no rain in sight, we’ll see eight and a half at least.” He waved a French fry at her. “Hey, nice shirt. Don’t think I’ve ever seen you in real clothes.”
She tugged absently on her shirt. It unnerved her that she’d spent time that morning sorting through her closet. It was just a sports event with her assistant, but she’d chosen the shirt carefully all the same.
“Speaking of shirts”—he waved his beer toward the field—“see the guys in gray, those shirts that say Braves? That’s the other team.” He took a big swallow of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The guy in the middle of the infield, on the mound, he’s the pitcher. The guy in the white shirt preparing to bat—he’s on the home team.” He took a swig of his beer. “The home team always gets to bat last. It’s their last chance to win if they’re behind.”
He held out the tray of nachos, offering them to her. She started to refuse, but then lifted one out of the cardboard container, scraping off some of the cheese. It was delicious. She helped herself to another as Gage told her the rules of the game.
“What’s really amazing,” he said, pointing toward the guy standing ready to bat, “is how the best of these guys can react to a visual stimulus in two hundred milliseconds. They’ve got half the time it takes an eye to blink to see the ball after the pitcher releases it. The remaining time—three hundred milliseconds—is the time they have to react, to physically adjust to what they know about the ball’s path and hit it. For the best players, it’s a decision, but it’s a fast one.”
She reached over Gage, grabbed his beer and took a swig. The crowd booed and she lifted her head to see the man who’d been standing in the batter’s box now walking back toward the stands.
“Called strike. Bummer way to go down,” Gage said, as if she understood. “You need three things to be great at this game,” he lectured in a tone that was suddenly serious. “Fast hands, fast feet and fast eyes, but it’s eyes that are probably most important. Fast eyes means a hitter can focus on the ball and then transform that focus into an attack.”
He scooped up some of the cheese from the nachos with a couple of the garlic fries and popped them in his mouth, swallowing in a gulp.
“My theory,” he continued, “is that the hitter, when he stands facing the pitcher, is tapping into the most primal parts of his nervous system. It mimics a fight to the death, like two lions poised to launch at each other’s necks—one watches the other move, then instantly reacts. It happens below the level of conscious awareness. A millisecond can mean the difference between whiffing a strike or blasting the ball over the center field wall.” He grinned at her. “See, it’s more than a game. It’s science.”
She ignored his lighthearted jab at her seriousness and watched one of the hitters swing and miss a pitch. “How often do they manage to hit it?” she asked.
“Depends on the player. The guy batting right now usually hits and gets on base in one out of three at-bats.”
“That’s good?”
“Better than good.” He munched down a handful of chips. “Few sports demand reactions as quick as what a guy needs to hit a major league fastball. Well, there’s tennis, and fencing, but that’s about it. Football, basketball, soccer—they’re fast but they can be played in seconds. Nope, when it comes to speed, baseball’s right there at the top.”
She squinted out at the field. The players were standing, unmoving. She tried to get a sense of the speed Gage was talking about.
The afternoon was warming; the fog had burned off and it was a beautiful day. She peeled off her jacket and dropped it onto the empty seat next to her and settled back. Theirs might be a world-class stadium, but the seats were rigid and uncomfortable. She grabbed her jacket, folded it and put it under her, cushioning her backside.
“Where’s Alex?” She tried to sound casual. But just being in a stadium once again made her nerves jump.
“He’s right there.”
Gage pointed and she followed the direction of his finger. Standing in a circle, Alex was studying the pitcher and the field.
“Hey, I know you have a whacko aversion to ballplayers. I thought it was why you didn’t take him seriously.” He downed a fist full of fries. “That and the fact that he’s a hunky guy. You always avoid them.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Except me, of course.”
“You should’ve stuck to hockey. It would’ve saved me the trouble of dealing with you.” She took another big swig of his beer. “And it’s not whacko. I have my reasons.”
“You always do,” Gage said with a tinge of resignation.
She definitely did not like ballplayers, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Alex.
She watched him grip the bat, watched his forearms flex as he lifted it and took a swing through the air. Gage was right—he crouched in his stance, moved through his swing—in a way that was every inch primal.
A responding heat jolted deep inside her. Also primal. But so not good. Not now. And not for a jock, never again.
She’d fallen hard for a football player when she was finishing up vet school. An audacious striker, he could score a goal from seventy yards out. But it wasn't his passes on the field that lured her in. She’d been naïve then, young, and so enthralled and distracted by his charm that she’d nearly lost out on an important fellowship. When Brett had asked her to marry him, she’d moved heaven and earth to get back from her fieldwork in Africa in time to put the final details together for the wedding. Not that she’d needed to; her mother had hired not one but three wedding planners. You’d have thought they were planning a coronation, not a country wedding in Cornwall.
The morning of the wedding, Brett sent a two-line letter by messenger saying he couldn’t go through with it. There’d been no call, no explanation—he just jilted her, just like that. He turned up on the telly a week later, all smiles, with a lingerie model on his arm. In the end a friend told her he’d admitted he’d thought it might’ve been a good lark to marry an aristocrat’s daughter, but she’d proven too serious. And Brett was a man who liked booty and fun in one package.
His uncaring words had hurt more than anything else. Even more than having to face their guests that morning.
After that, the long faces of her friends and the wry glances from her mother’s aristocratic acquaintances were more than she could bear. She’d been more than humiliated—she’d been broken. She’d accepted the job at the Center and moved to California a month later.
Nope. She did not need a jock in her life.
The Center might, but she didn’t.
It’d be a replay of her younger self getting crushed, and she’d barely begun to crawl out of that hole.
She turned her attention back to the field. The hitter before Alex had made it to base while she daydreamed, though she wasn’t sure how.
“Watch how the pitcher hides his hands until the last moment,” Gage said, elbowing her so he wouldn’t have to put down his beer. “The great ones know how to disguise their release. That’s Taylor pitching now. He’s good, but he’s no match for Alex. Alex is one of those hitters who’s not just gifted, he’s trained up, and the more trained up a hitter is, the longer they can wait. It gives them just that extra fraction of time to read the pitch.”
Gage passed her the beer. “The sports press says he’s going for the Triple Crown this year. He could do it.”
His admiration of Alex was impossible to miss.
She took a big breath, followed by a big swallow of beer. “Sounds like a horse race,” she said as she handed the cup back.
A ballplayer, she thought, gritting her teeth. Great. Just great.
A roar sounded as the crowd leapt to their feet and booed wildly. Alex waved his hand and backed out of the box.
“Did you see that?” Gage shouted. “Taylor nearly drilled Alex. There could be blood yet.”
“There’s the hockey player,” Jackie said, laughing.
But as she watched the replay on the massive screen that towered above center field, she realized just how dangerous it was to stand in front of a ball heading straight at you at ninety-five miles an hour.
People around them began to sit back in their seats, most of them still muttering and shouting at the field.
“This’ll either be a sweet, sweet pitch or we’ll have a brawl,” Gage said.
She watched as Alex tapped his shoe with the bat, then flexed his arms and brought the bat up near his shoulder. It seemed that not only his eyes but his whole body was focused on the pitcher. A hawk watching prey couldn’t have had a steadier stare.
Alex swung on the next pitch, hitting the ball between two players, neither of whom could get it. He ran to the first base.
The crowd cheered, and Gage jumped up, punching a fist into the air.
“That’s the way, Alex.”
Jackie stood too, feeling odd about it, and then felt odder when everyone else sat before she did.
By the time she sat and got comfortable again, the crowd was groaning. She looked to the field. The players were jogging off.
“What happened?”
“Double play,” Gage said. “We’re out.”
Jackie tried to absorb all the rules Gage threw at her in the next inning, but some seemed downright nonsensical. A player could get on base if he hit the ball, but he didn’t have to hit the ball to get on base. She sipped more of Gage’s beer, joking that obviously drinking helped with comprehension.
The second inning went quickly, with no one for either team getting on base, though a couple of the players managed to hit the ball fairly far. But there was always another player directly where the ball came down.
“Why don’t they hit where the other players aren’t?” she asked.
“I’ve often wondered the very same thing,” Gage said.
She guessed he was laughing at her, but he was straight-faced when he asked if she could handle another beer.
“Why not?”
When Alex’s team was up for the third time, their first batter got on right away. But the next batter, the pitcher, swung three times without even touching the ball.
“He’s not very good, is he?” Jackie said.
“Not at hitting. But he has a wicked fastball.”
She’d have to take his word for it. Every pitch looked the same to her—they went rushing toward the batter somewhere around chest high.
The next hitter got on base when he got there faster than the ball did. And then the next hitter got on when one of the other players had trouble getting the ball out of his glove.
The crowd roared.
“Hot damn! Bases are loaded for Alex,” Gage said, thrusting the tray of nachos at Jackie and once again jumping to his feet. He clapped and whistled, joining in with the rest of the crowd.
The catcher ran out to talk to the pitcher, and the crowd settled back in their seats. Gage took back both his nachos and his beer.
Jackie leaned forward, eyes intent on Alex. What did he think about when he stood there, waiting for a ball to hurl past? Was he in a position of power or did that belong to the pitcher?
He missed with his first swing, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. They called out encouragement.
Jackie released a long breath. The pitcher and Alex both took their positions again.
The pitcher released the ball, and Alex stepped toward its path, lowered the bat and swung. The bat connected with a crack, and the ball soared into the air and then into the stadium seats. Gage leapt to his feet, spilling what was left of his nachos.
“That’s it! That’s it! Way to go!” Gage roared. He hugged Jackie, smearing her shirt with crumbs and cheese. “Grand slam! I’ve been coming here for years and I’ve never seen one!”
She wasn’t sure how to respond. The crowd was screaming all around her. Alex was running around the bases and as he reached the one where he’d batted, the men who’d run in before him and the man waiting to bat all high-fived him. The crowd was cheering and calling his name.
“Watch.” Gage beamed. “He’ll come out of the dugout.”
Dugout. Sounded like a canoe. But she watched as Alex stepped up out of the enclosure and tipped his hat to the crowd. They roared. Then he looked over to where she and Gage were standing and smiled.
His smile melted a trail through her that felt like melted butter, yet what followed immediately was the slow sinking feeling that never presaged a good ending.
She needed to get a grip.
She glanced over at Gage; he was transfixed. And he got along with Alex. She should hand the wooing of Alex off to Gage. It’d be a better match. And she wouldn’t care if the board screamed about it.
The next two hitters both popped out—Gage’s words—and just like that, the players changed places on the field again.
Gage leaned across her to signal one of the vendors. The man handed her a warm bag, and she gave him the money Gage pressed into her hand.
“Peanut?” Gage offered. “You’ll have to shell them. Part of the fun.”
“If I eat one more oddity, you’ll have to carry me out of here,” she said. She couldn’t believe he could eat anything else.
Her cellphone vibrated in her pocket and she pulled it out.
“It’s the rescue line.” She took the call, putting her finger in her other ear so she could hear. She looked up to see Alex glance her way. Great. He’s just done something heroic and she was talking on the phone. She slipped her gaze to her lap and told the rescue supervisor she’d be there in half an hour.
“I have to go.”
“You need me?” He said it in a tone that meant he hoped not.
“I don’t think so. You okay catching a cab back to the Center?”
He nodded. As she stood to leave, she saw Alex glance her way again. Color rose in her cheeks. She hoped he couldn’t see it from so far away.