“What happened to your face, Ramon?” Alex rolled the r in the first-baseman’s name with a saucy flourish.
“You like?” Ramon Escalante smirked broadly, showing them a mouthful of pearly whites made even brighter in contrast to the dark hair of his new mustache.
“If I was George Michael in 1997, I would be incredibly jealous.”
Another man, this one younger and quieter, took the empty seat between Tucker and Ramon. The new arrival smiled but said nothing. It was hard to get a word in edgewise when Alex and Ramon were in the same room. The ego tended to eat up all the oxygen.
“You are jealous because I look like a man and you cannot grow a simple beard.” Ramon’s Spanish accent, originally from the Dominican Republic, tended to get thicker in direct proportion to how much Alex was irritating him at any given moment.
“Have you seen my face?” Alex ran a palm over his permanent dark stubble. “I have to shave twice a day or I look like Teen Wolf. I can grow a better ’stache in my sleep.”
Tucker popped a piece of honeydew in his mouth and nodded to the younger man who’d been the last to arrive. Miles Cartwright, the new kid pitcher who was garnering a lot of early buzz, didn’t say anything but looked at Tucker wide-eyed.
“You think if we leave them alone too long they’ll whip their dicks out and compare measurements?”
Miles choked on the bite of eggs he’d just stuffed in his mouth.
“There is not a ruler big enough,” Ramon said with an indignant snort.
Alex snickered. “Your English is getting rusty. You keep mixing up big and small.”
“Boys, boys, boys.” Tucker pushed his plate away, unable to stomach the too-sweet fruit. “All this homoeroticism is delightful, but we have a shuttle to catch.”
It was a perfect day for baseball.
The sun was bright, the clouds hanging like cotton balls tossed carelessly into an otherwise flawless blue sky. Tucker lived for the half hour leading up to the first day of spring training. All the nervousness of the morning had faded away, replaced with a bubbling excitement reminiscent of his early years.
Alex and Ramon were trading barbs, but the prattling was drowned out by the whir of the shuttle bus’s wheels against the pavement and the general clubhouse chatter of fifteen other men quietly discussing what they’d done over the off-season or what they thought of a late announcement about a new second-baseman slugger who’d be joining the team.
Tucker was toying with a Felons stress ball in the shape of a baseball, absentmindedly squeezing and releasing the ball, occasionally tossing it up and bouncing it off his forearm, before catching it again on the pop-up. He could do the same trick with a real baseball, but the snap back tended to leave bruises if he wasn’t careful. This year he’d have to be extra careful with his arm.
They rolled into a parking lot filled with a few assorted sports cars, kicking up dust and coating the pristine exteriors of the expensive automobiles. The bus came to a shuddering stop, and the door swung open, wafting the overly warm interior with a fresh breeze.
“E’rybody off,” bellowed the driver, as if he were addressing a school bus full of hormonal adolescents instead of some of the highest paid athletes in the game. The portly man sat back, chewing on something—either gum or tobacco—and eyed them all like they might be up to no good.
Outside, they collected their duffel bags and made their way across the lush emerald-green grass towards the freshly laid infield, its white lines more blinding than Ramon’s capped teeth. It was too early in the year for the bugs to be bad, but a few lazy black flies darted by, giving the air the illusion of being a living, moving thing.
Off from the field proper was a mowed track and an extended makeshift bullpen. That was where Tucker, Miles and the rest of the huge pitching roster would loosen up their winter-rusted arms and find out who had what it took to make one of the five starting spots, who would be relegated to a relief position, and who would be fretting over the lingering threat of a dropped contract or a trade.
Tucker rolled his head in a loose circle, rotating his shoulders to shake off the knot between his scapulae that had a tendency to form whenever the word trade came up. He’d had a lucky career so far, drafted to the Felons farm league fresh out of college. They’d been the only club he’d played for in fourteen years. It wasn’t unheard of for someone with his stats to stay with the same team for most of their major league run, but he wasn’t the same player he’d been at twenty-two.
Sometimes, the call came through and there wasn’t a damn thing a player could do to change their fate. You could get traded, you could get dropped or sometimes you were just forgotten.