Excerpt from DIAMOND RING
Excerpt from Diamond Ring
By KD Casey
Four innings into their first start together, Alex’s confidence—and nerves—are fraying. He adjusts his chest protector again, pulling it out from where it’s sweat-stuck to his jersey, then puts down a series of signs to avoid giving the pitch type away to the runner standing on second. His signs culminate in a finger pointed toward the dirt to indicate a fastball. Sixty feet away on the mound, Jake shakes his head. Again. It’s been like this all game. Jake, accommodating, media-trained, likable Jake, shaking him off.
Fine, if Jake wants to throw a changeup, Alex’ll call for one. See if he cares. Alex puts down another sign sequence, waving three fingers, tapping them against his thighs to show pitch location. Except Jake shakes his head again.
Alex can’t call time, can’t jog out to the mound, not when he’s already gone out there twice. Can’t annoy an already annoyed umpire because an annoyed umpire isn’t a strike-calling umpire, and Alex needs him to call strikes. This might be Jake’s first start, but the team will allow him his mistakes. Rookies just have to figure stuff out. Ignoring, of course, that Alex is a rookie too.
Alex goes through the sequence again, sandwiching the real sign, a flash of one irritated finger, between a few decoys. Even the batter must hear his frustrated grunt because he glances back.
Yeah, fuck you too. Alex readies his mitt to catch a fastball.
Or would.
If Jake threw one. Instead, the pitch comes in a changeup, slower than a fastball and with a late dive to it that skids by Alex, rolling toward the backstop. Alex scrambles, managing to get his mitt around it, but before not the runner on second advances to third.
To make things worse, the official scorer deems it a passed ball not a wild pitch. So officially Alex’s fault. Fantastic.
He calls time, giving the umpire a Pitchers, you know? look that probably just looks pissed off. Which he is.
When he gets out to the mound, Jake’s already got his glove by his mouth. An apology at the ready. “Sorry.” He sounds like a teenager being caught after curfew, probably something neither of them ever did—Jake because he wouldn’t and Alex because he didn’t have one.
Alex was in the minors for four years. He’s handled pitchers who were hardheaded and those who were pushovers. Never one who was both at the same time. “You gonna throw what I call?”
He expects withering agreement. Stepped-up defiance. Certainly not a shrug of Jake’s beam-wide shoulders. “If you call for the right thing.”
“Which is what?”
“A curveball.”
“This guy eats curveballs for breakfast.”
“Yeah, well”—Jake tilts his head unaccommodatingly—“he hasn’t seen my curveball yet.”
Alex almost wants to laugh. Because the persona Jake shows the rest of the world is clearly a put-on. If Alex wasn’t so frustrated by it, it might make him like Jake more. As it is they have a game to play.
“Next pitch curveball.” Alex waits two beats to see if Jake will argue, before he jogs toward home plate and whatever the game has in store for them.
*
“I got this round.” Jake has his wallet out before Alex can offer to pay. Not like Jake doesn’t owe him for the grief of the first few innings. It was, if not smooth sailing after that, at least less choppy waters, all culminating in a win. Alex might have finished the game wrung out and sweat-soaked, but he’s been floating ever since, through their postgame media scrum, through scrubbing ballpark dirt off in the shower, through accepting Jake’s invitation to goout, like Alex could be contained by the four walls of his hotel room.
Jake picked a place that’s very Jake. Bad music blasts over the sound system. The beer tastes like a frat house. Alex can’t bring himself to complain, especially not when the bartender gives Jake the eye as if checking him out—which Jake preens at—then asks to see his ID.
He goes a terrific shade of red. If Alex wasn’t already having one of the best nights of his life, that might put it over the top.
They get beers and drink. Alex tries to radiate the kind of straight-guy energy that also dissuades women from thinking he’s interested in them. Standing in Jake’s literal shadow helps. For a while, the night is a swirl of people who recognize Jake and who make vague ’sup dude noises at Alex.
A few things get shoved Jake’s way to sign. He pulls a Sharpie from his pants pocket—because of course he carries one—and scrawls his signature on a cocktail napkin. He recaps the Sharpie, then taps it insistently against Alex’s knuckles where they’re curled around his glass.
“What?” Alex says.
“You’re not going to sign too?” Jake raps him again like he’s making a point.
Alex does, a scrawling, indecipherable Angelides next to the practiced, curving loops of Jake’s signature.
“You think that’ll be worth something someday?” Jake asks when the autograph hunters leave, when he procures two barstools seated under a TV that’s playing highlights of their game.
“It’s got your name on it. So probably.”
Jake makes a disapproving noise. “You’re here too, you know.”
The TV switches from their game to their postgame interviews. A reporter wearing a fusty jacket with actual elbow patches aims a question at Jake. How’d it feel to get your first big-league win? A few seconds later the feed cuts to Alex. How’d it feel to help Fischer notch his first big-league win?
Jake looks vaguely apologetic at that.
Alex nudges him with his shoulder. “It’s how things are—pitchers get all the glory, catchers do all the work.”
“We should do something to remember this.”
“That’s not what we’re doing?”
“Something other than drinking skunked beer and watching ourselves on TV.”
Alex studies his beer. “I thought that’s how this was supposed to taste.”
“I mean it.”
“You wanna go get tattoos?” He suggests it mostly to watch Jake go pale.
“I’m Jewish. It’d be a thing with my parents if I did,” Jake says. “But we could get something to commemorate this.”
“Like matching friendship bracelets?”
His smile broadens as if Alex was being serious. “Sure.”
“What if we end up not liking each other?” Alex asks.
Jake’s forehead wrinkles, like he’s confused at the idea of someone finding him unlikeable. “You really think that’ll happen?”
“I don’t even like you right now.”
For about two seconds, Jake looks crestfallen. Then he laughs and knocks his glass against Alex’s, foam sloshing over the rim. “I kinda want a necklace,” Jake says. “You know, something with some flash.”
“I don’t wear a lot of jewelry.”
“Except for the nipple ring.” Said teasingly, like Jake’s been thinking about it.
“I used to wear more when I was in a band.”
Jake’s eyes go platter-wide. He paws at Alex’s arm, demanding to see Alex’s old, embarrassing pictures on his phone. “You look”—he glances between Alex and picture-Alex, whose hair was up in spikes and dyed an even darker black—“kinda like Wednesday Addams.”
Alex chokes on his beer.
“Maybe it’s the eyeliner.”
Which Alex was undoubtedly wearing, and still sometimes wore, enough that it ends up at the top of his cheekbones like eye-black.
“Or,” Jake continues, “possibly the jewelry.” He taps on the photo in which Alex is wearing at least five earrings in each ear, a series of hoops and spikes lining his cartilage.
Alex touches his ear, reflexively. “Yeah, those suck with my gear on. Still wish I hadn’t taken `em out.”
Jake tilts his head in question.
“I went to a piercer about reopening them. They couldn’t. Too much scar tissue.” He touches his ear again. Jake tracks the movement. Alex has only drunk half a beer, but he’s still high off the flush of a good win. “Here, feel.”
Jake hesitates. And hell, maybe Alex crossed some invisible line. That the casual kinds of touches that are okay in a clubhouse or in the company of their teammates aren’t okay sitting at a moderately terrible Oakland bar.
Then Jake scoots his barstool fractionally closer. Extends his arm, the pads of his three-million-dollar-signing-bonus fingers. Alex didn’t think about what this would be like—the brush of Jake’s knuckles against his cheek. The rough catch of his calluses. The hitch in his breathing, like he’s doing something more intimate than feel Alex’s earlobe, which has almost no active nerve endings in it, except for all the ones firing now, sending a frisson across his scalp.
A second later, Jake withdraws his hand. “You must’ve had a lot of earrings.”
“It was a phase.”
“I guess you gotta rebel somehow.”
“That wasn’t really me rebelling.” Because Sofia drove him to shows in her ancient, rattling Volvo, and didn’t mind when he came out reeking of cheap beer and cigarettes. “Baseball kind of was.”
Jake’s eyebrows go up. He takes a drink of beer, foam decorating his lip that he licks off.
Which shouldn’t do it for Alex at all, but somehow does. He sips his own beer and gears up for this conversation. “My aunt and her girlfriend are kind of nontraditional.” He braces for Jake’s reaction. Guys can be weird about any number of things, though Jake doesn’t seem like he would be. Still, Alex waits to see if he’ll need to overturn a beer on his head or tell him to fuck off. The team probably doesn’t want Alex to deck their star pitcher, but hey, sometimes guys slip and Alex’s fist ends up in their faces.
Jake just nods and makes a vague keep talking motion.
“Baseball was kind of my way of rebelling,” Alex says. “It’d have been easier if I was a tattoo artist.”
“My parents probably would have been happier if I was a lawyer. I mean, not now. But when I first got drafted.” Jake fiddles with the box of cocktail napkins, turning it so it’s squared up with the rubber mat sitting on the bar. A shrug like there’s more to it. “Guess everything worked out how it was supposed to.” He grins, and Alex can’t help but smile back, touching his glass to Jake’s when he proposes a toast to a never-ending number of games in stadiums with upper decks.
One that’s only slightly marred when Jake says, “You know what? We should do shots.”
If Alex ends up catching their next game hungover, well, that’s a problem for tomorrow.
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KD Casey is a writer and baseball enthusiast living in the Washington, DC, area. Her second novel, FIRE SEASON, was named a New York Times Best Romance Book of 2022. She has also written for a variety of baseball analysis websites including FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus. She believes in high socks, unbuttoned jerseys, and the designated hugger, not the designated hitter. More info about Diamond Ring can be found here: https://www.kdcaseywrites.com/diamond-ring
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