Moonshot (3 page)

“This is bullshit.” Chase leaned back in his seat and tossed a plastic pen, watching it flip through the air before catching it.

“Can you get your shoe off my desk?” Floyd Hardin, his agent, moved around his heavy desk and swatted at Chase’s tennis shoe. “I need you to focus.”

“I’m focused. Dodgers don’t want me anymore. So what? I’m sick of you Californians and your damn sunshine. You told me this was temporary, anyway. You know what I really want.” He sat up, rolling the pen through his fingers before sticking it in the edge of his mouth.

“Yeah, the Yankees. And you haven’t let me forget it. But they didn’t need you then, and
now
…” Floyd raised his hands, the action showcasing the three World Series rings he’d probably picked up at Sotheby’s. “You’re not giving me a lot to work with, Chase.”

“I’ve got the best stats in the league. What the hell else do you need?”

“You know their club as well as anyone, Chase. They like players who are
clean
. No drugs, no skeletons, no drama.” He leaned over and tapped the front page of the paper, Chase’s photo front and center. “Not this.”

“They need me,” he said stubbornly. “And I’m not signing with anyone else.”

“It’s not your decision. You’re getting traded. It’s up to the Dodgers where you go next. I’ve tried to talk to the Yankees, but they aren’t biting. According to their camp, you’re out.”

“They said that?” Chase scowled, stopping his chew on the end of the pen and pulling it from his mouth.

“Yes. But my guy at CAA says Milwaukee might be making a big play. Have a blockbuster deal they’re fronting.”

“I won’t do it. Milwaukee?
Fuck
that.”

“Once again…” the man said slowly. “You. Don’t. Have. A. Choice.”

“I’ll refuse to play. Error my ass off.”

“And you’ll get black-balled and never play for a major league team again. Including the Yankees.” He crossed his arms over his chest and watched Chase.

Chase tilted his head back and groaned, his eyes searching the ceiling. “All this over a shitty lay,” he said quietly.

“Learned your lesson?”

“With women?” he laughed, a hard and bitter sound. “Sure.”

“You had a million Los Angeles women to choose from. I don’t expect you to be celibate. Just
think
next time you feel like unzipping your pants.”

He stood, lifting a baseball cap and pulling it on. “You think, too, Floyd. Get me in pinstripes, or I’ll find an agent who can.”

7

Packed over a six-month season, there were 162 baseball games every year. That was 162 times players warmed up, 162 times they walked onto a field and risked their career with swings, steals, and plays. Eighty-one times we stepped off a bus and onto an opponent’s dirt. Eighty-odd times we dealt with opponents’ fans, their jeers, their shitty locker rooms, the cloud of contempt that surrounded a visiting team. Especially when that visiting team was the greatest ball club in the world, the team every player wanted to be on, every fan wanted to secretly root for. It could be hell being a Yankee. But then we had home games. Times in the magic, an entire city’s energy swirled in the air—the love strong, powerful, and coursing through our boys’ lungs, fifty thousand souls storming to their feet for no purpose other than to celebrate our awesomeness.

It was one hell of a schedule. Exhausting by the time it ended. And that tally didn’t include the playoffs—an extra twenty games to cap off the season. The most emotional games all year, each win celebrated in full fashion, assuming we got there. Assuming we pulled a constant stream of Wins.

But then again … we were the Yankees. Did I need to dignify any other possibility?

I sat in a corner of the equipment manager’s office and stared at a page in my biology textbook, the chapter on Population Ecology. Boring stuff. I doodled a flower in the right margin of the page, then stopped. Refocused and read the paragraph again. This office was the worst place to study: absolutely empty and quiet, especially this time of day. An hour before the team arrived, my freak of a father the only player in these halls. Everything was already set for the game, the balls mudded this morning, uniforms delivered from the cleaners and hanging in lockers, our food deliveries still three hours out. It was a tomb, which was why Dad loved to stick me in there. Good for biology, bad for my entertainment. I wrote down a few notes, reading over the sentences a few times to make them stick, then turned back to the book.

I wasn’t a brilliant girl. Ask me a question about baseball and I’d ace your test. Put a math equation before me and my eyes glazed over. I used to have a tutor. Dad was focused on A’s, thought that was crucial to my success. Three tutors quit before he gave up. Now, I taught myself, scanning in assignments to a home-school company in Jersey. They graded my work and required me to be present for exams four times a year. They also decided, at the end of the year, if I’d learned enough to graduate. It was May. One more month, four finals, and I’d be done with high school forever. I’d ditch my book-bag at home, say sayonara to books, and fully commit my time to the pinstripes.

I already had a contract penned for after graduation. Equipment Staff Assistant Manager. Not the most glamorous title in the world, but it’d keep me on the team bus. I wasn’t really sure what the next step would be. Denise in Marketing had been trying to get me to intern up top with promises of a more permanent job. But I couldn’t imagine breathing in the air of an office and not the field. I couldn’t imagine looking out a window and down onto the action.

My graduation both loomed and beckoned. I was probably the only teenager in the city who didn’t want to grow up.

8

If fans leaving a game looked closely on the subway, they might see Frank Cinns. Our back-up third baseman pulled on a maintenance shirt and cap and turned invisible. He lived in Manhattan, as did Madden and Tripp, but their deep wallets used drivers to get home. Brooklyn held another five or six, a few preferred the Hamptons, but Dad and I lived in Alpine. Dad liked to drive, and used the twenty-mile trek to clear his mind after a game. I typically fell asleep. Something about the hours of intensity followed by the quiet hum of road … it was my lullaby. That and the nineties country music Dad lived by. A lethal combination to wakefulness, especially at one in the morning. Tonight was even later, an extra-long press junket holding up everything, a litany of questions drilled at every member of the Yankee organization, all regarding the same topic: Chase Stern.

They asked Tripp how he’d react if Chase slept with his wife. Tripp laughed. Fernandez, when asked the same question, broke his pencil in half. Dad didn’t get that question. Even reporters occasionally have tact.

They did ask Dad if he thought Chase would be a good fit for the team. I had straightened in my seat, my eyes on my father, but true to form, he gave little more than a grunt.

Half awake, I stood in bare feet before my bathroom sink, and washed my face. Leaning forward, I examined a zit that hadn’t quite decided to live or die. Once moisturized, I clicked off the light. When we traveled, I typically fell asleep to the TV, lulled to bed by an ESPN reporter. At home, it was nice to have the quiet. I stood on my bed and reached high, turning the window crank, the cool breeze immediate, the sound of the waves soothing. Our home perched on the short edge of a cliff, the crash of water against the rocks constant. Squatting on the bed, I pulled back the top blanket and crawled in, reaching out and flipping the switch beside my headboard, my room going dark.

Twenty-two miles away, in an executive conference room of Yankee Stadium, a printer hummed, spitting out the pages of Chase Stern’s new contract.

9

It wasn’t lost on me that I was sitting in the wrong place. On the other side of the pool, a cluster of teenagers, their music floating over. I had caught bits of their conversations as I’d passed them—once by the food, once in the house. Bits of a foreign language that discussed Adele and parties, Spring Break, and Twitter. I knew most of them, we’d been clubhouse brats together, back when we were eleven or twelve. Then they’d moved on to private schools and new friends, weekends spent somewhere other than the club, my spotting of them less and less, their game seats up in boxes and not in the dugout. It had been a clear parting of ways and now, I was a million miles away. Sitting next to their fathers, chiming in on conversations that would cause them to roll their eyes and itch for an escape.

They were all glued to their phones, clustered together in the cabana. I watched them, half of their heads down, their conversations seamless, despite the constant movement of their thumbs. Maybe having friends was the secret ingredient needed for a phone addiction. I watched Katie Ellis giggle and tried to recall where I’d left mine. Probably the truck. My last sighting of it had been days earlier, no real need for it when I was with Dad.

In the past, he’d tried to push me to join them, had seemed to think that social interaction with them was crucial to my happiness. But over the last few years, he’d thankfully given up. I didn’t want their friendship, certainly didn’t need it. Not when we had absolutely nothing in common.

“Need a drink?” Thomas Grant stopped by my chair, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder.

I looked up with a smile. “Sunkist, please.” I liked the man, the patriarch of the Grant dynasty, which had owned the Yankees for the better part of the century. A man who had taken me under his wing at a young age, a beam crossing his face whenever we met, my future in the Yankee organization all but guaranteed with his fondness for me. And the occasional hints that I should marry his son and live happily ever after as a member of the Grant family? I could handle those.

“You got it.” He squeezed my shoulder and stepped toward the house.

The conversation around me was about a Cleveland Indians trade, and I pushed out my feet, settling deeper into the chair, the warmth of the fire heating my shins, the weather still cool on the Hampton coast. We were at the Grants’ massive Hamptons estate, an impromptu barbeque grown bigger by the inclusion of wives and kids, the four teenagers on the other side of the pool just a small part of the party. Tobey Grant, a sophomore at Harvard and the future king of the Yankee empire, caught my eye, his cup lifting to his face, his gaze holding mine as he took a long sip, then lowered the drink. I looked away, back to the fire. We’d had a thing, once. Two years ago, during spring training. A few stolen kisses in a Hilton hallway, his hand sneaking up my shirt. He’d been my first kiss. It’d been okay, the second time better. I thought it had made us
something
; he hadn’t. It was really just that simple.

I watched red-hot embers flake off wood and float into the sky. There were times when I loved the idea of dating Tobey, when I warmed to the Grants’ not-so-subtle push of us together. There were times he loved the idea of dating me. Those times just never managed to line up, our occasional make-out sessions never enough to convince each other that a dedicated relationship was worth pursuing.

One wife trickled over to our group, her curvy body draping over Cook’s lap. She was a new one; his last had had an issue with prostitutes, and his use of them. This one had been around for two years. I had a side bet with Dad that she wouldn’t make it to five.