Maceo Ruiz, 53, minor league baseball scout with 28 years on the circuit, slumps into a scuffed vinyl booth at The Dugout just after 9pm, rain streaking the bar’s fogged windows. The left shoulder he wrenched playing college ball throbs after 12 hours hunched behind a high school home plate, and his tattered spiral notebook — the one he refuses to replace with the scouting app the league pushed last year, its pages crammed with scribbled pitch counts, player quirks, half-remembered diner recommendations he’s collected over the decades — sticks out of the pocket of his faded Louisville Slugger windbreaker. He orders a draft Pabst, rests his forehead on his fist for a beat, and tries to shake the voice in his head that’s been nagging him to retire for six months.
The bartender sets a side of dill pickles down next to his beer before he can ask. He looks up, and there’s Elara, the woman he’d exchanged three-sentence pleasantries with when he stopped in for a burger three nights prior. Her dark hair has a streak of silver running through the left side, tied back in a messy braid, and her mint green nail polish is chipped at the edges from, she’d mentioned offhand then, grading 8th grade science labs all week. When she sets the plate down, her knuckle brushes the back of his hand, warm and calloused at the same time, and the scent of lavender hand soap and fried onion rings wraps around him for half a second before she steps back.
He knows who she is, before she says it. She’s Javi Mendez’s stepmom. Javi is the 17 year old left-handed pitcher he’s in town to scout, the kid with the 94 mph fastball and a curveball that drops off a table, the one every team in the lower minors is fighting to sign. The second the thought crosses his mind, his jaw tightens. Fraternizing with a prospect’s family is a fireable offense, the kind that gets your name blacklisted from every scouting department in the country, the kind that would throw the 28 years he spent driving 40,000 miles a year, sleeping in motel beds with lumpy mattresses, eating gas station burritos for dinner, right down the drain.
He should leave. He knows he should leave. But she sits down across from him when the last of the post-game high school crowd filters out, her knee brushing his under the Formica table before she tucks her legs back, like she didn’t even notice. She laughs at his story about the 2019 prospect who showed up to a tryout hungover, threw a 95 mph fastball straight into the minor league mascot’s groin, and still got signed because his control was that good. She tells him about the kid in her science class who built a working rocket out of soda bottles and a lawnmower engine, who almost blew out the school’s parking lot fence last month. Their eyes lock for two beats too long every time she pauses to take a sip of her iced tea, and he finds himself leaning forward across the table without meaning to, like he’s scared he’ll miss a single word she says.
He reaches for his beer at the same time she reaches for her glass, and their hands knock together. He doesn’t pull away first. He holds her hand for half a second, his thumb brushing the faint scar on her wrist she’d gotten, she’d mentioned earlier, when she was a teen learning to ride a dirt bike with her older brother. Her skin is softer than he expected. The jukebox in the corner spits out a slow Stevie Ray Vaughan track, and the rain taps harder against the windows, muffling the sound of pickup truck traffic on the main road outside.
The conflict he’s been fighting all night snaps. He doesn’t care about the league rules, doesn’t care about the risk of someone seeing them and spreading rumors, doesn’t care about the voice in his head that’s been telling him he’s too old for this kind of thing since his ex-wife left seven years prior, saying he cared more about 17 year old pitchers than he ever cared about her. He tells her Javi’s grade is already locked in, that he didn’t inflate a single number, that every scout in the stands today saw the same thing he did: that kid is going to the majors someday, no favors needed. He tells her he’s driving back to Tampa tomorrow to file his report, that Javi’s signing offer will be on her kitchen counter by the end of the week.
She leans in, her elbow on the table, her face six inches from his, and he can smell the peppermint gum she’s chewing. “I didn’t sit down because I wanted something for Javi,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear. “I sat down because you’re the first person I’ve talked to in three years who didn’t immediately ask me what Javi’s pitch count was last weekend.”
He brushes the stray strand of hair that fell in front of her face behind her ear, his thumb brushing her cheek. He asks her if she wants to fly out to Tampa with Javi next month for his first spring training, if he signs. She smiles, the corner of her mouth tugging up higher on one side, and laces her fingers through his across the table, no hesitation.
A drop of rain ran down the window next to their booth, blurring the neon “OPEN” sign into a soft, glowing pink streak.
