Manny Ruiz, 53, has spent 22 years crisscrossing Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia as a minor league baseball scout for the Dayton Dragons, logging 60,000 miles a year on his beat-up F-150, a dog-eared scouting notebook never further than an arm’s length away. His biggest flaw, one he’s leaned into for a decade after a casual road fling leaked his top prospect notes to a Cincinnati Reds scout, costing him a shot at a major league scouting gig, is that he never mixes work and anything even resembling personal connection. He eats alone, stays in no-frills motels, leaves bars as soon as he finishes his second beer, no exceptions.
He slumps into the scuffed vinyl booth at the back of The Dugout, the only dive bar within 10 miles of the rural southern Ohio high school field where he spent the afternoon clocking a 17-year-old left-handed pitcher who throws a 94 mile per hour fastball with a curve that breaks so sharp it makes batters trip over their own cleats. The bar smells like fried pickles, cheap beer, and old cigarette smoke stuck in the ceiling tiles, the jukebox spitting out 90s Alan Jackson deep cuts, a handful of local farmers and the high school’s coaching staff clustered at the bar yelling about the game. He twists the cap off a frosty mug of Pabst, tucks his notebook under his thigh so no one can peek at the pages scrawled with velocity readings and swing mechanics notes, and lets his shoulders slump for the first time all day.
He notices her 10 minutes later, when she slides into the booth two spots over, wearing the same navy high school baseball hoodie he saw her in in the stands earlier, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid, a half-empty glass of pinot noir in her hand. He’d clocked her in the third inning, when she’d screamed so loud at the umpire for a bad call that the entire section turned to look, a thin split on her bottom lip he’d assumed was from a wayward foul ball. She keeps glancing over at him, at the edge of the notebook peeking out from under his thigh, and he tenses up, already reaching for his wallet to leave, when she stands and walks over, sliding into the booth across from him before he can say he’s not taking questions.
Her knee brushes his under the table when she shifts to get comfortable, the contact light but electric, and he smells vanilla and cut grass on her, the faint tang of red wine on her breath when she leans in. “You’re the Dragons scout, right?” she says, not bothering with small talk, and he opens his mouth to lie, to say he’s just passing through, but she laughs, low and warm, and taps the edge of the notebook sticking out from under his leg. “I saw you with the radar gun all game. I’m Lena. My stepson is the lefty you were staring at for four hours.” Manny’s jaw tightens. League rules strictly forbid scouts from talking to a prospect’s family before the draft, and his own personal rule forbids talking to anyone related to his work full stop. He’s halfway to standing when she tilts her chin up, and he sees the faint purple bruise blooming along her jawline next to the split lip, not a foul ball like he’d thought. “My husband is his dad,” she says, her voice quieter now, picking at the label on her wine glass. “He shoved me into the kitchen counter this morning because I told him I’m filing for divorce once the season ends. I don’t want anything for the kid, he’s good enough to get signed on his own. I just wanted to talk to someone who isn’t in this town’s gossip mill for five minutes.”
The conflict hits him square in the chest, warring between the instinct to run, to stick to his rules, to not get tangled up in whatever mess this is, and the sharp, unignorable pull of her, the way she’s holding his eye contact like she can see the 10 years of loneliness he’s buried under scouting reports and highway fast food. He sits back, signals the bartender for another beer for him and a refill for her, and when she reaches across the table to tap the notebook again, her hand brushes his wrist, the callus on her index finger rough against his skin, from years of pitching batting practice to her stepson in the backyard, she tells him. The bar empties out slow, the coaches and farmers filing out to their pickup trucks, the jukebox switching to a slow Conway Twitty track, the bartender wiping down the counter and pretending not to watch them.
He tells her about the leak 10 years prior, about the promotion he lost, about the rules he built to keep himself from getting burned again, and she nods, like she gets it, like she’s built her own set of rules to survive her marriage. When the bartender turns off the neon open sign, she leans in even closer, their faces only a foot apart, and asks if he was planning to drive back to Dayton tonight. He says he was, that he had a motel room booked 20 miles up the road, but he can cancel it. He tucks his notebook in the locked glove compartment of his truck before he opens the passenger door for her, making sure no one can get to it, no chance of anything going wrong this time. She takes his hand when he helps her up the step into the cab, her palm warm and calloused in his, the cool May air smelling like clover and diesel from the corn farm down the road. He closes the passenger door behind her, walks around to the driver’s side, and pulls out of the parking lot without glancing in the rearview mirror.
