Mace Riggs, 53, has spent 25 years as a minor league baseball scout for the Cincinnati Reds, logging 300+ days on the road most years, eating more gas station hot dogs than home-cooked meals, and actively avoiding any conversation that doesn’t revolve around fastball velocity or slider break. His biggest flaw, one he’s never bothered correcting, is that he’s written off all casual human connection as a waste of time ever since his wife packed their minivan and left him for a high school football coach in 2016. He doesn’t do communal tables, doesn’t swap phone numbers with strangers, doesn’t even make small talk with bartenders.
He’s parked on a cracked vinyl stool at a dive bar 15 minutes outside Dayton, Ohio, on a rain-soaked Tuesday night, his spiral notebook full of scrawled notes about the left-handed pitcher he just watched throw a complete game shutout, when the door slams open and a woman shakes rain off her canvas jacket so hard a few drops splatter the laces of his scuffed work boots. He glares up first, ready to snap, then stops. She’s 48, he guesses, sun streaks in her dark brown hair, a smudge of tire grease on her left wrist from changing her own flat earlier that day, wearing a faded high school baseball hoodie with the same number the pitcher had on his jersey. She apologizes, soft and a little flustered, and sits two stools down, far enough to respect his space, close enough that he can smell lavender hand lotion over the bar’s permanent scent of fried onions and cheap lager.
He goes back to his notes, but he’s aware of her: the way she taps her chipped cherry-red nail against the side of her root beer glass, the way she glances over at his lanyard with the Reds logo peeking out of his flannel shirt three times in ten minutes. When the bartender drops a basket of crinkle-cut fries between them, she slides it an inch closer to him without asking, her knuckle brushing his wrist when she pushes it across the sticky Formica counter. Her skin is warm, a little calloused, she mentions offhand she tends a half-acre vegetable garden behind her rental house when she’s not working medical coding shifts from home. He grunts in response, the most he’s offered a stranger in months, and grabs a fry. It’s salty, crispy, better than he expected.
He knows the rule book backwards and forwards: no fraternizing with players’ immediate family, no sharing scouting notes with anyone outside the organization, no even letting on how you feel about a prospect’s chances until the official draft list drops. That’s the line he’s never crossed in 25 years, even when a dad slipped him a $500 envelope after a game once, even when a grandma baked him a plate of chocolate chip cookies and begged him to give her grandson a shot. But when she leans in a little, her denim-clad knee brushing his under the bar, thunder rumbling so loud the neon Coors sign hums against the cinder block wall, and asks if her boy’s got a real shot, he doesn’t lie. He tells her he’s writing him up as a top three pick for the low-A team out of Huntington, that his fastball hits 94 with consistent movement, that he’s got the kind of level head coaches fight over. He tells her not to repeat it to anyone, and she nods, her hand resting on his forearm for three full seconds, warm and firm, before she pulls back.
They talk for another 45 minutes, no baseball, mostly. She tells him her son works two part-time jobs at an auto shop and a grocery store to pay for his 12-year-old sister’s ballet lessons, that their dad bailed when the kid was 10. He tells her he had a little sister who did ballet too, that she died in a car crash when she was 16, that he still buys ballet slipper keychains from gas stations when he sees them, keeps them in a box under his bed at home. He doesn’t know why he tells her that, he hasn’t told anyone that since his wife left.
Her phone buzzes, a text from her son saying he’s done with post-game drills and waiting by the field. She stands up, slips her jacket back on, and tucks a scrap of notebook paper under his beer coaster before he can say anything. She winks, says if he’s ever back in town scouting, she’s got a front porch with a swing, a cooler of craft beer her brother brews, and a strict no-baseball-talk rule after 8 PM. He nods, can’t find the words to say anything back, and watches her walk out into the rain, the door slamming shut behind her.
The bartender comes back from hauling trash, asks if he wants another beer. He says yes, and pulls the scrap of paper out from under the coaster, sees her name, Lena, scrawled above a 10-digit phone number, a tiny doodle of a baseball in the corner. He runs his thumb over the smudged ink of her phone number, the neon sign’s red glow painting the edge of the paper pink.
