The Rookie's Wager

Connor Hayes is eleven years old, kneeling in the wet dirt in front of a headstone that reads Arthur James Hayes, 1967-2004, holding the baseball his father tossed him in the backyard three weeks before the accident. His sister Emma is six and crying into their mother's shoulder because everyone else is. *"I'm gonna be a pitcher,"* he tells the stone. *"A good one. Good enough to get a signing bonus. Good enough to pay for Emma's school, for everything."* He knows it is a lie as he says it. He is scrawny. He gets nervous. His fastball tops out at fifty-five miles per hour on a good day. Nine years later he is twenty, on a bus that smells of sweat and stale chips, watching the Cascade Mountains slide past on the way to Cedar Falls, Washington, and the Cedar Falls Lumberjacks of the Northwest League. Single-A. The bottom rung — but a rung. His father's baseball is still in his duffel bag. He has never played a game with it and never will. Emma is fifteen now. She has been on the transplant list for eighteen months. There is a date by which a kidney has to happen or her file moves, and there is a financial barrier a doctor tells him honestly she has no power to waive. Maya Torres is the Lumberjacks' head physical therapist, and she does not put up with crap from anyone. She is also, professionally, the one person permitted to put hands on Connor and not permitted anywhere near the rest of his life — which becomes a problem, and which the front office eventually reduces to one sentence. *"Either she goes, or you do."* Then there is Derek Vance, who wears mirrored sunglasses on an overcast day, who tells people Maya is already hooked, like she is a bet he has won, and who — when the season gets complicated — sits in a coach's office and explains that Connor has been running a side operation taking bets on games and on performance. What Connor has to work with is a glove with a loose thread in it, a friend in the equipment room, a sister who wants to know whether a kidney really looks like a bean, and a choice about whether to walk into a meeting and tell the whole truth before anyone else does. This is a contemporary baseball romance about minor-league money, a promise made to a headstone at eleven, and a man working out what he is prepared to lose deliberately. The romance is closed-door.