Page 1 of Breakout Year

Eitan

Breaking: Last-minute trade launches Crooks third baseman from Midwest to center stage…

Eitan vowed to spend no more than five minutes with his ear against this door.

Wait here and don’t do anything rash. What Isabel, the Cosmopolitans media relations handler assigned to handle him, had said before she left.

Rash probably included listening in on the conversation murmuring in the next room. But in fairness, the people on the other side of the door—reporters assembled for a New York Cosmos press conference—were all talking about him.

The door was cold. The hallway smelled like ballpark: fresh grass and old sweat. The ceiling tiles hung low. A taller ballplayer might have to duck, but Eitan was all of five-ten. Okay, five-nine. In cleats.

He opened the timer app on his phone. The countdown had almost expired its three hundred seconds—hardly any time at all. Was there a certain limit that turned overhearing into eavesdropping? I get five minutes…unless I hear something good.

His timer dinged. Fine. He would behave. He peeled his ear off the door. Isabel had been gone…a while. What did she expect him to do?

Be patient, probably.

He was twenty-seven years old. He was new to the Cosmos organization. Isabel had seemed nice, if harried, though everyone in this city seemed harried. It had been a long day, even if it was only mid-afternoon. So he could be patient. Probably.

He tried not to bounce on his heels and almost succeeded. He counted the ceiling tiles, an old hard-to-shake habit. He adjusted and readjusted the Cosmos jersey he was wearing over his hastily ironed dress shirt.

Rivkin . The word—his last name—popped through the slim barrier of the door. Followed by trade . Followed by controversy. Well, now he had to know what they were talking about.

He pushed the rim of his ear against the door. Press hard enough and you could feel the pulse in your head—his heart beat steady but rabbit fast.

Eavesdropping was probably rude, but so was his team—his old team—trading him with one minute to go on trade deadline day.

He’d already put his phone in airplane mode.

That had been step one in getting through this.

He’d texted his parents, his former teammates on the Cleveland Crooks, and his agent, Gabe—in that order—then silenced all his other calls.

Now his phone sat brick-heavy in the pocket of his bright blue suit pants that clashed with the dark navy of his new jersey, because those pants had been bought specifically to match his Crooks gear.

Of course you wore the wrong outfit. A thought he couldn’t ignore, unlike the notifications he’d managed to tune out since the news hit.

Common sense would say not to check them right before he met with the press.

He took out his phone, switched out of airplane mode, waited for it to acquire signal. Voicemails, texts, WhatsApp, TikTok…

Connor, his best friend on the Crooks, had posted a goodbye on Insta with photos of their time in Cleveland together, arms draped around each other under the stadium lights. The rest of it, though—fuck, reading those notifications would have been a mistake any time but was especially one right now.

He was frowning over them when Isabel reappeared.

“What’re you doing?” she asked by way of greeting.

She was almost as tall as he was, in a blazer bearing not so much as a wrinkle, with black hair that she’d marshaled into a short ponytail.

In the five hours he’d known her, she’d tried to handle him with that same kind of exactness.

Given what had happened with Cleveland, he didn’t really blame her.

He held up his phone, which buzzed. And buzzed. And buzzed. “Being inundated.”

“Set your phone back in airplane mode.” And she waited until he actually did it before asking, “Are you ready?”

She’d said the same thing in the town car on the drive in from JFK that morning, and before and after each of his various meetings with Cosmos personnel, most of which were fairly brief get to know the new team kind of things that distracted him from having been unceremoniously lobbed off his old one.

Not lobbed. Traded . Though standing in the narrow corridor about to face the press, he wasn’t exactly sure there was a difference.

“I think I’m good to go?” he said. It came out as a question.

She frowned—that PR-person frown he’s come to know and…if not appreciate, at least understand. “If they ask you something that you don’t want to answer—and rest assured, they will—just say how happy you are to be in New York.”

“I am happy to be in New York.” Even if he’d already calculated the number of days remaining before he could leave.

Another frown.

“Really.” He put on his best smile. He’d had his teeth whitened earlier in the season, the dentist zapping away tea stains in stratigraphic layers. He would either look good on camera or like he was trying too hard. “I am happy to be here. I am happy to be talking with the New York sports media.”

Isabel snorted. “No one is happy to be talking with the New York sports media.”

He laughed, then ground his finger into the dimple poking its way into his cheek. “See, happy.”

Isabel almost cracked a smile. “Sure. Just not so happy that Cleveland gets in their feelings about it.”

And he was spared from saying something like If Cleveland didn’t want me to offend them, maybe they shouldn’t have traded me when she pushed the door open and propelled him through it.

Inside, the Cosmos press room held six or seven rows of chairs, a dozen chairs to a row, space in the back where even more reporters were idling, tapping things on their phones or scribbling in notebooks.

Eitan tried to count them from where Isabel seated him at a table in the front, mic aimed at him, patterned Cosmos backdrop shifting in the inadequate air conditioning.

He did the math, then did the math again, and came up with a lot of reporters .

A fuck ton. Certainly more than he’d ever encountered in Cleveland, all of whom were looking at him like they expected him to say he was thrilled— thrilled —to be here.

It wouldn’t even be a lie. He was thrilled. Mostly.

He shifted in his chair, tapped his foot.

The microphone was buzzing, a low hum like a muted TV.

He tried to tune it out. Somehow, it got louder.

He had the next thirty minutes to introduce himself to the media.

The first, and only, rule of baseball news conferences was to be boring enough to put the entire press corps to sleep.

Isabel posted up next to him, slightly off to the side, just enough to be out of the camera’s view.

Various team personnel introduced him: the owner, an elderly guy who’d made his money doing unspeakable things to the stock market but had decided to pour it into rebuilding the Queens baseball team, so all was forgiven.

The team’s general manager, one of the crop of new, next-generation baseball executives, whose teeth rivaled Eitan’s in their sheen.

Then it was Eitan’s turn to speak.

“You’re up,” Isabel said.

A mental skills coach once told Eitan that pressing his tongue against his teeth was a symptom of either nerves or excitement. He pushed it against his incisors and tried for an approximation of a smile.

“So, New York, huh?” A water bottle sat in front of him.

He broke the seal. Its plastic click-click-click echoed through the room.

The bottle contained exactly two sips of water—or one and a half sips.

Drops fell onto the Cosmos jersey he was wearing, too new for him to think of it as his.

Great, now he wasn’t just nervous: he was nervous and damp.

No one said anything. Were they waiting for him?

He was supposed to have prepared a statement—Isabel had said, Gabe had said, his mother had said? but he’d come to treat interactions with the press the way he did fielding third base: he’d done it enough to know it by feel.

Feel. That baseball term for something so practiced it became easy and intuitive.

Except none of this was easy or intuitive.

So he was left staring at the assembled reporters who, maddeningly, were staring right back.

He considered his options. Fuck the Cleveland baseball organization, but also why didn’t they want me enough to keep me? That might not go over so well.

All right, time to break the ice.

“It’s funny,” he said, “but I get more nervous in front of you all than I do playing in front of fifty thousand people.” It was a joke. It was supposed to be a joke.

No one laughed. One reporter offered a look that managed to communicate both sympathy and that Eitan wasn’t in Ohio anymore. As if Eitan needed a reminder. He muttered—or attempted to mutter— tough crowd .

Except he aimed it at the mic. “ Tough crowd .” Loud as a PA announcement.

He winced. Isabel winced. The reporters in the first three rows winced. The owner and GM winced. So this was inauspicious. Or a total fucking mess .

“All right”—he waved gamely—“bring it on, I guess.”

Isabel nodded to the assembled media, who all thrust up eager hands, then called on a reporter by name.

“How’re you feeling about the trade?” the reporter asked.

“I’m still getting used to it.” What else was Eitan supposed to say?

That he’d found out about the trade from social media before the Crooks front office had even bothered to call him?

That he’d procrastinated for an hour before needing all of five minutes to pack?

That he’d spent the entirety of the—really nice, to be fair—private jet ride with his shirt sweat-stuck to his back like he could already feel the glare of baseball’s hottest spotlight?

He tried on another smile. “New York’s a little bigger than Cleveland. ”