Page 57 of Breakout Year

Eitan

Rivkin Sweepstakes: Breaking Down Likely Landing Spots for Baseball’s Biggest Free Agent

Late November

“Could we turn down the air conditioning?” Eitan tugged at his collar again.

He was wearing a new shirt—this one fresh from the store so as not to be infused with any sort of bad luck—that was apparently tissue-paper thin.

Or else the air in this Anaheim hotel conference room was just blowing that hard.

Next to him, Gabe had been typing something out on his phone, bemoaning how much he missed old-school BlackBerries, and occasionally offering Eitan tidbits of baseball news. “Have some water.”

Eitan did not want water. Eitan wanted to meet with a team or several teams. He wanted to sign a contract. He wanted to be done, so this uncertainty could stop burning in his belly. “Are you sure the Cosmos aren’t interested?”

Gabe put down his phone. Despite the cold, his forehead shone in the conference room lights. “If they were, I would tell you.”

“How about the other New York team?” Gabe had grown up a fan of the other New York team and scowled every time Eitan called them that.

“Them too.”

“Yeah.” Eitan rolled his shoulders, rubbed his hands together to warm them. “But when they said not interested …”

“Eitan, you’ll have your pick of teams.”

Just not the ones in the place I most want to live. “Who’s coming by first?”

Gabe rattled off the list again, beginning with St. Louis. Teams would come, make their case as to why Eitan was the third baseman of their future, and he’d be offered a staggering amount of money. Generational money. He should be more excited. He knew that.

Waiting for a team who was—Eitan checked his phone—officially two minutes late, he turned the question of why he wasn’t more excited over in his mind.

He missed Akiva. He thought, reading between the scant lines of Akiva’s texts, Akiva missed him too.

Liking each other wasn’t the problem. Everything else was, beginning with Akiva being either rooted or stuck in New Jersey, depending on how you looked at it.

Everyone Eitan had talked with had said that his being upset over the breakup would fade—that things that burned hot and bright were bound to fizzle. He just didn’t want them to.

He checked his phone again. St. Louis was verging on really late.

Well, not a great first impression, but these meetings were busy.

Stuff was bound to run over. He spent a few minutes looking through St. Louis’s roster.

His hit tendencies mapped well to their ballpark.

They were a little light on starting pitching, but you couldn’t have everything.

Gabe’s phone buzzed. He examined it. Frowned. “Looks like they aren’t coming.”

“What?”

Gabe shrugged, but his face was grim. He offered up his texts, displaying one from St. Louis’s general manager, a declination that simply said, Sorry, have to cancel.

“They want to reschedule, right?” Eitan said, even as his stomach clawed with the answer.

They weren’t coming. They weren’t coming even if Eitan was the best free agent on the market, one a decent amount under thirty and relatively unburdened by any particular injury history, ankle aside.

One without a family to consider in making decisions about where to move.

Gabe typed something. Received an almost immediate response. “They’ve decided to go in another direction.”

Like toward an objectively worse ballplayer.

Fine. Well, fuck St. Louis. He’d liked the city when he’d played there—the people were nice and baseball-interested, and the barbecue was good—but not enough to not resent whatever the hell this was.

If they didn’t want him as he was, he didn’t want them either. “Who else is coming?”

An hour later, two more teams had cancelled and a third wasn’t returning Gabe’s texts. Eitan tried not to squirm. Despite the cool, his shirt was probably wrinkled, his hair done for. Every buzz of Gabe’s phone made him jump.

Finally, finally, representatives from the Texas team rolled in.

They sat in a row opposite Eitan. For a moment, he felt like a bug under glass.

Gabe had assured him that these meetings tended to be excessively friendly—“They want you to play for them, after all”—but there was something in the set of their general manager’s shoulders Eitan didn’t like.

Also, he was wearing a cowboy hat inside an Anaheim hotel. Who did that?

“We felt this conversation was easier to have in person.” The GM had an exaggerated drawl even if Eitan recalled vaguely that he was from Boston. He motioned for a manila folder that was handed to him by an aide, which he slid over to Gabe.

Eitan imagined any number of things in that folder: a list of transactions he’d paid Akiva, a copy of the NDA.

Screenshots from Akiva’s previous job. If he were straight, the implication he’d paid for sex wouldn’t be a big deal.

Players sometimes did that, because people sometimes did that.

No one would look askance at a large Venmo transaction between a player and his girlfriend.

It was possible these were paparazzi photos taken from a blurry distance, testaments to Dave’s talents as the Ansel Adams of being a creep. Maybe someone had taken their photo on the train, and Eitan was about to be hit with an accusation of public indecency . Who knew?

Didn’t your closer have a DUI charge that somehow went away? Eitan bit that back. There were any number of things ballplayers did that teams actively abetted or at least looked the other way about in the name of securing their talents. Whatever he’d done, Texas had deemed that to be worse.

Eitan plucked the folder from Gabe before Gabe had time to react.

He opened the file. It took a moment to adjust what he was seeing: a photo of him and Akiva sitting in a café, their fingers held loosely together.

Akiva had been talking about something—probably a book given the gleam in his eyes—and Eitan didn’t remember much other than that look.

Not the flavor of the oat milk chai latte he’d been drinking or how the chair he’d been sitting on had a wobble in one leg.

Only the lightness he’d felt being in the exact right place at the exact right time with the exact right person.

Who he’d left a continent away to come and sit in this chilly little room.

“And?” Eitan said.

“We’re a team with a certain…” The GM paused. “We want to make sure our players project a wholesome image.”

Maybe it was his go-rounds with the New York media over the last few months, but for once, Eitan could hear the question underneath the question: Are you gonna keep being gay?

If he said no, they might offer him a contract. He could go to Texas. Be the guy on the left side of the infield, someone who hit second or third in the batting order. If he kept posting numbers the way he had been for much of his career, he had a good shot at being a Hall of Famer.

For that, he could tell them the whole thing with Akiva had been a lark, a hoax.

For that, he could go to Texas, date, and keep quiet about it.

Not hold hands in public. Not kiss over dinner just for the sake of kissing.

Stuff his life into an opaque box and call it happiness.

He could endure that, possibly. People did more for less.

He discarded the folder on the table. Gritted out, “Thank you so much for coming by. Have a wonderful day.” His hands were white knuckled. He waited until they’d left, and the door was closed, to pound a fist against the table, letting the impact send reverberations up his arm.

Gabe clucked that he could break something, but Eitan barely heard him. If he broke something, so what? Clearly, he’d given up everything for baseball when baseball was unwilling to give so much as an inch for him.

“I take it from your reaction that this is non-negotiable,” Gabe said mildly.

Eitan was shaking his head. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t seem to control his body. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. An understatement. “This is fucked up,” he said.

“Yes.” Gabe’s mouth went tight.

“How many other teams will care?”

Gabe didn’t answer, because the answer was obvious. All of them .

“You gonna say ‘I told you so?’” Eitan spat. Because he had told Eitan so, repeatedly, adamantly, in language that never quite stuck. He called Eitan kid ; Eitan felt like one now, sore all over like he’d been in a schoolyard scrap.

Gabe clenched his eyes shut. For a moment, Eitan braced himself to be told he’d fucked everything up. “I’m sorry this is happening,” Gabe said. As if this kind of treatment was inevitable as the weather. “Knowing it was going to and seeing it are two different things.”

Feeling it was another thing entirely, one Eitan wasn’t going to let himself experience in front of a witness, even if it was just Gabe. “Yeah.” Even that came out with tears in it.

“Hey, listen”—Gabe was using a tone that Eitan had never heard him employ before, one deliberate in its gentleness—“it’s been a long day.” Though it was barely two in the afternoon. “Why don’t you take a break? I’ll text you if any other teams make contact.”

Eitan’s hand was beginning to smart; his head was beginning to throb. The reasonable thing would be to go back to his room and hang out or find the handful of other players on site and go for a round of golf or something. Eitan mostly hated golf.

Nothing good would come from this feeling, like if someone else walked into the room, he might explode or worse.

Once on a road trip, when he’d been awake earlier than was reasonable to bother other people, he’d watched a documentary on deep-sea diving.

How explorers would bring Styrofoam cups to the bottom of the ocean that would come back miniaturized from the pressure.

He felt like that now—not crushed, precisely, but hammered into something smaller than himself.

“Yeah, I should probably go,” Eitan said.

“Hey.” Gabe reached out as if he might do something drastic, like try to hug Eitan, before he shook his head. “It’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna work this out.”

“You don’t know that.” And so Eitan picked up that folder and his suit jacket. Said goodbye to Gabe and dragged himself through the hotel conference center in a daze.

Up in his room, Eitan threw his jacket on the floor, stripped out of his suit pants and left them in a heap.

Sat on the bed. Stood up. Pulled out the desk chair, pushed it back in.

Opened the curtains—the midday light was blinding—and closed them again.

He considered the folder, its contents. Hiding that away wouldn’t change anything.

There were other copies of course. He opened the folder, smoothed the printout with the flat of his palm.

They wanted him to turn away from that picture, from that past version of himself rendered grainy on printer paper.

He studied it now; even at low resolution, the look on his face, and on Akiva’s, was clear.

Maybe Eitan would take that picture with him wherever he was going. Hell, maybe he’d get it framed.

He sat again. Cupped his head in his hands.

His ring was cold against his face. He took it off, considered it in the light.

Was someone from the Cosmos still eavesdropping on his heartbeat?

He wasn’t theirs now. Didn’t belong to anything so crass as a baseball organization .

An impulsive person might chuck the ring from the hotel window.

It didn’t open. Probably for the best. Instead, he tucked the ring into a recess of his suitcase and checked his phone—no word from Gabe.

Eitan should put his suit back on. Should go downstairs, head held high, as if nothing was the matter.

He should show all of baseball they couldn’t fucking get to him.

Instead, he picked up his suit, folded it half-heartedly, and stuffed it back in its carrying bag and into his suitcase.

Pulled on sweats. If he went for a run, at least he’d be somewhere other than this room, where the walls felt like they were closing in.

He wanted to be anywhere else—in his room in Cleveland, in his apartment in New York.

In a small house in New Jersey.

He took out his phone. Found a plane ticket. It was somewhere between a forty-minute and two-hour drive to LAX, but that had the most direct flights. If he left now, he could be in Newark by one a.m. He could be by Akiva’s side, in his bed.

Before, Eitan had wondered what it would cost for them to be together. Now he knew. He went anyway.