No Appetite

Bats distributed: four. Stadium roof: just rebuilt. Future stadium: just announced.

---

A gas pump outside Lake City, Florida Saturday morning. The number on the display crossed eighty and kept going. The Roadmaster has a twenty-two-gallon tank and Tate had let it run down close to dry. The numbers rolled past a hundred before the handle clicked off.

"Christ. Hundred and four?"

Tate, leaning over from the passenger seat: "That whole Strait of Hormuz thing."

I screwed the cap back on. I got behind the wheel.

We took the I-75 split south past Gainesville. Tate's window was still down. The air got heavier for the next ninety miles.

---

The Howard Frankland is eight lanes across Tampa Bay. The dome was on the left, tilted toward downtown, the roof reading very white in the sun. I was still looking at it when the lane line crossed under me. I corrected. The water on either side was flat and the color of old aluminum.

Columbia was in Ybor City, on Seventh Avenue, in a block-long building of red brick and Spanish tile that had opened in 1905. They seated us in the room I had asked for, the one with the running fountain. I had researched this place back in Houston.

Tate ordered in Spanish. I asked for the 1905 Salad and the Picadillo Criollo and the server corrected my pronunciation while writing it down.

The plates came. Tate's was a Cubano, pressed flat. Ham, roast pork, salami, Swiss, mustard, pickles. Black beans and rice on the side.

"I didn't see that on the menu."

Tate took a bite, crunching into the hard sandwich bread.

"How's the salad," Tate said.

"It has olives."

"Mhm."

The Picadillo was ground beef in tomato sauce with raisins and more olives. I ate slowly.

Tate was watching a table on the far wall. After a while he said: "The Relentless Sunshine do it differently down here. They don't look at the bat. They look at what the bat does."

"How."

"Numbers." He held up his hand and let it down. "Exit velocity. Some kind of model. Bats go to a guy in another building who tells them yes or no based on the data."

"So what we have."

"Just the story." He took a bite.

I waited.

"I'll see who I can dig up tomorrow."

He pulled his phone out and set it face-down on the laminate. After a minute it buzzed. He looked at it. Set it back face-down.

---

Sunday morning I walked Vinoy Park alone. The sky was glass. Pelicans on the rail, four at a time, the bay flat as a coaster. I sat on a bench and tried to finish the last dispatch and instead watched a man who had not yet figured out the paddleboard.

Back at the motel I grabbed a Tampa Bay Times at the front desk. I knocked twice on Tate's door and opened it. He was on the phone. He held one finger up. I closed it and went to mine.

The new stadium deal was on the front page. I read it on the bed.

---

By one o'clock we were in the cheap seats at the Tropicana. The roof was a tent that had cost taxpayers nearly sixty million to replace, after the city cut the stadium's insurance from a hundred million to twenty-five before Hurricane Milton. The catwalks were lower than I had pictured, four rings of them, and there was an air-conditioned chill that you would not have believed from the parking lot.

The Miami Decos were in their road grays. Junior Caminero put one halfway up the left-field seats in the bottom of the first. The ball climbed past the rings and out.

Yandy Diaz took Eury Perez's first pitch in the bottom of the fifth. I had to look it up later: four hundred and twenty-six feet to dead center. The Sunnies won 6-3.

The deal to replace the stadium we were sitting in was three days old — two-point-three billion across the bay, opening 2029.

---

Tate had landed on a name on Sunday. Devon, in equipment operations, in for the homestand. We met him on the second-floor concourse at eleven Monday morning. He was wearing a polo and AirPods and had a Stanley cup in one hand and a folder in the other.

"Cecil. Hey." A nod at me. "Walk with me."

We walked.

"So Russell sent me your number. I've got maybe four minutes — there's a meeting at eleven-fifteen about the new park. You're out from, uh?"

"Wallop. Wallop Lumber out of Washington state," Tate said.

"Right. Good name. Pine?"

"Volcanic-soil Douglas fir. Mount St. Helens new growth. We've got some samples in the wagon if you'd like to see."

Devon stopped in front of a closed door, looked at his watch, looked back at Tate.

"I appreciate the visit, Cecil. Here's the thing. There really isn't any appetite in the building right now. We're top of the American League, second best record in the majors. Nobody wants to be the guy who changed what's working. Right?"

Devon continued, "And what's working right now is Victus wood in Junior Caminero's hands. He just hit his 12th yesterday."

"We saw it."

"Let's say your volcano wood is exceptional. The way we'd evaluate, we'd want exit velo data, barrel-weight tolerance, smash factor, durability curves. Even just two or three guys' worth, lab-test, anything you can put in a CSV. You send us that, I get it to Aaron. Aaron compares your numbers with Victus. Then we talk. But without that, you probably wouldn't make it back through the door." He looked at his watch again. "I really am sorry."

I had not yet said anything. We only had a story.

"We'll send what we have," Tate said.

"That's all I'm asking. Russell says hi by the way."

The door opened. Someone put a head out and said his name. Devon nodded once at us and was gone.

Tate stopped at a railing overlooking the lot. The bats were where we had left them. He set both hands on the rail and leaned into it. He let out a long breath.

---

We stayed for the game. Baltimore was in for three. The opponent had changed. The result had not. I wanted the Sunnies' bats to fail. They put up a season-high sixteen runs. Junior Caminero's Victus stick put lucky 13 into the cheap seats.

Back at the motel I sat on the bed. I had not eaten dinner. The dispatch I was trying to write kept veering into data analytics and city ordinances. I leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

The phone vibrated on the bedside table.

sorry haven't responded. fall is going to be weird i think but iowa is fine. the field of dreams thing is for olds lol. stay safe. — a

I read it twice. I set the phone face-down on the bedside.

Lights off.

— Freely