Curveball (The Philadelphia Patriots)

by Sykes, V. K.

  It took no courage to ignore the elephant in the room, and that was exactly what her body was demanding she do. But Taylor wouldn’t let her brain and her good sense give up that easily. Ryan had to confront the issue square on, and it was clearly going to be up to her to get him started.

  “You know you’re far from the first player that this has happened to,” she began, forcing herself to lock her gaze on his. “Crazy stuff, like sudden and inexplicable loss of control. Throws that go anyplace but where you want them to.”

  Ryan’s eyes narrowed a little, but otherwise he showed no reaction.

  “Extra practice doesn’t help,” she continued. “Tricks don’t help. More concentration, less concentration, more relaxation, more positive thoughts, blanking it out—none of it works, right? Everybody tells you to try something different. Everybody thinks they’ve got the answer. But it doesn’t matter what you try, the problem doesn’t go away. It just gets worse.”

  He gave a dismissive snort. “It’s not like I haven’t had a lot on my mind for the past while, have I? Thanks to Devon and especially thanks to that trade you engineered, blocking me from going to the AL.”

  Ouch.

  His voice wasn’t bitter, but the edge was unmistakable.

  Taylor shook her head. “Sure, stress and change can trigger slumps. But you know this isn’t like that, Ryan. You know this is bigger than some ordinary slump. A slump doesn’t make you forget how to throw a baseball, does it?”

  He gave that rhetorical question a couple of seconds thought before shaking his head. “I don’t know anything,” he said stubbornly. “Other than that talking about it is going to make it worse.”

  “I think it depends on who you’re talking to,” she countered.

  Ryan didn’t respond, taking another drink instead.

  Taylor forged ahead, determined to press him. “You remember these names—Steve Blass, Steve Sax, Mark Wohlers, Rick Ankiel? Just to name some of the more prominent guys who had the problem? Well, they probably reacted about the same when it first hit them.”

  Ryan’s jaw dropped, almost like she’d punched him hard in the gut.

  “You’re comparing me to those guys?” He shook his head contemptuously. “They were all pitchers, except Sax, and he worked through his problem.”

  Taylor thought his protest sounded forced. If she didn’t miss her guess, he’d been thinking along those lines already, too. “A few guys do get over it on their own, but it can take years. You don’t have that kind of time.”

  He gave another snort. “Wow, what a cheery outlook. Thanks for that bit of sunshine, babe.”

  The look on his face spliced her heart in two, but she couldn’t stop now. “I’m sorry, but you know it’s true. Ryan, it’s not something you can do on your own. You must realize that.” Taylor wanted to grab him and shake him out of his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the truth. If he didn’t get help, she was convinced his career was in jeopardy.

  And hers, too, because the two couldn’t be separated.

  If Ryan failed, it would be a disaster for them both. For better or for worse, from the day she convinced Dembinski and the rest to make the trade for Ryan, their fortunes were tied together. If he went down, she might well go down, too. At least in the sense that her aspirations for the GM position would take a potentially fatal hit. The Patriot players would stay focused and loyal to their teammate—they always did. But management, coaches, scouts, and media relations staff had zero loyalty to any player, or to any manager other than the GM. In fact, Taylor knew that skeptical, questioning comments had already started to make their way around the team offices.

  “I figure I just need a couple of more days off from playing first,” he said with no discernible conviction.

  You may get more than a couple of days of rest, pal.

  “You need to talk somebody with expertise in this field,” she countered.

  Ryan’s eyes widened, then his mouth contorted into a grimace. “A shrink, right? Or some sports psychologist? Oh, hell, why not find a medium and conduct a séance? That would be as good as drowning me in some bullshit psychobabble.” His voice had started to rise in tandem with the color creeping up his neck. “I tried that crap once, years ago, when I was in a long slump. It may work for some guys, but it didn’t do a damn thing for me.”

  Frustrated, Taylor decided she had to dial it back a notch if she had any hope of getting somewhere with a typically pig-headed jock. “I know a little about this problem, Ryan, because I went through something along these lines in L.A. with Kevin Saint. A doctor in New York by the name of Farley helped him a lot. I can get you his number—and I really think you need to call him.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Ryan said. “Let it go, Taylor. I can deal with my own problems. I always have.”

  Taylor could see Ryan was in no mood to be pushed. The grim cast of his features made it clear that if she kept at him, the night would be over in the time it took him to drop her off at her apartment.

  Maybe it would be over no matter what she said at this point.

  But she had no real choice but to push him more, because he was wrong. She knew that as well as she knew every statistic about him. Players were rarely if ever able to spontaneously overcome the type of throwing disease Ryan appeared to have contracted.

  “I’m afraid that this time you can’t,” Taylor said. “You need professional guidance, and not from one of the team shrinks, either. You’ve got to listen to me, Ryan. Please, I know what I’m talking about here.”

  His eyes narrowed, cold as chips of ice. “What do you know about actually playing baseball, Taylor? Sure, you can spout statistics and probabilities until people’s heads spin off their necks, but when was the last time you stood in a batter’s box and tried to hit a ninety-five mile an hour fastball? Or tried to throw all the way across a baseball diamond with power and accuracy? Never, that’s when. So, don’t try to tell me you know how to fix my problem.”

  Taylor’s stomach contracted into a hard little ball as she studied Ryan’s disdainful, almost contemptuous expression. Yes, he was pissed off at her, but his eyes betrayed more than that. A lot of hurt was there, too.

  What must he be going through inside? With his livelihood on the line, his body and his mind were failing him almost every time he gripped a baseball. Something which had once been as easy and natural as drawing breath had become impossibly difficult. The transformation was so sudden and shocking that it was no wonder he remained in denial.

  Taylor steeled herself not to flinch in face of his anger, because she knew she wouldn’t be able to look into a mirror tomorrow if she wimped out now.

  “You’re right. I’m no big league player, and I can only guess what you’re going through. But is that a good excuse for dismissing what I have to say?” The pitch of her voice was rising, so she slowed down, taking a couple of deep breaths. “You of all people know how precarious your situation is. Do you really want to trust that time and hard work will make everything right again? Can you really look me in the eye and tell me that’s all you need to do?”

  Ryan lowered his eyes, as if studying the wine glass that he gripped tight in his fingers. For a few seconds, he remained silent, but then he raised his gaze to meet hers. “Please don’t make me have to tell you again to drop this, Taylor.”

  Swamped by waves of both frustration and hurt, Taylor exhaled a sigh that seemed to come all the way from her toes. She was about to lash out with a bitter reply, but fortunately managed to bite back the words that might have turned out to be the last he’d ever let her say to him.

  “Ryan,” she said after schooling her features, “please just call Dr. Farley. One telephone conversation, that’s all. If he isn’t able to convince you to give his approach a try, then I’ll never say a word about it again.”

  Talk about giving a hostage to fortune. Could I really make good on that promise when our careers are at stake?

  Ryan averted his gaze and waved at their server
for the bill. “This evening is over,” he said as he turned his gaze back to her.

  He might as well have built a towering stone wall between them.

  21

  “ANKIEL WAS A hell of a pitcher,” Nate Carter said. He leaned back in his chair, beer bottle in hand, as he addressed the other guys around the booth in a back corner of Angelo’s. “The guy had awesome stuff. But then he lost it, just like that.” The Patriots’ ace snapped his fingers with a loud crack.

  Ryan cast his eyes around the South Philly bar in search of their server because, God, he could use another beer. While torture was supposed to be illegal, he felt like he’d spent tonight’s game stretched out on the rack. In what Ault had said was his last start until he got his act together, he’d managed not to be charged with an error, but that was due to dumb luck more than competence. Some games you didn’t have to make a throw that really counted, and that had fortunately been the case tonight.

  Still, the way the ball had felt when he gripped it, Ryan knew that if he’d been called upon to make a key throw he would have blown it. His confidence was shot, and the five veterans sitting around the table with him knew it, too.

  Jake Miller nodded his agreement, as did third baseman Aiden Marriner. “I never hit against the guy,” Jake said, “but I saw all those gruesome TV replays. It was so brutal in that 2000 Division Championship. I mean five wild pitches in one inning? The poor dude must have been totally dying inside.”

  During batting practice, Miller had asked Ryan to join him and a bunch of other Patriots for a couple of beers after the game. Like Ryan, pitcher Noah Cade and catcher Nick Rome were relatively new to the team, having just a season or so under their belts. Third baseman Aiden Marriner was there as well. Like Carter and Miller, Marriner was a veteran and had been part of the Patriots’ core leadership group for several years.

  Ryan couldn’t believe the guys actually hung out here at Angelo’s, a sports bar on South Street. As he’d expected, all six players—especially superstars Carter and Miller—had been more or less mobbed for fifteen minutes before they even sat down at the prime table owner Angelo Moretti had reserved for them. They signed autographs for a few dozen fans before things settled down and they could drink and talk in peace.

  Though Ryan deeply appreciated his teammates’ gesture of friendship and support, he didn’t need to hear about Rick Ankiel or anybody else with throwing yips.

  “Ankiel’s an incredible athlete, though,” Nate said after pouring down a big-time swallow of beer. “How many players could give up pitching like he did and then make it back to the big leagues as a hitter?” He gave a little shrug. “Other than him, probably zero.”

  Jake gave Nate a mock contemptuous look. “Not you, that’s for sure. You can’t hit a beach ball lobbed underhanded.”

  “Got that right,” Rome said with a smirk. “Son of a bitch can still throw rockets, though. He’s wearing out my frigging glove.”

  Nate flipped Jake the bird before offering Rome a fist bump.

  Other than when they brought up his problem, Ryan enjoyed the easy camaraderie of his Patriot teammates. The players had shown him nothing but respect and patience even as his game deteriorated. That had made it even worse, really, because of the way he was letting them down with his costly errors.

  “Can we change the subject?” he said a little grumpily as their server acknowledged his hand signal for another beer. “Look, I’m not a pitcher, and I haven’t lost all my control, either.”

  Liar. You’ve never felt anything like this before in your life. Your brain has forgotten how to throw.

  But Ryan knew he couldn’t let himself give in to his negative inner voice without sinking under the nightmare vision of a forced early retirement and a life without baseball. What would he do if he wound up released and nobody picked him up? Even his dream of playing DH for an American League team was starting to look sketchy at best. Most of those teams wanted a DH who could play a position at least occasionally. Would any of them be interested in a player that couldn’t throw a ball straight? A player with an apparently intractable mental blockage?

  Not likely.

  But retirement wasn’t an option he wanted to consider, not when he needed a lot more time in the majors to ensure financial security for both Devon and his mother. Despite the solid money he’d made these past few years, his expenses had been high and taxes had eaten up a big chunk of his contract. He was far from being poor, but he also had to face the reality that he could be out of baseball at thirty-three with no other marketable skills.

  No, Ryan wouldn’t give in to that inner voice, or to a voice like Taylor’s, either. She’d practically killed him last night by hammering away at that damn Steve Blass scenario and nagging him to run off to that New York shrink—or whatever the hell he was. She obviously thought he was completely fucked-up, and that realization made him feel about six inches tall.

  Even if he thought there was some hope that time on a shrink’s couch would solve the problem—which he sure as hell didn’t—Taylor was ignoring the implications for a major league player like him when it came out that he was seeing a guy like that. His reputation as a solid, reliable player, one he’d worked hard to earn for more than a dozen years, would be blown away instantly when the word got around the league. No longer would he be seen as a guy in a slump, something everybody goes through from time to time. He would be seen as a player with a psychological problem. And once that dreaded label was stuck on you, Ryan knew that it could never really be scraped off. The stigma and the worry of a recurrence never disappeared.

  As if there weren’t enough problems getting in between Taylor and him already, his on-field situation had become more than her so-called elephant in the room. They’d had a tacit agreement to avoid talking about the Patriots, and especially anything that had to do with him, but then she’d broken it by inserting herself so doggedly into his business. Even worse, he didn’t know how much of her concern was about him and how much was about protecting her own ass.

  Though that might well be an uncharitable way to look at it, every time he thought he and Taylor were getting somewhere, she tended to throw him a nasty curveball.

  What happened last night had sucked, because one bright spot in his life lately had been Taylor, and when they were together—absorbed completely in each other, not in baseball—he’d been able to forget about his problems for a while. Sex with Taylor had been at times volcanic, at times sweet, and always as close to perfection as Ryan could imagine. Yesterday, before the argument at Susanna Foo’s, he’d wanted nothing more than to get dinner over with and get her between the sheets. But she’d blown that plan out of the water by trying to jam that shrink down his throat. How many times did he have to tell her he’d deal with his problem and didn’t need her doggedly insisting that he get his head read? The only couch he wanted to hit was one where she was underneath him, and now that was probably done, too.

  At least until she stopped acting like his AGM and more like someone who would actually listen to him. Someone he could trust and rely on to have his back.

  “Sorry, Ryan,” Nate said, interrupting his brief reverie. “No offense meant. We’re just trying to make you feel a little better, man.”

  Ah, crap. These guys were the heart and soul of the Patriots—each man a veteran with as much or more major league experience as him. They were going out of their way to make it clear to him that he was both accepted and valued—he couldn’t have failed to get that message tonight—and yet he was starting to act like a defensive jerk.

  “None taken,” Ryan said quickly, grateful for his teammates’ solidarity and concern. “I really appreciate what you guys are trying to do. It’s just a little hard to stay positive when you’re letting the team down like this.”

  Jake waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t even think like that. Just keep working hard. Take even more infield practice. You’ll get through it soon enough.”

  Nate nodded. “He’s right. And when
you throw, try to remember what it was like when we were little kids, before all those coaches started messing with us. When I think about that, the feeling I remember is how pure and sweet it was. I just hauled back and let fly, and somehow the ball always went where I intended it to go.”

  Aiden stopped studying his beer bottle label long enough to jump into the conversation. “I remember when I was growing up on an island in Maine.” He angled his glance toward Ryan. “I used to practice my throwing by trying to get the ball into one of my dad’s discarded lobster traps—you know, the old kind with wood slats?’

  Unsure if he’d ever actually seen one of those, Ryan nodded as if he understood the fine details of lobster traps.

  “I’d clean out all the interior partitions, and cut some of the mesh and slats out of the side. Then I’d fire away from sixty feet and see if I could throw the ball into the trap. And you know what? Every time I start to think about getting it inside that thing, I’d usually miss it by a mile. But when I was able to blank my mind and throw completely naturally, it went in like ninety percent of the time.” He took a quick mouthful of beer before continuing. “When you start thinking about it too much, you try to aim the ball into your target, and then you usually miss.”

  Ryan gave him a tentative smile but he doubted lobster traps would do the trick, at least in his case.