Stu and Michael hump the suitcases to the pool house and meet the women inside. Helen has made everyone sandwiches, dainty triangles of ham and cheese for the ladies, a pair of bricks stacked twice as thick for the men. After eating over nervous, thin pleasantries, Helen takes Audrey to the kitchen to make some tea.

Michael doesn’t need any chamomile, he needs a highball, which Stu provides from the living room’s wet bar. The men sink into leather recliners. The big TV is on some satellite channel, showing the Caribbean series, the DR versus Puerto Rico, the volume low.

The men watch a few pitches before Michael says, “Why’d they have to take the Caddy?” His was a top-of-the-line CTS. Probably a tad ostentatious, but he deserved it, he and Audrey had agreed, for taking care of his family for so long. Deserved it doubly, she’d pointed out, after they’d climbed back from 2008, when their retirement took a sick-feeling twenty-five-point dive. She’d be fine with the Camry another few seasons, she’d insisted. She’d seen how hard he was working—more and more of those awful clinics, barking at high school kids, ten-year-olds even, about how to stride and how to swing and how to wallop the ball so some college scout might notice you—and she knew how much he wanted it.

Michael scoured road tests and reviews in Motor Trend. It didn’t make his decision, but it might’ve helped that Jason Goodyear started promoting Cadillac right around the All-Star break. Slick TV commercials and glossy magazine ads Audrey would flag, chirping about how he made those cars look handsome. Michael always liked Goody. Maybe because they’d both been left fielders, but more likely because Goody was a decent guy: a quiet, lead-by-example type. Respectful. During spring practice he always wanted Michael to check out his swing, and while they’re in the cage he’d make a point of asking about the girls. They were giggly undergrads his rookie spring, and he’d treated them kindly, flirting just enough to make them blush beet-red.

“It’s insured, right?” Stu refills Michael’s glass. He’d waited for the end-of-year prices, put all of 240 miles on it before they’d had to double back to the Midwest for family obligations and a tween hitting workshop in Evanston.

“Huh? Yeah,” Michael says. He has already run the numbers (last year’s model, six months used). “But I lost five thousand the minute I drove it off the lot.”

“That’s the rub.” After watching a few pitches on the screen, a high fly that carries to the warning track, Stu clears his throat. “Listen, Mike. Helen and I want you and Audrey to make yourselves at home in the pool house—there’s a little kitchenette and everything back there. I know we have a few days before the team shows up, but you two, you should stay through till Salt Lake,” he says, “if that’d make it easier.” At the end of every March, when Stu and Helen head for Los Angeles and the major league season, Michael and Audrey lock up the house again and drive to Utah. They’d planned to take the Caddy up this year—they’d have to rethink that.