Look, I did it again. I’m trying to tell you about the ancient team, the men and women who would become the Hohokam, and I go off to left field. Okay, here’s history: A bunch of drafts and vets and trades and called-up Triple-As stand on a field and examine their new configuration. (Their wives and girlfriends, sitting in the stands, do the same.) They’ve been playing for years, but never with these teammates, never with these game calls and strategies. Eventually, with the day in and day out of it, with the mistakes and corrections, they find a new type of cohesion, a coming together that feels good enough to be true. It happens to the Lions every spring, and as much could be said of the Lions’ wives, that sisterhood forced and finessed until they become a unit, ready for the long season.

The ancient dwellers banded into clusters of floodwater farmers, roving at first but then setting up more permanent camps. They built houses on poles, clapped adobe around the buildings’ sides like they were tarring their bats. Made pottery to hold their sunflower seeds and chew, etched seashells they brought home from the long road trips to Baja. Tied the shells on hide strings and hung them round their necks, tucked under their uniforms like a pitcher’s lucky charm. Did they know the same shells were buried right below their feet? That this used to be an ocean?

Of course not. How could they? They were progressing just like the rest of us: one foot in front of the other. Or one pitch after another, in the case of the Lions. Or one party after another, in the case of the Lions’ wives.

And they weren’t calling themselves the Hohokam yet; that came later. After all, do you know what Hohokam means? Those who have gone.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

THE OUTFIELD

The baseball wives know you don’t want to be the first to show up in Scottsdale, but surely you don’t want to be the last to arrive at the party. And it is a party: luncheons and spa days, cocktails and color consultations, mornings at the furrier’s and afternoons with the jeweler. There is a great deal of time between the rare preseason moments when they have their husbands’ attention, their calls to duty. Those calls: To cheer him from the family section of the ballpark, loud enough that he might just look over. To get him steak on Sunday nights, to rub his feet on Wednesdays, to dangle—and deliver—a blowjob at the end of the week as reward for all his hard work. There are many ways to earn one’s keep.