The baseball wives know it’s best if you call ahead, tell the people who take care of things you are coming. Give them a week. They have services for this, not just for the baseball wives but for all the wealthy part-time residents of Scottsdale, Arizona. There are crews with Windex and Lysol and rubber gloves and an endless supply of garbage bags, because it doesn’t matter how clean the wives left things, their homes will be dirty. The autumn sandstorms, those funny-sounding haboobs, get grit everywhere, even under the lips of the rubber-sealed, triple-pane, energy-efficient windows. So over the phone the baseball wives explain where their hide-a-keys are (of course they have one—for the pool guy, for the maid, for the florist—hidden very discreetly, no one would ever guess to look under the potted Christmas cactus to the right of the door), tell them to let themselves in. No reason the year’s first impression of Arizona should be a dead mouse on the kitchen floor. No reason their husbands’ white-shirted elbows should get gunked up from resting on the kitchen counter, the counter covered in dust the exact same color as the imported stone. How was I supposed to see that? is not a good excuse. There is no acceptable excuse, in fact, for anything less than immaculate.

The cleaners throw away the shriveled cacti the wives forgot to put on the back patio for the yard men; after several months without water, none at all, the plants look like a line of sad-old-man penises, spikes sunk in on themselves. The top companies will replace the cacti, returning them to bright green sheaths, erect and pointing and so similar-looking to the originals that no one—not the wives, not their oblivious husbands—knows a thing of their suffering.

Someone will need to run the water, flush the toilets, start the cars—things husbands might do under other circumstances, but the baseball wives know not to ask, not in spring. There will be hiccups in these systems: coughing pipes, murky tanks, engines sputtering as they try to draw from hibernating batteries. Ideally, the advance crew can handle these jobs, too. More legs, less legwork, the wives like to say. Last year, feeling independent, Eliza Summers tried to jump her car herself and got second-degree burns on both palms. Better her than her husband, Melissa Moyers pointed out. He’s the best the Lions have in middle relief.