The baseball wives, even hapless Lisa Putney, know not to let their husbands manage real-estate acquisition; a ballplayer would pick a house with two bedrooms, half a kitchen, and an entertainment room the size of an elementary school auditorium. That would be the first place they’d furnish, too, chock-full of leather recliners, arranged in a semicircle around a TV screen the size of a California king bedsheet. Men, it seems, are happy to eat off paper plates while standing at the kitchen counter, don’t see the point of headboards, and think they’re doing well if their clothes are in folded piles. Some of these men would be fine to stay in hotels or short-term rentals, the way they did when they were just coming up, when they didn’t think anything was wrong with hotels or short-term rentals or being single. But the wives insist they must own; what would people think if they were the only ones still renting? And so they buy, $1 million homes, $5 million villas, Southwest estates in the low eight figures.

A lesson to them all came at Jane Rogers’s expense: she let Stan pick out their Arizona place, and he bought a man cave with two and a half bathrooms attached. His was a quick trade from Pittsburgh, and the family was scrambling to set up two new homes and sell two others. I have my hands full with L.A., she’d rationalized when Melissa Moyers called to introduce herself and offer help, and Stan refuses to stay at a hotel unless he’s on the road. I told him to get whatever. Jane was overwhelmed by finding a year-round home, getting her kids, then six and thirteen, into the right schools during the awkward, midyear move. It’d be easier if I could just give someone a big envelope of unmarked bills, she’d said, her Nashville accent turning some words short, stretching others long. Ease-yer, on-vell-ope, bee-yalls. How peculiar, Melissa had thought but did not say. She had also thought: You can. Her kids had done fine, switching into L.A.’s top prep school the week after Hal was traded. Donation, that’s what they call the grease on the wheels. Charitable contribution.

It’s not like they’d had roots in Pennsylvania, Jane had continued; they hated the place, nearly everything except for those neat Carnegie museums—her little boy loved the dinos. If it were up to her, they’d be back in Tennessee somewhere—she was from Franklin, she and Stan had been sweethearts at Vandy—but the closest major league teams were St. Louis and Cincinnati, and who wanted to live there? Melissa clucked in agreement but wondered how much longer this woman would ramble. Jane was lonely, Melissa impatient, and the difference in the two women’s frequencies set the line humming and popping.