For another subset of women, Scottsdale is their only residence, the second home they got in the divorce. And here is a tricky thing for baseball wives: ex–baseball wives. They are still baseball wives, having endured minor league ball and the onerous winters with husbands underfoot like overgrown teenagers. The exes are still friends to the current baseball wives, having listened to their gripes, having griped themselves. Together, these women have bought vibrators to keep them company when their husbands were on the road and sexy lingerie to entice their husbands upon return. These women know too much not to be friends. And the baseball wives—as much as they’d like to deny it—have some niggling, just a teensy hint of fear, that at any point, they, too, could become ex–baseball wives. Melissa almost lost Hal once, during their last season in Boston, to a kinesthesiology intern from Harvard; she caught him fooling around again, a few springs ago, with some sun-stroked harpy named Tamara. More than one of the current wives have broken up perfectly healthy marriages, severing a ballplayer’s ties to his high school sweetheart or the patient woman who slogged through the farm system. That bitch, the baseball wives mutter when a cleat chaser usurps a friend’s position. It’s the circle of life, the baseball wives explain when a woman they like more replaces one they like less. This uncertainty, the either-way of it—the baseball wives know it also means, It could happen to me.

Liana Goodyear, the former wife of Jason Goodyear, is a perfect example of this treacherous territory—not of the cheating and stealing, but of the problem associated with the divorce. Jason, handsome enough to contend for Sexiest Man in America, clean-cut enough to be, rumor had it, in development talks with Disney, had two American League MVP awards and nary a smear on his rap sheet when he plucked this elementary school teacher out of thin air. Whirlwind courtship, a family-only wedding in an undisclosed location. And just like that, one of the country’s most eligible bachelors was off the market. Liana quit working and did her best at all the baseball wife duties: attending games, keeping house, befriending the other baseball wives.