Week two all anyone could talk about was Jason Goodyear. Not the divorce, though everyone had thoughts on Liana and her show-off party. No, the wives were abuzz about Jason’s arrest, the cleat chaser who nearly got him thrown in jail, her harebrained scheme to break into Taliesin West. What was he thinking? It just sounded too crazy. The wives watched the other men play, of course, but whenever a ball sailed into the outfield, whenever Jason was on deck or on base or even watching play over the lip of the dugout, they were observing him, scanning for cracks or mars, tics or troubles. Did they spot anything? Hard to say: He dropped a fly ball on the warning track—not the sort of mistake he made—but it was an impossibly hot afternoon game, the angle of the sun all wrong. He struck out swinging twice—also unlike him—but maybe he was just rusty. He threw a rocket from deep left to second, and instead of reaching Putney standing on base, it beaned the runner, who cursed so loud it could be heard on the radio broadcast. Each mistake was, on its own, tiny—not necessarily even an error—but did it add up to something more?

Week three there is a new girl, the young Dominican pitcher’s wife, sitting in the row behind them. Vásquez, that’s his name. Victor Vásquez. She has the smooth face of a teenager, and beautiful amber eyes, giant like a kewpie’s. A small child sits on her lap—presumably the pitcher’s son—and his round face makes their mouths water and coo. They all love babies, the fat little limbs and gurgling lips, the peach-fuzz hair and plum-dust skin. But Melissa Moyers does not coo. Instead her eyes go back to the woman—the girl; she looks younger than Melissa’s oldest, and may well be. Her small body is somehow tight and curvy all at once; it is hard to imagine this butterball emerging from her belly just eight or nine months ago. The only point Melissa sees to the contrary: the girl’s milk-swollen breasts are huge, bigger than Hillary’s, bigger than Melissa’s and Lisa’s combined. Her chest might topple her were she to forget her continued effort at uprightness, her determination to keep her shoulders up and back. Melissa gives her a tight-lipped smile.

When the baseball wives are not looking, the squirming baby reaches down for the bright chains around the women’s necks, for strands of their shiny hair, for their smooth shoulders.

“Hijo, no.” The girl pulls her child’s hand back. “No toques.” The fatness of the baby, versus the slightness, the wide-eyed naïveté of the girl in her artfully distressed jeans and bright sneakers and brand-new Lions T-shirt: the two seem evenly matched, like the baby might even win.