Michael isn’t quite sure where he’s going, but knows the complex is near the new casino on the east side, all of it built on Indian land. Talking Stick Casino is not a place he’s been, but it’s tall and gaudy and flashing spotlights into the night sky, and so he points the car toward its beacon. He has to loop around the sports complex twice to find the way in, an unlit boulevard that splits two parking lots, one still waiting for its stripes. The landscapers have dropped off the plants for the median but transplanted only a few; the rest loiter in black plastic tubs. For a flash he thinks about taking a couple of the smaller cacti to restart his own battered collection—Audrey loves her succulents—but he shakes the idea from his mind. He is not a thief.

The new stadium is a hulking shadow lit by the occasional exit sign. Through the gates he can see a broad concourse, the spotless counters of vendors who have yet to move in. There’s no good view of left field—but he tries to imagine it as he circles the stadium. Big, small? Of all the corners of the field, left is the most malleable, the easiest to shorten or stretch per the site plan. It annoys Michael that while the infield and its dimensions are sacred—the ninety-foot base path; the sixty feet, six inches from the rubber to home; the ninety-five feet between the mound and the grass line—his domain can be doubled or halved, depending on street grids and how many seats some owner is trying to fit. Look at the Green Monster—only 310 to the wall—while the deep part of the old Yankee Stadium was 457. (Another reason Michael admired Joe: in 1937 he hit forty-six home runs in that stadium, even with its farther-than-far left-center wall.) The Lions’ Culver City home, a nondescript, moderately nostalgic stadium built in the nineties, has a gigantic left, which is part of why they invested in Goodyear. That man has strong legs and an arm like a rocket launcher.

The first ring of practice fields is dark, but there is a glow beyond them, and he hears something that sounds like a bat making contact. He walks toward the noise. The lights, hanging just inside the upper net, cast webbed shadows onto the paved approach, with a bigger, batter-shaped shadow spilling onto the walkway. Thwunk. The next ball is spit out of the machine. The shadow batter swings, a swing Michael recognizes instantly as Jason Goodyear’s. Decisive, graceful. Certain.