Above him, the stadium organ comes to life, a creaking progression from one chord to the next. Dissonance, resolution, dissonance, resolution. The notes get louder, more confident, all the way around the loop.

EIGHTH

No team ever stays on top of the standings—nothing is static, remember—and right around 1400 the Hohokam had a rough go of it. No one’s sure what happened: maybe it was a drought, a flood, or some asshole GM making bad trades, breaking up all the best parts of the team. But whatever caused it, the whole civilization collapsed. The Lions have their own five-game skid the last week of March, but as catastrophic as it feels to Woody Botter and Stephen Smith and everyone else who has a hand in cutting and trimming the Lions to their final iteration (down from eighty to thirty-six by March 25, one more round of paring to go, the last of the probable cuts walking around with targets on their backs), it is a blip in the grand scheme of things.

No, the Hohokam’s fall was more than just a sloppy wipeout, a dust-yourself-off-and-get-some-stitches sort of spill: they went poof, just disappeared. Closed their lockers one day, walked out of the stadium, and never came back. Left their ball courts, left their pole houses, left their pottery and spearheads and so many other bits scattered about their desert compounds. With time and mud, all of it got buried, just like the shark teeth, the rhinoceros footprints and fern fossils and whatever else’s been sunk below the sod. Given that vanishing act, now their name makes sense, right? Hohokam: those who have gone.

The Pima people took up the Hohokam mantle, settling along the Salt River. They managed the wave of Spanish explorers, sent them on to New Mexico and the Grand Canyon. They welcomed the westward-moving Americans, made friends enough that they became scouts for settlers, proving themselves to be useful allies. Another team, the Maricopa, came calling in the middle of the nineteenth century. Mergers are hard, but the Maricopa seemed a good partner against the Apache (the bench-clearing brawls were getting more frequent). It’s not unlike the dynamic of these men gathering every spring; strangers until they’re not, competing until they’re teammates.

And as for the team, as the spring season nears its end, the Lions head toward their own clubhouse détente. The starting pitchers are set—that game Greg Carver threw, right after his night with Tami, that would be his last—and the outfield looks like it will settle into Goodyear-Monterrey-Matthews. They cut all the bullpen catchers and auxiliary infielders, the young guys who were wearing down the starters with their overeager smiles and underwhelming play. In the clubhouse the men can move around again. This feels sustainable, they think, this configuration and scale.