Enter stage left, Tamara Rowland. Mind you, I’m not pinning all that’s to come on Tami—she’d argue, Wrong place, wrong time, rotten luck. And she’d have a point. In our profession, we try to be objective, and I’d like to give Tami the benefit of the doubt. Jason had plenty of mess before their first gin and diet, and he made more than a few bozo moves on his own. The scope of the mess is still unclear, but I know for a fact that Jason has been in Arizona for three weeks and he’s never once used the front door to his Arizona home, even as Liana gets up and goes to school every day, teaching a bunch of snot-nosed first graders at Sandpiper Elementary. And it wasn’t just Michael’s memory, there is a batting cage in Jason’s backyard—so why is he working out at Salt River?

Last season he was fine, but this winter the line started going shaky. Three months of paparazzi photos, and not one with Liana by his side. Sightings in Vegas, look-alikes in Atlantic City. His California house is on the market, as is a flood of memorabilia. Nobody’s connected the dots, but I have a mind to.

Look, I said “we” and “our” like I’m still part of the corps, like they didn’t buy me out when the paper took its most recent nosedive that sad day, two Februarys ago. Isn’t half my pension concession enough? I’d said, not wanting to turn over my creased and cracked credential, the laminate so familiar it felt like a second skin. But my new boss, some dot-commer who looked younger than my son, shook his head no. He could not condone misrepresentation, he said with a holier-than-thou sniff.

What does a sportswriter do without his badge? Loiter around the parking lot, that’s what, watching for players to come out of the clubhouse, hoping he can launch a question over the heads of the shortstop-size kids waiting for signatures, their uncapped Sharpies waving (don’t wear a white shirt). He’s not a hell of a lot different from Tamara Rowland, truth be told—yesterday, I spied her sitting in the shade, a few yards away from my own perch.