And in watching Tami take the stage, I can assure you it isn’t “wrong place, wrong time” as it is happening. To get Jason Goodyear in her thrall, to share a meal with him, to have their bodies close, to imagine them even closer is a thrill. She’s not thinking about ripple effects, not thinking about dominos—she’s mooning over his sapphire eyes then hoping for dinner then watching the landscape in the moonlight then wondering at how much cash is in the till. But there are those encounters, in baseball and in life, that send every sort of tailspin into motion, and with their meeting, Tami might just’ve sent our man whirling.

PROSPECTS

Tamara Rowland knows only the rookies hang out by the exit. Done-up divorcées, new-to-Scottsdale cocktail waitresses, ladies in from Single-A-affiliate sorts of towns—places so small they don’t know any better. Tami could find half a dozen of them squeezed into the line of four-footers, grubby-fingered little boys with dirt under their nails and summer freckles just starting to blush. Nearby, but probably not attentive enough, the kids’ bored-looking fathers hang back in the shade, thumbing phones and tugging on their belts. Tami knows not to be distracted by these men: doesn’t matter if they’re handsome in that midlist-Hollywood way or if they’ve got a whiff of Silicon Valley about them—these guys are still mentally in California, booking dot-com deals or toothpaste commercials, thinking about something, someone, far away. After all, the boys-only trip to watch Lions spring training is as much a gift to the woman waiting back home (a quiet house for three straight days, a weekend for brunch with girlfriends, a free afternoon to call her mom) as it is a dose of father-son bonding.

Also queued up by the players’ exit: the too-pushy teen and preteen boys, pudgy middle schoolers and undersize underclassmen who bike over from the local schools, just as soon as the final bell rings. Zitty, awkward guys who’ll never make it, definitely not with girls, and unlikely even into the ranks of the JV squad. Equipment manager, maybe. Without better prospects, they throw their hearts into this, baseball fandom, and the signatures they might catch as athletes depart the stadium. Tami feels for these boys, remembers how touch-and-go it was with her son Connor, before he’d shot up and thinned out and learned that no woman likes a guy who makes fart noises for fun.