Tami’s not racist, but she knows better than to go for the Hispanic players. Not that she doesn’t like them, but they won’t like her. Those guys will pick a younger woman, sometimes even young enough to get them into trouble. She got Anaheim’s Latin American scout drunk once, and all he wanted to talk about was how his top prospects kept getting themselves into teen pussy, and team counsel was on his ass. Apparently the age of consent is twelve in Panama, fourteen in Paraguay. And they’re babies themselves, the DR prospects signing the day they turn sixteen if they’re any sort of talent. Shit, she’d made a boatload of bad decisions at sixteen.

And she doesn’t mean to stereotype, but the few black guys still playing professional baseball (the numbers have dwindled since the Rickey Henderson years), aren’t usually interested in women like her. They’ll go to the “urban” clubs in the rehabbed warehouse blocks north of the train station to find edgy sorority sisters and dancers for the Suns. There are exceptions, of course. Tami had a nice time with a Padre originally from Arkansas; he had a thing for chicken-bone blondes with big hair. She hadn’t worn her hair like that since Lubbock, but teasing it came back like riding a bike.

No, as a single woman in her midforties, Tami’s best shot is with the white guys. Not Joanne’s masters of the clubhouse—too old for her—or the deer-in-the-headlights rookies, young enough to be a son, but guys a few years in, going through a hard patch. Maybe they’re struggling on the field or coming back from an injury. Wading through a divorce or adjusting to a trade. Mourning a dead parent or worrying over a sick kid. Vulnerable, somehow or other. Those are the ones to try for; they’re the ones who need it. Sometimes they remind Tami of her Danny, how after a game there was nothing he wanted more than to lay his head in her lap. It’s nice to be needed like that.

Tami knows an old wino, Troy, who worked the left field gate at Scottsdale Municipal; after flashing him a smile and doing her best shoulder-shimmy hello, maybe throwing in an I’m-glad-to-see-you-too hug, he always let her in. Someone was feeling generous and hired him at Salt River Fields, and when she steps up to the gate, he acts like it’s the world’s biggest coincidence they’ve found each other here. No harm in acting like she’s bowled over, too.