THIRD

Let me remind you of our timeline. We’re a few games into the season, a few billion years into Arizona’s geological history. At this point, like a determined left-hander learning to switch-hit, the ocean floor rose. At first, the batter’s success is sporadic and slow, but then—the crotchety old hitting coach barking instructions, yelling at the batter about his feet, his grip, his eye, his goddamn eye—the player gets the hang of it, and the net of the batting cage’s far boundary starts to push out in a steady pulse. Contact, contact, contact, says the crack of the bat, says the creak of rising land. What the fuck did you do, Herb Allison yells into the phone when Jason calls from the precinct at 2:00 a.m. What the hell, Woody Botter hollers when Jason walks into the clubhouse the next morning, looking as rough as a rosin bag after a rainstorm. He did what? Liana asks when a reporter, waiting at the edge of her property, shouts out a question about her husband’s trespassing charge. No comment, she corrects herself, hustling into her car and off to school. That’s their promise, hers and Jason’s. That wasn’t just Twitter gossip Deidre heard: the picture-perfect marriage to the elementary school teacher? A source, and not just a wined-up left fielder, confirmed they’re split. She gets the house with the brand-new batting cage in the backyard. She gets every penny promised in the generous prenup, so long as she keeps saying: No comment.

Up, the seabed climbed, until the Arizona landscape looked more like East Africa, a loose and grassy savannah, dust-brown and baked. Up, the seabed climbed, until the last corals were gone, the fish scratched from the order. They were replaced by mastodons, by giant ground sloths, by bullpen-size beavers. And dinosaurs: a duck-billed hadrosaur darts between the bases as a long-necked sauropod ambles the concourse like a lazy peanut vendor. But no lions yet—the MGM lion, the team’s inspiration, would need more time to cook. And no humans. A few million years would have to pass before the giant footsteps of the titanothere could be shrunk down to a man’s size twelve, to say nothing of Jason Goodyear’s forthcoming signature line. I’d tell Jason to think about that the next time he sinks a boot in the warning track after a downpour. Look at the tiny impression your cleat makes, Goody. Think of those ancient footsteps, and remember: you are a speck.

Not that he needs any more lectures right about now, especially not from a sportswriter whom he only ever addressed in press conferences as “the older fellow with the ’stache.” How quick does a face like mine fade? Does a guy like him notice when a guy like me goes missing, when half the press corps is wiped out in eighteen months, replaced by tweet-happy rooks whose only experience is bumbling through the scores on college radio? Theirs make my early dispatches seem like Chekhov; the new form makes this story, the long route, feel that much more necessary.