The Lions ride their own wall of water, and surge forward through the spring. The fielders who went butterfingered over the winter regain their touch; the bats, under Coach Mike’s grouchy supervision, grow as strong and thick as banyan trees. The pitchers find their arms, their heat and precision fed by the newly fertile soil that is a team coming together. And the team is aligning, starting to look like a cohesive unit, like a contender for the division—the bullish among us suggest the pennant.

“Among us”—how easy it is to insert myself back into the booth, to recall the smells of burned coffee and comped hot dogs and that neon-green relish, the anticipation of getting your stat sheet from some zitty media ops intern. How natural to put myself back in the postgame press conferences, Dorsey Paine bloviating in his charming way, Jimmy Cardozo cracking jokes, Jason, with his normal reticence, refusing to talk about anything but on-the-field action. He won’t talk about the Townsend trade or how he feels about that old-timer Monterrey starting again in center field. Won’t talk about the divorce or rumors that Nike is making him a shoe or anything at all about Frank Lloyd Wright. If I’d been granted access, if I’d been in the room, I’d’ve asked: Is it true you lost half a million on Thursday night after Dorsey dropped you off at the stadium to “get your car”? And another $500K on Friday, not even caring if people were watching you getting mopped? Sara’s not the only one to see him scuttling back across the bridge between the casino and the field, late for his 7:00 a.m. date; I’ve seen it, too. A guy who works security at Talking Stick, he tells me that Jason Goodyear is in and out twice a day, pregame and post, if not another time in the middle (and how, I wonder, does he manage that?). And it’s not like he’s sleeping there; only baby Goslin and his helicopter mom have sprung for the six-week suite. If given the opportunity at the presser, I’d’ve asked: What the hell are you doing?

There’s an obvious answer: poker, blackjack, occasionally craps. Just like there’s an obvious answer for the jack of diamonds tattooed on his chest: this guy’s an addict, hooked on poker like he was—hopefully still is—hooked on sport. Is it because one thing—baseball—became too easy that he had to hop to another table? Because now he’s seeking competition of any stripe, of all stripes. Hitting balls, throwing rocks, getting women—even mature ladies like Tami—to wobble over him. When you start seeing everything as sport, life as something to win, the thrills start piling up, or at least the possibility of them. That’s probably the straw that fucked the camel, to borrow a phrase from Herb, between Jason and Liana. She’d waited patient through the season, was looking forward to a quiet, a regular, a calm off-season with her still-new husband. Instead he went on a surge of his own, manic and brusque and only really focused on working out and then getting back to a poker table and staying there. The whole month of November, he was never once home for dinner. Liana didn’t tell me that detail, but her housekeeper was happy enough to share it in exchange for a hundred-dollar bill. The worst of it was when he said he was going to L.A. for a few days, only to drive across town, binge for two nights and a day on the floor, stopping just for food and the john. He played something like two hundred rounds, most of them lost. At the end of that epic session, he was down most of a million.