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.

I wish I could say everyone loves the surge, the newly fertile soil that sends sprouts growing an inch a week, that puts the Lions at the top of the spring standings. Silly, boastful ledes: The Lions are going to maul the division. These Lions are ready to pounce on the competition. The surge is good, yes, but of course good is bad for some. Some plants drown in the too-deep water. Others get overshadowed by their neighbors’ broad leaves and wither without enough light. Some plants get ripped from the ground by passing water, their roots not strong enough, and are carried so far from where they started they don’t even recognize the land where their wave stops. Is that what happens to Jason, when he walks into the casino after dinner and comes out squinting into the morning sun with a game—a real game, a baseball game—to play? Does he recognize that morning, does he know that night?