The kid didn’t look the least bit sorry. There he was – top pitching prospect in the city, maybe one of the top five in the country, on a state championship-bound team in a huge media market –  gone viral for hurling fastballs through factory windows for TikTok likes. This tells you how long I’ve been around, but it used to be that when a player got caught doing some dirt, he’d hang his head and read an apology. Once in a while it looked like he’d actually meant it too. Not this kid though. The words said “sorry,” but everything else – tone, expression, body language – said “I don’t care, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

I was covering his presser in a crowded high school gym for the Star (if you could call it that after a venture capital group bought the paper and gutted it, then sold the name to some other suits who relaunched it as an online pub that I’d be embarrassed to click on let alone write for if I didn’t need the money), and the more the kid talked the more my blood boiled. I’d been around enough egomaniacs (George Steinbrenner, Kyrie Irving during his Nets stint, and my old editor Will Branch to name a few) to become practiced at keeping myself in check, but the entitlement behind that microphone wasn’t making it easy. I was sure that most of the other journos in the room caught it too, but they either weren’t paid enough to care or were too afraid of stepping on toes, so when the Q&A opened up they lobbed softballs like Have you reached a settlement with the factory owner? Pro forma stuff. I could’ve gone that way too. Probably should’ve. The Star was already running AI-generated articles, and fears of cuts permeated the staff discord chatter. If I drew any heat, I was basically jumping to the front of the layoff line.

Thing is, I’d never been good about backing down. I’d put up with a lot from athletes and coaches and editors. I had patience, sure. But I also had lines I wouldn’t cross, and letting this kid’s arrogance go unchecked was one of them. The same writers who would spin his stunt as a bit of harmless fun would pile on with “What happened? Inside the fall of ______” pieces if he later flamed out. That wasn’t me, nor was I going to be the one to say I told you so.

Instead, I threw a changeup. I raised my hand, and when I got called on I looked the kid dead in the eye and asked him what he wanted to say to all the players who got benched or cut or had their offers pulled or lost endorsement deals for less than what he’d done. As soon as I said it, I could feel a half-dozen eyes on me. From my right, someone whispered, “What the hell, Jim?” From behind, I heard what may or may not have been “Asshole.” The potbellied coach standing beside the kid went from stony calm to tomato-faced as he shot me a death glare. The kid, for his part, finally lost his smirk. He blinked, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again, like he was chewing imaginary gum while he searched for the words. Eventually, he stammered something and I wrote it down, a bit of color for a piece that otherwise wrote itself.

The conference went on for a few minutes after that, then most of us split to file our copy. I figured I’d have something on the Star site and socials within an hour. I was early at the door when a fortyish guy in a team polo shirt stepped in front of me. “Coach wants a word,” he said, looking none too happy.

I’ll bet, I thought.

I turned and looked back. Sure enough, the coach was fuming. He wasn’t just red in the face anymore. He looked like he was halfway to a heart attack. I figured I’d let him chew me out for a while and get it out of his system and still have time to write my piece, of which I wouldn’t change or cut a single damn thing.

But then as I started to walk toward him, he and the kid exchanged a few words, and the kid walked to meet me instead. He didn’t look nearly as angry. Mostly, he looked hurt.

“Bro, why’d you try to do me like that?” he asked. From the audience, he’d looked like a giant, a few inches shy of Big Unit territory. Up close, he seemed nearer to my height, six-two or six-three. He also looked his age, like he should be asking one of my buddy’s daughters to the prom instead of pitching for pro scouts and holding press conferences.

“Someone had to,” I told him.

“It was a stupid building,” he said. “It’s not like I threw at someone’s head.”

“And you thought it was funny. And it got likes. And your coach reamed you for it. And you said you wouldn’t do it again. So what’s the big deal, right?”

“Coach said you’re just bitter that you didn’t get your shot. That’s why you’re all up in my shit.”

I blew out my arm playing college ball. The majors were never guaranteed, of course, but playing in the pros seemed to be my life’s general trajectory up to that point.

“I wrote about a lot of guys who were on their way up. Adam Ottavino. Dellin Betances. You ever make it, you ask them if I ever tried to drag them down. I wrote about guys you never heard of, either, but their names meant something back in the day. Do you think yours will a few years from now?”

“Off the record?” the kid said. “You’re a dick.”

“Off the record, it’d be good copy writing about you fucking up, so I should probably keep my mouth shut and let you, but I’m telling you, former prospect to current, that you only get one shot at this. You don’t want to live, eat, and breathe baseball anymore, don’t want all that pressure, then there’s no shame in walking away. Don’t let any coaches or teammates or anybody else tell you otherwise. It’s your arm and your life. But if this is what you’re all about, then you don’t want to spend years asking yourself ‘What if’? over some dumb decision you made.”

I know something about dumb decisions – in my case, it was over-medicating and pushing everyone away; if only they had TikTok back in the ’90s.

The kid looked at me and squinted, trying, I figured, to find the younger me in the contours of the old. “How long did it take you to stop asking?”

“About half my twenties,” I told him.

After I made assistant sports editor at the Star – the old Star – Will took me out to celebrate, allowing his desire to get hammered in a socially acceptable setting override whatever contempt he had for me. I thought we’d reached a breakthrough when he threw an arm over my shoulder, but in his next breath he told me that if we weren’t such sorry sons of bitches, he’d still be covering real news and I’d be on a big league mound making millions. That was when I decided to stop being sorry and started gunning for his job.

“Fuuuck,” the kid said, shaking his head.

“Yeah.”

The coach called the kid’s name, and he called back that he’d be right there, but before he left, he asked me if I was done dogging him.

“Don’t throw meatballs and I won’t swing.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said and walked away.

Later, when the piece ran, the kid reposted it accompanied by a laugh emoji. I thought of Will, years dead, pointing a jaundiced finger at me while he spewed rage and disappointment. Will would’ve torched the kid in column after column and felt righteous doing so. He was not my destiny, not any more than pitching in the pros had been. He was the line I would always stay inside of.

***

Zac Goldstein holds an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. His work has appeared in Ink in Thirds, The Literary Hatchet, and Litbreak Magazine, among others. A New Jersey native, he lives and teaches in North Carolina. He can be found on X @ZacRatesThings and on Instagram @zacratestheuniverse.