Out into the world and into baseball clubhouses they come, grown and sturdy men who five months ago imagined the summer would be no different than any of their summers.
If nothing else, and more than a few had been raised on little else, there’d be baseball.
For many, the game was their first crush before it was their steady, their first hustle before it was their career, their first blush of faith before it was their soul. You come to rely on a presence like that, a routine that hardly requires steering anymore, just the tap-tap-tap to keep it centered.