americanleaguer, meet brain.
Brain, meet americanleaguer.
Now that you guys are acquainted, maybe things will go more smoothly here.
Just realized that I neglected to post my own first story to my own livejournal. Seriously, guys, I sometimes wonder about my own mental fitness.
Anyways, it's the same thing that's been posted around, plus an extra two sections at the end that I added. No idea how long this thing is gonna be in the end, but it's looking pretty damn lengthy. Oh well. I'll just keep a-chippin' away...
Title: Still hasn't got one. I should just call it "The Long and Rambling Derek Jeter Story".
Pairing: Derek Jeter/Jorge Posada (implied), Jorge Posada/Bernie Williams, more to come if I continue it, I guess.
Rating: Definitely getting up into the R range with the first of those two new end sections :/
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been, or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
Derek Jeter isn’t having a very good winter, and he’s so worried about the team’s troubles that he isn’t at all sanguine about next year.
He wishes that this was something he had only told himself after the season ended (exploded? Crash-landed?), but he can’t fool himself that much. In some deep, dark part of his mind he knows that these troubles have been plaguing them all season, possibly even before. He’s still not sure if there’s one name for all of it, but he thinks there should be. The Red Sox fans are calling it ‘The Choke’, but that seems to be the result, not the cause, and is wholly inadequate for what went wrong with this splendid, glamorous team.
Derek doesn’t want to think about it, because it makes him a little sick, but even the start of basketball season can’t cheer him up enough to take his mind off of it. After a while he stops even trying to fight the near-obsessive thoughts, the worries, the maybe-sos and what-ifs. He should have been able to hold them all together, but he couldn’t do it, and without the solid comfort he’s had in past offseasons, the warm winter-warding presence of his team, there’s nothing to stop him from brooding on the couch, taking the season’s memories and sifting them through his mental fingers time and time again, trying to separate the dark from the light.
It’s all pinstriped, though, dark and light alternating in equal amounts, so the trouble’s all mixed up in the team and the game itself and he has to sift and sift again.
---------------------------------
He got a taste of it early in the summer, when every field was a bright, newly washed green and every sky a sharp, penetrating blue. At first he thought that it was just the Yankee mystique, taken to a new level-guys would get a homerun and trot around the bases, sedately clap each other on the back in the dugout. Hell, not even the entire dugout would get up to greet the returning runner. Nods, high fives, back slaps, these were the congratulatory repetoire of the New York Yankees.
It was OK. Maybe everyone just figured that they were the Yankees, winning was their due. There was no reason to act like every run scored was the first one they’d ever brought in. Win enough and you can afford to be cavalier about it. Those other teams who celebrated orgasmically at every smallest provocation-that was low-class. The Yankees, they were high-class baseball, all the way.
And Derek Jeter, captain of the classy crew, didn’t think that anything was wrong.
---------------------------------
The pitching staff gradually revealed itself to be like some sort of subtly warped family. It wasn’t out-and-out dysfunction, the kind of stuff you could see and treat, like back when David Wells had been on the team and Derek knew that he was going to have a drunkenly belligerent pitcher to quiet down 60% of the time. These days, Lieber and Moose have some sort of weird alpha-male dominance dance going on that is understood in all its intricacies by only themselves. Vasquez is treated like a disappointing child by all the other pitchers, until Tanyon Sturtze gets playing time and is treated like more of a kid, even though he’s 34 and Javy is only 28. Kevin Brown won’t talk to anyone, not even Torre, unless he absolutely has to. El Duque has started getting more and more imperial with everyone as his knee gets more and more painful, until by the time August rolls around only Mo will willingly talk to him.
Giambi came to spring training looking thin and sick, and Derek pulled him aside and asked if there was anything he needed to know about, but Jason just looked at him with a sullen glare and didn’t say anything. The longer he sat on the bench, the more sullen and intractable he got. Derek wants to call someone in Oakland, see if Jason ever acted like this before, but he doesn’t really know anyone on the team this year, a lot of kids and no former Yankees except for Chris Hammond and Jim Mecir, a couple of middling pitchers he never really knew anyways, so he never does call.
He secretly wonders and worries that it’s steroids, or rather was steroids, until after the season when he opens the paper one day and doesn’t have to wonder anymore.
Sheffield is violent in everything-either violently friendly or violently angry, violently hot and violently cold by turns. He likes to spout off to the media, which puts Derek in the unpleasant position of having to do media damage control, but that’s not what upsets him. Both John Olerud and the rookie, Brad Halsey, are terrified of Sheffield, go out of their way to avoid his locker after practices and everything, but neither one will tell Derek why, no matter how hard he presses, and Derek honestly can’t imagine what the issue might be, which just makes him worry more.
Matsui lives in his own private world of language and baseball barriers. The guys jokingly call him Godzilla, say he’s a monster with the bat, but Matsui just nods seriously and retreats into his corner of the clubhouse, ignoring everyone. His severely limited English and severely pumped-up bat intimidate everyone to the point where they’re perfectly happy to leave him alone. Derek hates seeing one of the best hitters on the team sitting by himself all the time, but there’s nothing to be done.
Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada are Derek’s two oldest friends on the team, and one hot day in July after a particularly grueling batting practice session he walks in on them in the shower. They don’t hear him, and he watches for a few minutes before walking back out of the showers and right out of the locker room. He doesn’t stop walking until he’s back in his own apartment, where he collapses on his couch and doesn’t move for the rest of the night. A week later he turns his back to Jorge in the steam room for the first time in his life, and he thinks his heart is broken, but then Jorge pats him on the flat of his shoulder blade and says, “Nothing lasts forever, Derek,” and walks out, and Derek thinks, screw his heart, his entire fucking circulatory system just broke.
For another two weeks after that Bernie ducks his head whenever they have to talk, maybe ashamed but definitely aware of what he took away, but after a month he starts staring insolently and defiantly, and these days he just acts like Derek is less than a pile of discarded sunflower seed shells, not even worthy of his attention, just someone else to be coolly polite to when there’s a game going on, nothing at all like someone he’s won and lost and loved and played with these past 10 years.
---------------------------------
A-Rod is a whole series of issues unto himself. Derek never asked for a puppy dog. Especially not one prone to hitting slumps and patchy defense, one who whines continuously, never leaves Derek alone, sulks like a small child denied his favorite dessert at the least hint of trouble, and finally, fatally, fails to deliver in the end when they all need him to.
Derek tries not to think about the amount of money A-Rod will be getting from the Yankees in the near future. He knows that he should be generous with Steinbrenner, because lots of other owners would have traded him away by now, but he can’t help thinking that they should have let the Red Sox have him.
---------------------------------
At the start of the season Derek just thinks this is all normal clubhouse trouble. He’s always been a Yankee, and the Yankees have always been a little tempestuous. He doesn’t realize that it’s any worse than it’s ever been until April 19th.
It’s some foul Bostonian holiday called Patriots’ Day, and the city is packed with baseball fans and marathon runners. Derek looks up at his digital hotel alarm clock at exactly 11:11:11 the night before, and the game’s at 11 am the next morning. He’s normally not too superstitious, but the Yankees have only 1 win out of three games in this four game series with the Red Sox, 1 game left, and all those floating ‘1’s are making him nervous.
By the time he gets onto the field he’ll have his famous calm eyes in place (Jorge used to tease him about that, ask if he should be jealous of Tim McCarver, he’s so into your eyes, I gotta worry about him, D?), but he’s jittery in the visitor’s clubhouse, picking up his batting helmet and tossing it from hand to hand, tying and retying his cleats, tightening and loosening his belt innumerable times. A-Rod’s got the locker next to his, but he’s mired in the drama of his own hitting slump and doesn’t follow Derek’s every move with his usual puppyish devotion.
The pitcher for the Sox is gangly Bronson Arroyo, who looks hittable early but settles down as he gets into the rhythm of things. It ends up 5-4, Sox, a 1 point loss. The Yankees go down 3-1 in the series. A-Rod goes 1-17 in the series, and his one hit is a single. “Ones,” Derek thinks darkly as they file out of the stadium with their heads down. He wants to be out of this horrible city as soon as he possibly can, doesn’t want anything even remotely like a taste of Boston on the back of his tongue, but they can’t get on the bus without seeing the Sox fans who wait for them at the gate. They point at their obscenely red jersies and chant, “Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” with equally obscene gusto. One burly fan, a thatch of curly brown hair jammed uneasily under a battered Red Sox hat, holds up a sign that reads ‘Boston’s No. 1”, and Derek shudders quietly.
In the safety of the bus, everyone slumps silently in their seats, except for Tom Gordon, who got the loss and feels badly about it, and is still green enough as a Yankee to not know any better, so he tries to inject a little levity into the general gloom and shouts out, “Yankees suck? That’s the best they got? Hey, at least ‘1918’ is a creative chant!” No one says anything, because he was with the Red Sox only a few years ago, and Derek is too distracted by the bad half of binary code to back up the new reliever, so the brave attempt at humor dies in the humid Boston air and eventually Gordon learns that this is not a team to joke around with.
---------------------------------
On April 23 they lose to the Red Sox in New York, 11-2. Matsui is the only one who scores, but when he gets his manly back slaps and high fives in the dugout, he just nods quietly, shows a little tooth, and sits back down, so the points might as well have never happened.
The next night they lose 3-2, a 1 point game. Derek hasn’t had a hit in ages, and while no one boos him in the Stadium he sometimes wishes they would. A-Rod had a homerun, so now he has emotion to spare for his exalted captain, but when he slings his arm companionably over Derek’s shoulders, tells him it’s OK, everyone slumps sometimes, prattles meaningless platitudes, Derek finds himself wishing miserably for Jorge and a better kind of comfort.
Jorge’s in a dark corner somewhere with Bernie, but Derek won’t know that for another couple of months.
The night after that they lose again, 2-0. The crowd finally does boo, when Derek strikes out for the 25th time in a row. In the clubhouse El Duque growls darkly that they had no right to boo him, not Captain Derek Jeter, in what he probably thinks is a comforting tone. Derek shakes his head sadly, but secretly he feels a little relieved. It’s about time the fans started realizing he doesn’t have all the answers, he thinks.
---------------------------------
He’s started noticing things. When Manny Ramirez cracks a Javy curveball in that last game, bringing in him and Mark Bellhorn, they’re met by half the team at the mouth of the dugout, and they get slapped around by the other half once they’re actually in. No one seems to care if they look manly and tough-they grab each other’s butts, rub foreheads, bump hips, hug so fiercely that they’re in solid body contact from nose to knees.
The Yankees come back from the Sox series angry and sweep the As. Derek tries to hug Sheffield like the Red Sox do at the end of the third game, but Sheffield steps back and turns it into a Yankee hug, shoulders and upper chests touching lightly, lower bodies angled carefully apart. He gives Derek a funny look afterwards, but Derek laughs and punches his shoulder heartily, and Sheffield forgets about it by the time he goes to sleep that night.
Derek doesn’t, though. He lies in bed and runs film through his head, but it’s not the endless reel of pitchers and batters that the club collects for the players to study. He’s contemplating the way Kevin Millar and Manny Ramirez approach one another when they go in for a hug, the way they holler and wrap their arms up together and how they scrub the head of the other with batting-glove-thick fingers. He flexes his own fingers in the dark, holding them up to see their dim shape, and tries to imagine someone grabbing him up after a homerun, throwing his batting helmet to the dirt and squeezing him around his chest, while he ruffled his hands through their short, regulation-cut hair, both of them laughing and no one worried about how anything looks.
He almost thinks he can feel it, the soft bristly hair felt dimly through tar-sticky gloves and the rumble of someone else’s joyful laughter in his gut, until he remembers the empty sensation of Sheffield pulling his body away, and then he’s lost it. There’s a model lying next to him in bed, her bright blond hair fanned sleekly over the silk pillow, one slender leg thrown sleepily over his, but with Sheffield’s mistrustful face hanging at the front of his mind, he goes to sleep feeling distant and a little cold.
---------------------------------
On May 18th they’re playing the goddamn Diamondbacks. Derek feels like breaking something. He stands at the plate, hot Arizona air suffocating him, sweat trickling maddeningly down his back, making him long to step off and scratch it, but can’t do that, not in front of the cameras. The over-tall blur on the mound sends something small and fast past him, weirdly enough he can almost see the stitches on the ball as it goes by while simultaneously realizing that he has no chance of hitting the thing, oh look, another strike, thank-you-very-much-Mr.-Randy-Johnson.
Johnson throws a perfect game, so at least it wasn’t just him. They lose in 11 innings, and the Red Sox beat the Devil Rays so Boston is in first place. Ones, ones everywhere, and Derek leans his forehead against the cool tile in the showers, thank fuck for air conditioning and cold water, but he still itches from sweat and dust and a bad loss. Everyone else is already out of the showers, and he hears Giambi hollering about something, but he just lets it go, man, not worth the trouble right now.
Back at the hotel he sits on his bed, AC cranked as high as it will go, and he thinks that he doesn’t even care if they win the next game or not, he just wants out of Arizona. “Give me New York,” he thinks, desperately, “give me coolly lit restaurants with immaculate food and sharp clubs that never close their doors to you and people wearing Yankees hats everywhere.”
When Jorge knocks, softly, at exactly 1 am, Derek pulls him into the room and shoves him up against the door and attacks him with his mouth, hands fisted in Jorge’s thin cotton tshirt, hips grinding so hard that he imagines Jorge can feel the grain of the door’s wood on his ass through his blue jeans. He muscles him around and hurls them both onto the anonymous hotel bed, breaking the feral kiss only long enough to divest Jorge of his shirt and briefly bite at his pectorals, later growling, “Jorge, Jorge, Jorge, Posada, fuck, fuck, Jorge,” but thinking, “Two, two, this is two, two is better than one, unless it’s baseball and then you can’t be two, you have to be one, one, fuck, Posada.”
---------------------------------
On May 26th they come from behind to beat the Orioles in Baltimore two nights in a row. He sees Sheffield direct a dark and worrying grin at the Orioles’ dugout, and BJ Surhoff gets a comical look of absolute panic on his face before knocking past several of his teammates and hurrying down into the clubhouse. Derek pulls Torre aside later and asks if there’s anything there he should know about, but Joe just shrugs and says he knows they both played together in ’89, the Milwaukee Brewers, that was before your day Captain, Gary must’ve been just 20 back then, a mere whelp if you can picture him that young, Terry fucking Francona was on that team, managing the Red Sox now, and can you believe that?
Derek tries to think what history Sheffield could have with BJ that would send him running for the clubhouse 16 years later, but he has no idea. Halsey and Olerud aren’t on the team yet, or they might be able to tell him, but even when they are and he’s worrying about them between games they won’t say a word (what the hell do they have in common anyways, other than this weird thing with Sheffield, the two are like completely unrelated, he just doesn’t get it) and he’s seriously considering calling BJ at this point, honest to God, because this club is getting really fucking weird as the season progresses.
---
It's just gonna keep going, and going, and going...
Now that you guys are acquainted, maybe things will go more smoothly here.
Just realized that I neglected to post my own first story to my own livejournal. Seriously, guys, I sometimes wonder about my own mental fitness.
Anyways, it's the same thing that's been posted around, plus an extra two sections at the end that I added. No idea how long this thing is gonna be in the end, but it's looking pretty damn lengthy. Oh well. I'll just keep a-chippin' away...
Title: Still hasn't got one. I should just call it "The Long and Rambling Derek Jeter Story".
Pairing: Derek Jeter/Jorge Posada (implied), Jorge Posada/Bernie Williams, more to come if I continue it, I guess.
Rating: Definitely getting up into the R range with the first of those two new end sections :/
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been, or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
Derek Jeter isn’t having a very good winter, and he’s so worried about the team’s troubles that he isn’t at all sanguine about next year.
He wishes that this was something he had only told himself after the season ended (exploded? Crash-landed?), but he can’t fool himself that much. In some deep, dark part of his mind he knows that these troubles have been plaguing them all season, possibly even before. He’s still not sure if there’s one name for all of it, but he thinks there should be. The Red Sox fans are calling it ‘The Choke’, but that seems to be the result, not the cause, and is wholly inadequate for what went wrong with this splendid, glamorous team.
Derek doesn’t want to think about it, because it makes him a little sick, but even the start of basketball season can’t cheer him up enough to take his mind off of it. After a while he stops even trying to fight the near-obsessive thoughts, the worries, the maybe-sos and what-ifs. He should have been able to hold them all together, but he couldn’t do it, and without the solid comfort he’s had in past offseasons, the warm winter-warding presence of his team, there’s nothing to stop him from brooding on the couch, taking the season’s memories and sifting them through his mental fingers time and time again, trying to separate the dark from the light.
It’s all pinstriped, though, dark and light alternating in equal amounts, so the trouble’s all mixed up in the team and the game itself and he has to sift and sift again.
---------------------------------
He got a taste of it early in the summer, when every field was a bright, newly washed green and every sky a sharp, penetrating blue. At first he thought that it was just the Yankee mystique, taken to a new level-guys would get a homerun and trot around the bases, sedately clap each other on the back in the dugout. Hell, not even the entire dugout would get up to greet the returning runner. Nods, high fives, back slaps, these were the congratulatory repetoire of the New York Yankees.
It was OK. Maybe everyone just figured that they were the Yankees, winning was their due. There was no reason to act like every run scored was the first one they’d ever brought in. Win enough and you can afford to be cavalier about it. Those other teams who celebrated orgasmically at every smallest provocation-that was low-class. The Yankees, they were high-class baseball, all the way.
And Derek Jeter, captain of the classy crew, didn’t think that anything was wrong.
---------------------------------
The pitching staff gradually revealed itself to be like some sort of subtly warped family. It wasn’t out-and-out dysfunction, the kind of stuff you could see and treat, like back when David Wells had been on the team and Derek knew that he was going to have a drunkenly belligerent pitcher to quiet down 60% of the time. These days, Lieber and Moose have some sort of weird alpha-male dominance dance going on that is understood in all its intricacies by only themselves. Vasquez is treated like a disappointing child by all the other pitchers, until Tanyon Sturtze gets playing time and is treated like more of a kid, even though he’s 34 and Javy is only 28. Kevin Brown won’t talk to anyone, not even Torre, unless he absolutely has to. El Duque has started getting more and more imperial with everyone as his knee gets more and more painful, until by the time August rolls around only Mo will willingly talk to him.
Giambi came to spring training looking thin and sick, and Derek pulled him aside and asked if there was anything he needed to know about, but Jason just looked at him with a sullen glare and didn’t say anything. The longer he sat on the bench, the more sullen and intractable he got. Derek wants to call someone in Oakland, see if Jason ever acted like this before, but he doesn’t really know anyone on the team this year, a lot of kids and no former Yankees except for Chris Hammond and Jim Mecir, a couple of middling pitchers he never really knew anyways, so he never does call.
He secretly wonders and worries that it’s steroids, or rather was steroids, until after the season when he opens the paper one day and doesn’t have to wonder anymore.
Sheffield is violent in everything-either violently friendly or violently angry, violently hot and violently cold by turns. He likes to spout off to the media, which puts Derek in the unpleasant position of having to do media damage control, but that’s not what upsets him. Both John Olerud and the rookie, Brad Halsey, are terrified of Sheffield, go out of their way to avoid his locker after practices and everything, but neither one will tell Derek why, no matter how hard he presses, and Derek honestly can’t imagine what the issue might be, which just makes him worry more.
Matsui lives in his own private world of language and baseball barriers. The guys jokingly call him Godzilla, say he’s a monster with the bat, but Matsui just nods seriously and retreats into his corner of the clubhouse, ignoring everyone. His severely limited English and severely pumped-up bat intimidate everyone to the point where they’re perfectly happy to leave him alone. Derek hates seeing one of the best hitters on the team sitting by himself all the time, but there’s nothing to be done.
Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada are Derek’s two oldest friends on the team, and one hot day in July after a particularly grueling batting practice session he walks in on them in the shower. They don’t hear him, and he watches for a few minutes before walking back out of the showers and right out of the locker room. He doesn’t stop walking until he’s back in his own apartment, where he collapses on his couch and doesn’t move for the rest of the night. A week later he turns his back to Jorge in the steam room for the first time in his life, and he thinks his heart is broken, but then Jorge pats him on the flat of his shoulder blade and says, “Nothing lasts forever, Derek,” and walks out, and Derek thinks, screw his heart, his entire fucking circulatory system just broke.
For another two weeks after that Bernie ducks his head whenever they have to talk, maybe ashamed but definitely aware of what he took away, but after a month he starts staring insolently and defiantly, and these days he just acts like Derek is less than a pile of discarded sunflower seed shells, not even worthy of his attention, just someone else to be coolly polite to when there’s a game going on, nothing at all like someone he’s won and lost and loved and played with these past 10 years.
---------------------------------
A-Rod is a whole series of issues unto himself. Derek never asked for a puppy dog. Especially not one prone to hitting slumps and patchy defense, one who whines continuously, never leaves Derek alone, sulks like a small child denied his favorite dessert at the least hint of trouble, and finally, fatally, fails to deliver in the end when they all need him to.
Derek tries not to think about the amount of money A-Rod will be getting from the Yankees in the near future. He knows that he should be generous with Steinbrenner, because lots of other owners would have traded him away by now, but he can’t help thinking that they should have let the Red Sox have him.
---------------------------------
At the start of the season Derek just thinks this is all normal clubhouse trouble. He’s always been a Yankee, and the Yankees have always been a little tempestuous. He doesn’t realize that it’s any worse than it’s ever been until April 19th.
It’s some foul Bostonian holiday called Patriots’ Day, and the city is packed with baseball fans and marathon runners. Derek looks up at his digital hotel alarm clock at exactly 11:11:11 the night before, and the game’s at 11 am the next morning. He’s normally not too superstitious, but the Yankees have only 1 win out of three games in this four game series with the Red Sox, 1 game left, and all those floating ‘1’s are making him nervous.
By the time he gets onto the field he’ll have his famous calm eyes in place (Jorge used to tease him about that, ask if he should be jealous of Tim McCarver, he’s so into your eyes, I gotta worry about him, D?), but he’s jittery in the visitor’s clubhouse, picking up his batting helmet and tossing it from hand to hand, tying and retying his cleats, tightening and loosening his belt innumerable times. A-Rod’s got the locker next to his, but he’s mired in the drama of his own hitting slump and doesn’t follow Derek’s every move with his usual puppyish devotion.
The pitcher for the Sox is gangly Bronson Arroyo, who looks hittable early but settles down as he gets into the rhythm of things. It ends up 5-4, Sox, a 1 point loss. The Yankees go down 3-1 in the series. A-Rod goes 1-17 in the series, and his one hit is a single. “Ones,” Derek thinks darkly as they file out of the stadium with their heads down. He wants to be out of this horrible city as soon as he possibly can, doesn’t want anything even remotely like a taste of Boston on the back of his tongue, but they can’t get on the bus without seeing the Sox fans who wait for them at the gate. They point at their obscenely red jersies and chant, “Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” with equally obscene gusto. One burly fan, a thatch of curly brown hair jammed uneasily under a battered Red Sox hat, holds up a sign that reads ‘Boston’s No. 1”, and Derek shudders quietly.
In the safety of the bus, everyone slumps silently in their seats, except for Tom Gordon, who got the loss and feels badly about it, and is still green enough as a Yankee to not know any better, so he tries to inject a little levity into the general gloom and shouts out, “Yankees suck? That’s the best they got? Hey, at least ‘1918’ is a creative chant!” No one says anything, because he was with the Red Sox only a few years ago, and Derek is too distracted by the bad half of binary code to back up the new reliever, so the brave attempt at humor dies in the humid Boston air and eventually Gordon learns that this is not a team to joke around with.
---------------------------------
On April 23 they lose to the Red Sox in New York, 11-2. Matsui is the only one who scores, but when he gets his manly back slaps and high fives in the dugout, he just nods quietly, shows a little tooth, and sits back down, so the points might as well have never happened.
The next night they lose 3-2, a 1 point game. Derek hasn’t had a hit in ages, and while no one boos him in the Stadium he sometimes wishes they would. A-Rod had a homerun, so now he has emotion to spare for his exalted captain, but when he slings his arm companionably over Derek’s shoulders, tells him it’s OK, everyone slumps sometimes, prattles meaningless platitudes, Derek finds himself wishing miserably for Jorge and a better kind of comfort.
Jorge’s in a dark corner somewhere with Bernie, but Derek won’t know that for another couple of months.
The night after that they lose again, 2-0. The crowd finally does boo, when Derek strikes out for the 25th time in a row. In the clubhouse El Duque growls darkly that they had no right to boo him, not Captain Derek Jeter, in what he probably thinks is a comforting tone. Derek shakes his head sadly, but secretly he feels a little relieved. It’s about time the fans started realizing he doesn’t have all the answers, he thinks.
---------------------------------
He’s started noticing things. When Manny Ramirez cracks a Javy curveball in that last game, bringing in him and Mark Bellhorn, they’re met by half the team at the mouth of the dugout, and they get slapped around by the other half once they’re actually in. No one seems to care if they look manly and tough-they grab each other’s butts, rub foreheads, bump hips, hug so fiercely that they’re in solid body contact from nose to knees.
The Yankees come back from the Sox series angry and sweep the As. Derek tries to hug Sheffield like the Red Sox do at the end of the third game, but Sheffield steps back and turns it into a Yankee hug, shoulders and upper chests touching lightly, lower bodies angled carefully apart. He gives Derek a funny look afterwards, but Derek laughs and punches his shoulder heartily, and Sheffield forgets about it by the time he goes to sleep that night.
Derek doesn’t, though. He lies in bed and runs film through his head, but it’s not the endless reel of pitchers and batters that the club collects for the players to study. He’s contemplating the way Kevin Millar and Manny Ramirez approach one another when they go in for a hug, the way they holler and wrap their arms up together and how they scrub the head of the other with batting-glove-thick fingers. He flexes his own fingers in the dark, holding them up to see their dim shape, and tries to imagine someone grabbing him up after a homerun, throwing his batting helmet to the dirt and squeezing him around his chest, while he ruffled his hands through their short, regulation-cut hair, both of them laughing and no one worried about how anything looks.
He almost thinks he can feel it, the soft bristly hair felt dimly through tar-sticky gloves and the rumble of someone else’s joyful laughter in his gut, until he remembers the empty sensation of Sheffield pulling his body away, and then he’s lost it. There’s a model lying next to him in bed, her bright blond hair fanned sleekly over the silk pillow, one slender leg thrown sleepily over his, but with Sheffield’s mistrustful face hanging at the front of his mind, he goes to sleep feeling distant and a little cold.
---------------------------------
On May 18th they’re playing the goddamn Diamondbacks. Derek feels like breaking something. He stands at the plate, hot Arizona air suffocating him, sweat trickling maddeningly down his back, making him long to step off and scratch it, but can’t do that, not in front of the cameras. The over-tall blur on the mound sends something small and fast past him, weirdly enough he can almost see the stitches on the ball as it goes by while simultaneously realizing that he has no chance of hitting the thing, oh look, another strike, thank-you-very-much-Mr.-Randy-Johnson.
Johnson throws a perfect game, so at least it wasn’t just him. They lose in 11 innings, and the Red Sox beat the Devil Rays so Boston is in first place. Ones, ones everywhere, and Derek leans his forehead against the cool tile in the showers, thank fuck for air conditioning and cold water, but he still itches from sweat and dust and a bad loss. Everyone else is already out of the showers, and he hears Giambi hollering about something, but he just lets it go, man, not worth the trouble right now.
Back at the hotel he sits on his bed, AC cranked as high as it will go, and he thinks that he doesn’t even care if they win the next game or not, he just wants out of Arizona. “Give me New York,” he thinks, desperately, “give me coolly lit restaurants with immaculate food and sharp clubs that never close their doors to you and people wearing Yankees hats everywhere.”
When Jorge knocks, softly, at exactly 1 am, Derek pulls him into the room and shoves him up against the door and attacks him with his mouth, hands fisted in Jorge’s thin cotton tshirt, hips grinding so hard that he imagines Jorge can feel the grain of the door’s wood on his ass through his blue jeans. He muscles him around and hurls them both onto the anonymous hotel bed, breaking the feral kiss only long enough to divest Jorge of his shirt and briefly bite at his pectorals, later growling, “Jorge, Jorge, Jorge, Posada, fuck, fuck, Jorge,” but thinking, “Two, two, this is two, two is better than one, unless it’s baseball and then you can’t be two, you have to be one, one, fuck, Posada.”
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On May 26th they come from behind to beat the Orioles in Baltimore two nights in a row. He sees Sheffield direct a dark and worrying grin at the Orioles’ dugout, and BJ Surhoff gets a comical look of absolute panic on his face before knocking past several of his teammates and hurrying down into the clubhouse. Derek pulls Torre aside later and asks if there’s anything there he should know about, but Joe just shrugs and says he knows they both played together in ’89, the Milwaukee Brewers, that was before your day Captain, Gary must’ve been just 20 back then, a mere whelp if you can picture him that young, Terry fucking Francona was on that team, managing the Red Sox now, and can you believe that?
Derek tries to think what history Sheffield could have with BJ that would send him running for the clubhouse 16 years later, but he has no idea. Halsey and Olerud aren’t on the team yet, or they might be able to tell him, but even when they are and he’s worrying about them between games they won’t say a word (what the hell do they have in common anyways, other than this weird thing with Sheffield, the two are like completely unrelated, he just doesn’t get it) and he’s seriously considering calling BJ at this point, honest to God, because this club is getting really fucking weird as the season progresses.
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It's just gonna keep going, and going, and going...