Love Bats Last (The Heart of the Game) Read Free

across home plate was nearly impossible. Only three players had earned the title in the past forty-seven years. This year Duarte was everybody’s favorite to do it. Alex intended to prove them wrong. But it was far too early in the season to be talking about winning batting titles.
    “Duarte’s one of the best in the game,” Alex said with a smile. Then he turned and walked down the tunnel to the clubhouse.
    He stripped off his uniform and tossed it into the bin in the center of the locker room. He wrapped a towel around his waist and headed for the showers.
    The buzz of the win sizzled through the steaming bodies and raucous laughter. The clubhouse was a sacrosanct haven; there was no substitute for the flow of energy that powered through it. Where else could you gather thirty alpha males, all at the top of their game, all happy to be there and do what they loved? Some guys found it so hard to leave behind, they manufactured reasons to hang out even after they’d retired. Not many succeeded; the clubhouse was a place for men active in the game.
    When Alex’s father had died of a heart attack two years before, Alex had shocked everyone by taking a year off baseball and busting ass to get the hang of managing Trovare, the family vineyard he’d inherited.
    Most would say he’d succeeded.
    But the truth was, he’d nearly gone mad.
    Not from the pressures of running the business—that he could handle. It’d been the gnawing feeling of having a gaping hole in his life, of missing something the way he imagined an amputee would miss an arm or a leg. Carrying on his father’s dream hadn’t been enough. Trovare hadn’t been enough. Sometimes he wished it were, but it wasn’t.
    Some claimed baseball was just a game, but to Alex it was like oxygen—he couldn’t imagine life without it.
    And as much as he’d missed the game during the year he’d taken off, he’d also missed the camaraderie. He was at his best, physically and mentally, when he was in his place, doing his part for the team.
    He let hot water flow over him and lost himself in the chorus of voices lacing through the steam. He rotated his wrist behind his back; the way it was acting up, this could be his last season for a run at the title.
    When he’d returned to the team last year, he’d made mistakes. He’d tried to keep Trovare going, to keep his game going, had tried to be all and everything to too many.
    In baseball, numbers never lie.
    He’d played so poorly for the first four months that management had made noises about sending him down to the minors. He wasn’t ready for that sort of ending and never would be. Only his hitting had kept that nightmare from happening.
    He’d lost track of what was important.
    Baseball was important.
    Trovare was something he’d been born to, but baseball was his . And this year, he’d vowed, nothing was going to get in the way of his game.
    But in spite of his resolve, he couldn’t let go. Trovare was all that was left of his connection with his father, a living bridge that death hadn’t destroyed. If he were to be honest, he loved Trovare. Maybe not the castle—that had been an obsession of his dad’s, he could see that now—but everything else about the vineyard, the gardens, and especially the older vines he’d helped his father plant near the south slope. The feel of the soil, the sugared, heady scent of the ripening grapes, the vital interplay of sun and water and earth, it was in his blood, always would be.
    A sharp zing to his left flank brought him out from under the steaming stream of the shower.
    He grabbed the towel that Scotty had thwhapped him with and tossed it aside. “Courting a shorter life span?”
    Scotty grinned and turned his face under the flow of the adjoining shower. “Are we still going to have a look at those team videos, old man?”
    Alex ignored the old-man barb. Scotty was all of twenty-three. And already he was the best starting pitcher on the team. Anyone over twenty-five