#y’all don’t interrupt men’s sports to highlight women’s games like that

[sports-nerd-xo]

Why am I being forced to hear about MEN’S SPORTS. Men’s FOOTBALL. While watching a WNBA game. AND WHY is it taking up screen space.

And while I was ranting about this, they full screened the interview WHILE THE GAME WAS BEING PLAYED.

[goldenbloodorange]

excerpt - The Windup and The Pitch

a sample from my NaNoWriMo project, completed December 2018 - it is currently being beta’d by a friend of mine, but here are two sample chapters introducing two main characters - if you read I am absolutely open to feedback!! 

JENKINS

“You’re one of those lady ballplayers, huh?” The Uber driver, Jed, says with a lower respiratory punctuation as Justina gets in the car.

“Uh, yeah, I am,” Justina says, nodding and smiling. 

She pulls out her phone and checks for any new messages. None yet. 

Fuck, she curses mentally, and looks out the window. The car is going over the Hoan Bridge on 794, heading towards Downtown Milwaukee and Justina sees the gray stretch of Lake Michigan reaching to her right. There are a few boats bobbing aimlessly in the distance and they make a temporary distraction from checking her phone incessantly,.

“What a season you all had this year, oh boy. Now, I wish I would have gone to one of the games!”

“Uh, heh, yeah.” Usually Justina would love to chat with anyone who just wanted to talk baseball, but she is admittedly preoccupied. 

She checks her phone a second time. Nothing.

Jed clears his throat and continues to externalize his thought process. “So uh….you’re...um...I know you, I know who you are. You’re...you’re…” Justina’s 25-foot tall Nike ad is pasted on the side of the building as they drive past; you see her name boldly emblazoned on her Belles uniform as she’s swinging, her side profile looking strong.

Jed means well. He is really trying. Justina doesn’t feel as bad about ignoring him as...he’s not an actual fan.

Justina’s phone finally buzzes. She’s waiting for a text from her agent (and teammate’s sister) Lenore Valenzuela, a lawyer turned sports agent who was almost scarily manipulative and good to have on your side, especially when it came to contract negotiations.

LV: Rumors of buyout are no longer rumors. Want to post for selection? Many MLB teams in the market for a spray hitting outfielder like you.

Justina’s heart stops. If she posts for selection, from the rumors she’s heard she could be drafted by any MLB team. Then what? Marinade in the minor leagues for a few years until the league decides she’s ready?

The pay bump, though. The pay bump.

The highest paid AAGPBL player wasn’t even making nearly what the league minimum in MLB was making - which, in Justina’s opinion, is both sad and to be expected. $535,000 was nothing to sneeze at - plus the luxury of being considered a pro ballplayer in a sport that had denied her participation all her life, and one of the first to finally make baseball a coed sport.

Minor leaguers in the MLB system were still paid like crap; not to mention the prospects of a player from this league posting were admittedly not great. Going from making not-so-great money...to not-so-great money...to possibly making the big bucks was not necessarily guaranteed.

“I played baseball as a kid,” Jed interjects. “They never let girls play with us.”

Justina nods politely at him through the rear view mirror. Though she always had a natural quick reflex when it came to fielding and hitting, Justina grew up being turned away from countless Little League teams. She eventually found a team that accepted her, but her family had to move from Mississippi to the Milwaukee suburbs as her father became unemployed and needed to move for work; he had a connection working in the food processing industry.

Jed rambles on. “My old man always said I’d get a college scholarship if I just practiced more.”

The more time Justina’s dad spent making sausage (he still works at the Klements factory off I-94), the less time he had to help Justina develop her swing. So she watched highlight reels and clinic videos on YouTube on the computers at the Milwaukee Public Library. Emulated the swings of some of her favorite hitters. Frank Thomas. Chipper Jones. Derek Jeter. 

And she’d visit the cages after school to put her theories into test.

She’d get weird looks since it was mostly packs of mostly white teenage boys trying to put in cage time for high school ball, but once they saw her hit, they’d ask who she was played for, and the answer was always the same:

Myself. 

It was the same deal in college; denied entry on the baseball team, Justina found herself at the cages, again with the same questions being asked. She found acceptance on the UW-Milwaukee intramural baseball team, which is where she met Quinn Braxton.

“But anyway, it’s awesome that you girls are playing ball. Always thought Milwaukee would get a WNBA team before a women’s baseball team, but hey, whatever.”

Justina’s phone buzzes again, and her head jerks from the polite smiling to her lap.

LV: You ready to make history??????

The Uber rounds the corner of Water Street. A couple of the girls are already on the corner, punching each other’s shoulders and acting like the inseparable group this team really was. Bridget McAfee. Quinn Braxton. CJ Willis. Maddie McCarthy.

Her sisters in arms, runs, hits, and errors. She’d miss them, yes, but there was a whole other frontier to explore, and she was just learning what exactly she was capable of.

Hell yes, Justina types, and immediately hits send.

BRAXTON

Last season’s Defensive Player of the Year, (with a 13-vote-margin) Quinn Braxton punches pitcher Maddie McCarthy in the arm for making the twelfth deez nuts joke in the course of ten minutes. Quinn messes with her equilibrium and Maddie nearly falls over.

“Fuck, Quinn, I’ll stop,” she says, laughing, grabbing onto a parking meter. It feels like they haven’t been apart for a month. It feels like no one’s ever left Milwaukee.

Before anything else can transpire, Justina Jenkins gets out of the backseat of what might be an Uber or Lyft Cadillac Escalade, dripping from head to toe as usual, sneaking a few salon appointments in between the last out of the Women’s World Series and this meeting. Her second or third Balenciaga bag rests on her right arm.

Willis snorts a bit. “We put the reservation in under your name, that okay? It’s $10 a minute for every minute you’re late.”

“Hi mom,” Quinn says, shoving her hands into her Nordstrom Rack camo jeans.

“Hello, darling,” Justina replies. She looks at her three teammates. “Well? I didn’t mean to interrupt what y’all were doing?”

“You’re never interrupting,” McAfee comes rushing towards Justina, crushing her in a giant hug. She smells distinctly like fabric softener and dry shampoo. McAfee is 6’1” barefoot and gives some of the best embraces in all of baseball. Willis and McCarthy follow suit, and before everyone knows it, the Belles superstar outfielder and team captain is wrapped in a crushing hug.

Quinn stands, pretending to be annoyed, arms folded and rolls her eyes. “Like y’all ain’t hug enough during the damn season.”

Justina pushes the other girls away and pulls Quinn into her own personal hug. “Bitch,” she says.

Quinn holds her at arm’s length away. “No Cabo for you, slugger? If it were up to me, my ass would be out of….here.”

It’s not that Quinn hates Milwaukee. She’s actually grown to love it. She grew up here, not far away in a modest home with her mom and twin brother Quincy, off National Avenue.

Quinn and Quincy both played on the high school baseball team, until he had a seizure and died right there in the gymnasium of their high school, in the middle of a warm up before practice. Heart failure, they said. Quinn had heart surgery as a child due to arrhythmia, only to see her brother’s own heart fail right in front of her.

It was too much for Quinn; even with the support from coaches and incessant counseling, she eventually resigned from the team. She didn’t dare pick up a baseball bat again until she met Justina Jenkins whom she met in an Early American Literature class at UW-Milwaukee, three years later.

Justina noticed the Ken Griffey Jr. Trapper Keeper Quinn must have found on eBay, because it was in perfect condition, and no one their age even knew what the hell a Trapper Keeper was. And she struck up a conversation, and their friendship blossomed over a mutual love of baseball. Justina grew up watching the Brewers and Quinn grew up watching the Braves, who used to be a Milwaukee team, and yeah yeah, Quinn was well aware of that and loved Hank Aaron and Chipper Jones and even Brandon McCarthy. Justina rued the year 2011 like no other but will recall it as one of the most enthralling in Brewers history, and was ambivalent when Craig Counsell took the helm as manager, but she’s grown to like him.

Quinn enjoyed her baseball chats with Justina, but never imagined playing by her side until she mentioned being thrown off a little league team and the inevitable “wait, you play too?” exchange happened.

You wanna toss a ball after class? Justina asked her one fateful day. I don’t have a glove, Quinn answered. They were all in storage or packed away where she could never reach them, not long after Quincy’s passing. Gotcha covered. I brought one for you, Justina replied. So we throwing or what?

“Nah, where else can I hang with ladies as fine as this?” Justina was always inclusive, inspiring, iridescent. 

If Justina ever had a bad day, Quinn didn’t know about it. Quinn did, however, know how quickly they both loved baseball and shared a commonality in that the sport they loved so much never seemed to love them back. When throwing the ball around after class wasn’t enough anymore, they were rejected from trying out for rec leagues, often told apologetically that they had no more open spots, met by the questioning glances of men who probably wore business suits in the daytime.

Then the Milwaukee Belles announced open tryouts, and nothing could have made Quinn happier when they both made the roster.

They also met a few other people who’d develop into the best friends and teammates she could ask for: Bridge, a young mom of three who was part Amazon part golden retriever; Valenzuela, a skittish, deceptively strong olive-skinned girl from Texas with a wicked left hand delivery; Robles, a fearless, rough round the edges pitcher drafted from the Mexican leagues who had experience pitching to men, and Muramoto, a deeply heralded Japanese baseball legend, who had an enthusiastic and ever growing fanbase at every game.

“What’s Mel up to today?” Justina asks. “She browsing the rumor mill?”

“Funny you should ask. She thinks this emergency meeting is news that we signed Hamasaki, who posted for draft last season but she didn’t like any of the offers she got. Must be nice being the top ranked female baseball player in the world.”

“Should be the top ranked baseball player in the world if we’re being honest,” CJ says. “I’d hold out for a nice contract, especially if it means I’d have to move outta Japan.”

Quinn remembers her hands shaking as she signed her contract with the team, and not seeing that much money before in her life. Not long ago she moved into a sunny converted-loft convo in Walker’s Point with her girlfriend, Melia, a lifelong baseball fan who especially loves Korean and Japanese ball.  

Melia’s job is painting watercolor portraits of people’s pets, but the paintings she does at home for fun are always Quinn playing baseball. Melia once used Quinn’s roster photo as a reference and the portrait hangs awkwardly in their bathroom, right above the toilet. Quinn doesn’t have the heart to tell Melia that it really doesn’t belong there. It’s what she has to look forward to after every road trip.

The neighborhood is vibrant and welcoming and fun and all full of enough life to sustain a professional athlete and an artist, and on game days, Mel and Quinn wake up early, but stay in bed, giggling and staying warm on those early April mornings and sharing whatever is on each other’s mind, until Quinn really has to leave for the ballpark.

Before signing with the Belles, Quinn had never been to any of the cities the Women’s League is in, not counting Chicago, where her mom decided to settle off with a boyfriend she met off some dating site. They still see each other and get lunch here and then; Quinn leaves tickets for her at every visiting game in Chicago but never sees her mom in the stands.

Valenzuela, bless her heart, would always try to distract Quinn when she’d notice her looking at the seats. “You know I might need to throw at you with runners on if you’re covering, right?” She’d say in the dugout between innings, followed by a gentle hug.

Chicago might be her least favorite city to play in, but she still looks at the seats before every at-bat, to see if someone may be in them.

On days when Quinn is especially bad, she expects to see Quincy, yelling at her to pay attention to who’s on second.

But the seats are always empty.

She knows her father lives in Atlanta and she has branches upon branches of cousins sprouting all through the South but she’s never thought about reaching out. She knows she probably shouldn’t for a few reasons.

Quinn is the kind of shortstop that does not know what hesitation is. She goes for what she wants without thinking, almost reflexively. She sees line drives and her glove raises instinctually.

There is no time better than now, and this has always been her motto. It’s gotten her this far in life.

Her future is already written. There will be empty seats in visiting stadiums and blowout games and maybe a defensive error or two, but this is all part of the plan.

The plan is to be the greatest there ever was.

It’s the most she can give Quincy. 

He is certainly worth it.

“So we going inside to meet, eat, or both?” It’s Valenzuela, late to the party as usual, wearing a slick black bomber jacket with a rose gold tiger embroidered on the chest.

The rest of the girls fall around her, and with the clouds and fog, they seem like a badass girl gang set on world domination, and once again, the Milwaukee Belles are together again.