Page 1 of The Strike Zone

ONE

SCOUT

“Man, I wish my ass looked like that.”

I winced as my head thudded on the underside of the table, but it clearly hadn’t been loud enough to cause concern, given the current conversation was still in full flow.

“Squats, bro. You gotta stick to squats.”

“I squat. Isquat, dude. My ass still doesn’t look like that.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, these guys work out for a living. What’s your gym regimen?”

Cyrus clapped a hand onto Joey’s shoulder, only for him to drop his head with a shameful shake.

“Clearly not good enough to make it look like I’m smuggling a pair of honeydews in my pants.”

There was a moment of silence as the guys continued their observations—let’s say—of the guys at practice, until a slow rhythmic beat kicked in. Alice tapped a stirrer against her coffee cup, enough to serve as a warning she wanted this meeting underway.

Or she wanted the guys to stop talking.Orthat she wanted to go back to bed. Probably the latter.

Whatever it was, I could tell she was about to crack.

I gave up trying to get the screen to work, carefully avoided banging my headagain, crawled back from the tangle of wires under the table, and slid onto my seat. Taking one look at the presentation I’d written, which was now kind of pointless, seeing as I couldn’t present it, I closed my laptop.

Guess I’d be winging it. At least I’d brought a couple of printouts.

I didn’t bother to look at Alice, I could already feel her eyes lasering into me, urging me to kill the chatter.

“Guys, can you stop talking about your butts for one second? I need your full attention. I promise you’ll have time to discuss them after I’ve briefed you.”

Joey and Cyrus—the two interns who’d been assigned to the social media team for the next three months—and for some reasonI’dbeen put in charge of—managed to tear themselves away from whatever was happening down on the field. Reluctantly, I might add. Joey gave a longing double take out the windows before he sat down.

Cyrus moved to a chair that still allowed him enough of a glance at the field that I knew he wouldn’t be paying full attention to anything I said anyway.

It was like they’d forgotten they’d still be required to work during their internship, that this much-coveted assignment did not mean they’d be doing nothing but hanging around with the players and gawping. Not that they would be hanging with the players, but I was beginning to wonder if they’d picked the social team because it had the most exposure to the Lions roster on a daily basis.

“Sorry, Scout,” they muttered in sync.

“Interns,” grouched Alice, under her breath.

With the tip of my finger, I eased her coffee cup closer to her and mouthed,Drink the caffeine,while declining to remind her she didn’t need to be here at all, seeing as she was part of the sales team, and this meeting was to discuss social media plans.

But Alice Tan kind of did what she wanted.

I still hadn’t figured out if the reason she was working in baseball was because her workdays didn’t typically start until mid-morning, therefore she could legitimately exist as a night owl and party after each game, or because she genuinely enjoyed baseball.

She liked the guys, I knew that much.

“Okay.” I clasped my hands together once I was confident I had the most attention from the interns as I was going to get, attempting to sound as commanding and “in charge” as I could. “Tomorrow is the first game of the season. We have a big year of work ahead of us. In the company meeting on Monday, we were told our team’s key objective is to grow the social channels. Under the entire communications umbrella, we’ve already succeeded in shedding the reputation as being the ‘loser club of the MLB’ and, according to the latest set of data, we’re now seen as fun and energizing. The demographic of attendees has become younger, and we’re bringing in new fans to the games.”

Taking a breath, I waited to see if either of the guys wanted to say anything, but unsurprisingly the room stayed silent.

“Great,” I continued. “We’re very hands on in this team, we have a weekly schedule dedicated to responding to comments, and we will continue that. Because we’ve grown so much, we have decided to split the work up for the year. Our focus will be TikTok?—”

“Awesome—”

“It is, and the persona we put out is that we take the games seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously.”

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