Page 49 of The Strike Zone

I grunted at her loudly instead. I guess she understood I was on the verge of collapse as she hit the Decline button and slowed the treadmill down to a stop.

“Okay, hop off.”

I’d never jumped to the sides quicker. Ripping off the mask, I attempted to suck down as much oxygen as I could.

My lungs burned. My thighs burned. My calves burned.

Even my ass was burning.

“Stand up straight, you’ll get more air in,” she ordered.

Snatching the towel, she was holding out to me, I did as I was told, doing my best to mop up the sweat pouring down my body, even with the AC on full, but I’d been running flat out on a 4 percent incline while my oxygen levels were monitored, and now I was the equivalent of a human furnace.

“I’m not built for sprints, doc…I’m a catcher…I’m built for squatting…” I puffed out, rubbing the towel over my face right as she rolled her eyes.

“Yes, Parker, I know. You tell me every week.”

“And every week you still make me come in here and do them. Even though I hate sprinting.”

Hated it. Always hated it. Hated it at school. Hated it now.Hated.

Marnie was still talking like she hadn’t noticed or didn’t care I could barely stand. “…and your results are good—oxygen extraction figures are higher than they were at the start of the season. You’re getting fitter, Parker.”

Huh. That was interesting. “Yeah? How fit? I’m already fit.”

“Fitter,” she repeated, peeling the disposable heart monitor from my chest and plugging it into her laptop.

Immediately her screen filled with colored graphs and wavy lines containing the data she and her team monitored closely.

I stepped down off the treadmill and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade from the fridge and another sweat towel from the shelf, and sat down while she worked her magic.

Doctor Marnie Matthews, the Lions’ president of baseball science and data, had been brought to the Lions by Penn Shepherd when he’d taken ownership of the team.

An astrodynamicist—or superbrain, as most of the guys called her—by profession, she’d come from NASA, where she’d spent the previous decade launching rockets into space. Because,If she could launch a rocket, she could make a baseball fly more efficiently, according to Shepherd.

She’d been tasked with helping the team win.

No small feat, but she’d succeeded and almost single-handedly turned the club’s losing streak around overnight. The data she collected on how each of us individually played our game had been the biggest contribution to the Lions winning, beyond the players themselves.

Through a series of tiny changes she’d implemented—from the way we traveled, ate, and slept, to how our bats were stored and the dugout was kept—we’d become a slick,almostunbeatable team.

She’d introduced Penn Shepherd to a new type of material embedded with tiny sensors that could monitor everything from heart rate to hydration and muscle fatigue to oxygen levels during a game, and account for them in real time. Therefore, she could make any necessary adjustments in real time.

If our sweat levels were up when we played during the high summer months and we were close to dehydration, then we’d be sucking down hydration packs during the batting. Last season we had 47 percent fewer injuries than the season before, which had 70 percent less than the season before that.

Her team of data scientists focused on each player as individuals, and when we came together, we were fitter and stronger because of it. I wasn’t entirely sure I understood everything she did, but we were winning, therefore I didn’t care a whole lot.

She could do what she wanted.

On the flip side, she was engaged to Jupiter Reeves, so she had her faults.

I watched as she flicked through the different charts she’d brought up.

“Hey, doc, how are my results compared to, say, Ace’s?”

“Ace is a pitcher. He doesn’t have the same cardio abilities you do. He doesn’t bat, he doesn’t run bases,” she replied, not looking up from the screen.

“Okay, what about Weston?”

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