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When the cell phone rings, Jim and Lisa Masteralexis shake their heads. It is late on a summer night, and their three young children have finally fallen asleep. Toys and puzzle pieces and picture books are strewn around the living room. Dinner dishes still sit on the kitchen table, macaroni and cheese on the floor. Looking at the caller ID, Jim sees it is one of their newer clients, Randy Ruiz: high maintenance, big bat. A first baseman/DH for the Reading Phillies , he is tearing up the competition. He is leading the Eastern League in batting and is second in home runs—despite having missed the first fifteen games of this 2005 season after testing positive for steroids at the end of the previous year. Jim snaps open the phone and says, “What’s up, Randy?” Ruiz is hysterical. He is calling from the team bus in the midst of a 430mile journey from Akron, Ohio, to Trenton, New Jersey. His manager, Steve Swisher, has just informed him that he is going to be suspended without pay for thirty days for failing another steroids test. Fighting back tears, he insists he is innocent. “I swear to God, Jim. Give me a Bible, put me in front of a church, and let lightning strike: I didn’t do it.” Here he is, having absolutely the season of his life, seven years into the grueling minor league journey, finally on the cusp of his dream, a kid who grew up in the South Bronx with nothing, and now the whole sweet story is unraveling. “Are you sure, Randy? Are you absolutely sure?” “Straight up, Jim. I swear. I haven’t touched it the whole year.” “All right, big fella. Pull yourself together. I’ll see what I can do.” Jim talks it over with Lisa deep into the night. They find the contact information for Quest Diagnostics, the lab authorized by Major League Baseball to conduct drug tests. In the morning they put in a rush order and arrange to have Randy tested right away. After rifling through some papers, they begin to file an appeal. Part of the application requires them to fill out a complete list of drugs Randy has taken in the last few months, the so-called “therapeutic use exemptions.” One of the drugs on the list catches Jim’s attention : Viagra. “Randy, man, you’re twenty-seven years old. What do you need that for?” “Jim,” he says, pausing. “This shit works.” Prologue “If They Make It, We Make It” West Brookfield, Massachusetts 2 | prologue Jim can only laugh. This merely confirms what he often says to Lisa about life in the minor leagues. It is a “testosterone soap opera.” ● Their first date, on June 15, 1988, took place at Fenway Park, a Red Sox– Yankees game. Jim had grown up just seven miles away in Watertown, listening to the Sox pretty much every night, Ned Martin’s voice echoing through the kitchen while Jim’s mother, Esther, rolled out Greek pastries. Several times a year Jim would trade three or four bucks for a ticket in the bleachers, where he’d bop the occasional beach ball, cheering hard for Yaz or Rico or Dewey. He doesn’t really remember the Impossible Dream team of 1967 (he was only five), but in ’75 he reveled in Carlton Fisk’s boyish dance to keep it fair. It was the sport’s iconic image: waving, waving, waving, jumping for joy. The next night, Game 7, Jim was there with tickets from a family friend, his hopes riding with every pitch. All these years later he can still see it, two outs in the top of the ninth, the score tied, the bloop off the bat of Joe Morgan falling too fast, plunking onto the outfield grass, the 4–3 Reds win, the acid taste of falling short. On Opening Day 1976, however, he was back, ducking out of Watertown Junior High at noon, hopping aboard an MBTA bus for Kenmore Square, and bounding through the turnstiles, a move that would land him his first and only suspension from school. Jim couldn’t get enough of the scene. There was something mesmerizing about Fenway, Updike’s lyric little bandbox of a ballpark, so much caring inside it, a sense, however preposterous, of its mattering in the grand scheme. He vowed that one day he would be an important person here. It hadn’t happened as a...

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