Round the Bases (Coach!Steve Harrington x Female!Reader miniseries)
⚾︎ Summary: A summer in Hawkins, Indiana was supposed to be mundane, spent with your younger cousin and his overbearing parents. Enter Steve Harrington: Little League coach and the man who turned your world on its head. Too bad fate seemed determined to keep the two of you apart. (2.5k words)
“Is it always this hot this early in the morning?”
Your question was rhetorical, but your twelve-year-old cousin had no problem answering it.
“Yup. Unless it’s raining.” JJ scrunched his nose, wistfully adding, “I wish it would rain.”
You gave his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. JJ wasn’t an athlete; he preferred reading books well above his grade level and playing board games. And while he had the vocabulary of a dictionary, his lack of hand-eye coordination was a constant disappointment to his parents.
“Your mom said the coach was really nice,” you tried. But even JJ knew you were grasping at straws; he just shrugged and dragged his feet towards the field.
“JJ! You made it!” The team’s catcher offered your cousin a toothy grin before pulling his mask over his face. “Coach Steve was worried you weren’t coming.”
The name Coach Steve made you picture a balding middle-aged man who wore shorts that sagged at the waist and ratty t-shirts with various condiment stains.
You weren’t expecting Coach Steve to be a gorgeous twenty-something with a full head of luscious brown hair. He wore a fitted Hawkins Cubs shirt and his cargo shorts were definitely well-fitted.
Steve waved at JJ. “C’mon, J-Man! You’re just in time for the team huddle!”
Before JJ can join them, you whisper in his ear, “win or lose, I’m proud of you. Just have fun.”
He glanced at you with a pained expression. “But my mom and dad said—”
You shook your head. “I’m the cool older cousin, remember? And I’d never lie to you. So if I say that having fun is more important than winning, that’s the truth. Okay?”
JJ managed a small smile and jogged over to his team, nearly tripping over his feet in the process.
You cringe, expecting a wave of cruel laughter from the other kids. But there’s nothing except the sound of Steve giving a pre-game pep talk.
“Alright, Cubs.” Steve rubbed his hands together. No ring, you notice. “I know you can do this. Practices have never been better. You guys are a team. A well-oiled machine. You go out there and show those Rangers what you’re made of!”
The team erupted into cheers; even JJ mustered up some enthusiasm as the catcher clapped a hand on his shoulder.
You were walking back to the stands when you heard Steve call out.
“Hey! Uh, JJ’s…adult person.” Steve jogged over, dust from the field coating his sneakers. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
Your stomach flipped when he took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Are, uh, are JJ’s parents coming?” Steve asked, anxiously glancing back at your cousin.
You shook your head. “No. JJ asked me to bring him. I’m his cousin; just visiting for the summer.”
There was no missing the way his shoulders sagged with relief. “Right. Good. I mean, they can just get a little…intense with him sometimes.”
Intense was an understatement, and you both knew it. Hell, even JJ probably knew it. Based on Steve’s pep talk and the way all of the other kids eagerly greeted him, it was evident that the source of JJ’s stress wasn’t from any of them.
“He’s not really athletic,” you carefully said. “I know he likes competition; he kicked my ass at Risk yesterday. But I don’t think—”
“Wait!” Steve paused, then put his hands on his hips and leaned in. “Sorry, I just…Risk, like the board game?”
You nodded. “Do you play?”
“Nah, but I—” Steve winced as someone blew a whistle. “Shit. Just, uh, don’t leave after the game, okay?”
He scampered off before you could answer. You watched him as you took your seat on the bleachers, barely registering the heat biting the backs of your thighs.
Every kid on the Cubs, whether they hit a home run or struck out, was met with the same level of enthusiasm from Steve. He cheered them on, hooting and hollering until his face turned red.
When it was JJ’s turn, Steve crouched down next to him. You could see Steve’s lips moving, but his words were inaudible to you.
Whatever they were, your cousin’s scrawny knees stopped knocking together long enough to hit the ball. It didn’t go far, but Steve acted like Babe Ruth was out there breaking bats.
“YEAH, JJ!” He whooped. “RUN, JJ! RUN!”
The rest of the team cheered JJ on as he made it to first base just in time.
Steve glanced over, finding you in the crowd immediately. He gestured to JJ with an impressed face. Look at him go.
Your smile warmed your face when JJ gave his coach a thumbs up, which Steve promptly returned. It was like seeing a different kid than the one who had dejectedly flopped onto the passenger seat of your car that morning.
The Cubs won against the Rangers, 4 to 2. The catcher–Derek, according to the middle-aged couple shouting for him in the stands–led the team in a painfully off-key rendition of We are the Champions.
“No time for loooooosers, ‘cuz we are the chaaaaaampioooooons!” Derek crooned, slinging a jersey-clad arm around JJ’s shoulders and swaying back and forth.
JJ looked like a weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. Not because he played exceptionally well; in fact, he’d been tagged out trying to run from first to second base. Still, there was no hiding his tiny smirk as he shuffled back over to you.
“You were great out there!” You almost pulled him in for a hug but stopped yourself; preteens were notoriously too cool for hugs. Instead, you settled for a reluctant high-five.
“Yeah, I guess.” JJ averted his eyes, determined to look anywhere but at you. “Can we get ice cream before we go home?”
Your heart sank; as much as you’d hoped that his parents were the whole problem, it was increasingly obvious that he simply didn’t like baseball.
“Hey, JJ!” You and JJ both whipped around to see Steve motioning you over. “C’mere for a sec.”
Offering a sympathetic smile, you nudged your cousin in Steve’s direction. “We’ll get ice cream right after this,” you promised.
Steve’s grin tied your tongue into a knot. Was this what it was going to be like every time you got near him? Would he always set off butterflies in your stomach, flapping their wings at one hundred miles per hour?
“Nice work out there, man.” Steve studied JJ’s face, noting his hesitation to accept the compliment. “Listen, JJ, be honest with me. Do you actually like baseball?”
JJ paused before answering. “I like the guys on the team and stuff—”
“Let me put it this way.” Steve crouched down slightly. “When you’re up at bat, standing on home plate, the crowd cheering your name…what are you feeling?”
“I dunno. Fine, I guess.”
Steve’s nostrils flared when he let out a long, despondent breath. “Alright. Here’s what we’re gonna do.” His hands framed his hips. “My friend’s little sister runs a Dungeons & Dragons group at the library. Wednesdays at three p.m. And you,” he pointed at JJ, “are going.”
“But we have practice on Wednesday at three.” JJ’s brows furrowed in confusion, glancing between you and Steve.
“Look, JJ, I love having you on the team,” Steve started, “but I know you’re only here because your parents are on your a–case about it. Right?”
JJ nodded, keeping his gaze trained on the ground.
“And your cousin told me that you’re really good at Risk. So I think you’ll like D&D.”
“But my mom said that that game is for devil worshipers.”
Steve laughed amusedly, and you had to bite back your own wry smile. Of course your aunt would believe such a ridiculous notion. Apparently playing a board game was enough to condemn someone to Hell, but not pushing around her own son. Right.
“There’s nothing wrong with D&D,” you reassured your cousin. When he still seemed unconvinced, you opted for a compromise. “Let’s go next week. Just to try it. If you totally hate it, we don’t have to go back.”
JJ chewed on the inside of his cheek, contemplating his options. He’d always been the straight-laced kid, doing what he was told and never straying from his parents’ expectations, no matter how absurd.
Now, a glimmer of excitement twinkled in his eyes. “Just don’t tell my mom and dad.”
You grinned. Maybe there was a chance for you to salvage JJ’s summer.
And seeing Steve Harrington again couldn’t hurt, either.
The scent of old books hit you as soon as you walked into the Hawkins Public Library. You inhaled it like a sweet perfume. Even JJ, who had been tense since breakfast that morning, seemed to relax. He’d looked like he wanted to drown in his bowl of cornflakes when your aunt reminded him that he had baseball practice after school.
“Hey.” Steve stood up from a nearby table. He wore a Hawkins Cubs polo with the word “Coach” embroidered on the right side of his chest. “Glad you made it.”
Your gaze lingered at the curve of his lips. That smile wasn’t for you; it was for JJ. Steve was happy that JJ decided to give D&D a try. At this point, you weren’t much more than a chauffeur.
You trailed behind Steve, careful not to step on the back of his sneakers, as he led you and JJ to one of the study rooms. A few kids were already inside, setting up game pieces and flipping through notebooks.
At the head of the table sat a girl, not much older than the rest of the kids, but she was definitely the leader. She sighed irritatedly when she saw the three of you standing in the doorway.
“Erica, this is JJ.” Steve nudged your cousin further into the room. “Uh, I asked Lucas to tell you—”
“That was your first mistake.” Erica crossed her arms. She took another glance at JJ and softened at his nervous demeanor. “You ever played before?”
JJ shook his head, too shy to speak.
Erica’s grin bloomed. “Fresh meat. Nice. Well,” she glanced between you and Steve, “you two can go now.”
“But I—”
“No babysitters,” Erica cut you off, leaving no room for argument. “You can wipe his nose and pinch his cheeks when you pick him up in two hours.”
With that, she whisked JJ into the study room. Despite the abrupt dismissal, his rigid posture loosened as he took a seat.
Worry still crept into your heart. JJ was a shy kid, often too sensitive for his own good. It would serve him well someday…but not as a middle schooler.
“Hey.” Steve’s voice, though soft, broke through your racing thoughts. “He’s gonna be fine. Erica’s…intense, but she doesn’t let anyone get picked on.”
He lowered his voice even more, leaning in to whisper in your ear. The tickle of breath sent a shiver down your spine.
“Rumor has it that she got one of the librarians fired for trying to end their game early.”
A laugh caught you by surprise. You clapped your hand over your mouth, desperate to suppress it before you drew unwanted attention to yourself.
“You’re so full of shit.”
“Maybe.” Steve smirked, leaning against a bookshelf. “But it’s believable, isn’t it?”
You refused to give him the satisfaction of being right. “Don’t you have to get to practice, Coach?”
Steve put up his hands in surrender. “Yeah, yeah. I’m leaving.” He started towards the exit, before stopping so suddenly that you almost bumped into him. “You, uh, you’re not from here, right?”
You shook your head. “Just visiting for the summer.”
In truth, you hadn’t planned on spending your time between semesters here. But when JJ called you up a few months ago and, in a fit of tears, pleaded with you to come stay in Hawkins, you couldn’t say no.
Even if it meant seeing people you definitely didn’t want to see.
Steve, oblivious to your inner restlessness, nodded in contemplation. “Maybe we can hang out or something before you go back home?”
Was that a date? No–he said hang out. Not go out. There was a difference; no doubt Steve would have asked you to go out if he wanted a date.
“Yeah, sure.” You swallowed your disappointment, hoping it wasn’t visible in your expression.
“Cool.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Call you soon.”
Call you soon. His words echoed in your ear, playing over and over like a melody. Not even the car radio nor the sound of JJ chattering about how amazing D&D Club was could tune out that promise.
It wasn’t until you pulled into the driveway that you realized that Steve hadn’t even asked for your number.
And, as you were about to find out, that wouldn’t even be the worst part of your day.
Your aunt stood at the doorway, hands on her hips, scowling as you and JJ clambered up the stoop. You were too busy wallowing in self-pity to notice how terrifying she looked: lips pressed into a thin line, nostrils flared, eyes narrowed.
“Mrs. Turnbow called,” she snapped the second you had a foot inside the house. “She wanted to know if Derek should pick up JJ’s schoolwork tomorrow, since JJ was ‘too sick’ to go to practice today.”
JJ stumbled over his own feet. “Mom, I–”
“Where were you? And why weren’t you at practice?” She shook her head in disgust, not even giving her son time to answer. “You owe Coach Steve an apology for missing practice. You’re not going to get any better if you don’t–”
“I don’t want to get better!” JJ choked back tears. “I hate baseball! And Coach Steve was the one who told me I should go to D&D Club instead.”
His mouth clamped shut as soon as he realized what he’d just admitted. He looked to you for help, but you couldn’t find anything to say.
“Go. To. Your. Room.” Your aunt hissed through gritted teeth. “I’ll talk to your father about this when he gets home. As for you,” her gaze pierced your face, “you’re here to be a good influence for JJ. Not to let him run amok and get involved with devil worshipers. I have half a mind to kick you out.”
“I-I’m sorry. I…” You blinked back the mist coating your own eyes. “It won’t happen again. I’ll make sure he gets to practice from now on.”
The older woman chortled. “Oh, no. I’ll be doing the dropoffs until you can be trusted again. You’ll need to prove yourself to us, young lady.”
That was that. No room for discussion. For JJ, there would be no more afternoons spent in pretend battle, woven into an epic story by Erica Sinclair, the–what did he call her? Dungeon Master?
And for you? There would be no more Steve Harrington.
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system. If that wasn't true, why would your "choose" commercial surveillance, abusive workplaces and other depredations?
In other words, economics is the "look what you made me do" stick that capitalism uses to beat us with. We wouldn't spy on you, rip you off or steal your wages if you didn't choose to use the internet, shop with monopolists, or work for a shitty giant company. The technical name for this ideology is "public choice theory":
Of all the terrible things that economists say we all secretly love, one of the worst is "price discrimination." This is the idea that different customers get charged different amounts based on the merchant's estimation of their ability to pay. Economists insist that this is "efficient" and makes us all better off. After all, the marginal cost of filling the last empty seat on the plane is negligible, so why not sell that seat for peanuts to a flier who doesn't mind the uncertainty of knowing whether they'll get a seat at all? That way, the airline gets extra profits, and they split those profits with their customers by lowering prices for everyone. What's not to like?
Plenty, as it turns out. With only four giant airlines who've carved up the country so they rarely compete on most routes, why would an airline use their extra profits to lower prices, rather than, say, increasing their dividends and executive bonuses?
For decades, the airline industry was the standard-bearer for price discrimination. It was basically impossible to know how much a plane ticket would cost before booking it. But even so, airlines were stuck with comparatively crude heuristics to adjust their prices, like raising the price of a ticket that didn't include a Saturday stay, on the assumption that this was a business flyer whose employer was footing the bill:
With digitization and mass commercial surveillance, we've gone from pricing based on context (e.g. are you buying your ticket well in advance, or at the last minute?) to pricing based on spying. Digital back-ends allow vendors to ingest massive troves of commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker industry to calculate how desperate you are, and how much money you have. Then, digital front-ends – like websites and apps – allow vendors to adjust prices in realtime based on that data, repricing goods for every buyer.
As digital front-ends move into the real world (say, with digital e-ink shelf-tags in grocery stores), vendors can use surveillance data to reprice goods for ever-larger groups of customers and types of merchandise. Grocers with e-ink shelf tags reprice their goods thousands of times, every day:
Here's where an economist will tell you that actually, your boss is right. Many groceries are perishable, after all, and e-ink shelf tags allow grocers to reprice their goods every minute or two, so yesterday's lettuce can be discounted every fifteen minutes through the day. Some customers will happily accept a lettuce that's a little gross and liztruss if it means a discount. Those customers get a discount, the lettuce isn't thrown out at the end of the day, and everyone wins, right?
Well, sure, if. If the grocer isn't part of a heavily consolidated industry where competition is a distant memory and where grocers routinely collude to fix prices. If the grocer doesn't have to worry about competitors, why would they use e-ink tags to lower prices, rather than to gouge on prices when demand surges, or based on time of day (e.g. making frozen pizzas 10% more expensive from 6-8PM)?
And unfortunately, groceries are one of the most consolidated sectors in the modern world. What's more, grocers keep getting busted for colluding to fix prices and rip off shoppers:
Surveillance pricing is especially pernicious when it comes to apps, which allow vendors to reprice goods based not just on commercially available data, but also on data collected by your pocket distraction rectangle, which you carry everywhere, do everything with, and make privy to all your secrets. Worse, since apps are a closed platform, app makers can invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers them to figure out how they're ripping you off. Removing the encryption from an app is a potential felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (an app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to install a privacy blocker on it):
Large vendors love to sell you shit via their apps. With an app, a merchant can undetectably change its prices every few seconds, based on its estimation of your desperation. Uber pioneered this when they tweaked the app to raise the price of a taxi journey for customers whose batteries were almost dead. Today, everyone's getting in on the act. McDonald's has invested in a company called Plexure that pitches merchants on the use case of raising the cost of your normal breakfast burrito by a dollar on the day you get paid:
Surveillance pricing isn't just a matter of ripping off customers, it's also a way to rip off workers. Gig work platforms use surveillance pricing to titrate their wage offers based on data they buy from data brokers and scoop up with their apps. Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination":
Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:
This week, the excellent Lately podcast has an episode on price discrimination, in which cohost Vass Bednar valiantly tries to give economists their due by presenting the strongest possible case for charging different prices to different customers:
Bednar really tries, but – as she later agrees – this just isn't a very good argument. In fact, the only way charging different prices to different customers – or offering different wages to different workers – makes sense is if you're living in a socialist utopia.
After all, a core tenet of Marxism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." In a just society, people who need more get more, and people who have less, pay less:
Price discrimination, then, is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data. You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it for; and who it does it to."
Neoclassical economists say that all of this can be taken care of by the self-correcting nature of markets. Just give consumers and workers "perfect information" about all the offers being made for their labor or their business, and things will sort themselves out. In the idealized models of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density moving about on a frictionless surface, this does work out very well:
But while large companies can buy the most intimate information imaginable about your life and finances, IP law lets them capture the state and use it to shut down any attempts you make to discover how they operate. When an app called Para offered Doordash workers the ability to preview the total wage offered for a job before they accepted it, Doordash threatened them with eye-watering legal penalties, then threw dozens of full-time engineers at them, changing the app several times per day to shut out Para:
And when an Austrian hacker called Mario Zechner built a tool to scrape online grocery store prices – discovering clear evidence of price-fixing conspiracies in the process – he was attacked by the grocery cartel for violating their "IP rights":
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Of course, there wouldn't be any surveillance pricing without surveillance. When it comes to consumer privacy, America is a no-man's land. The last time Congress passed a new consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from revealing which VHS cassettes you take home. Congress has not addressed a single consumer privacy threat since Die Hard was still playing in theaters.
Corporate bullies adore a regulatory vacuum. The sleazy data-broker industry that has festered and thrived in the absence of a modern federal consumer privacy law is absolutely shameless. For example, every time an app shows you an ad, your location is revealed to dozens of data-brokers who pretend to be bidding for the right to show you an ad. They store these location data-points and combine them with other data about you, which they sell to anyone with a credit card, including stalkers, corporate spies, foreign governments, and anyone hoping to reprice their offerings on the basis of your desperation:
Under Biden, the outgoing FTC did incredible work to fill this gap, using its authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (which outlaws "unfair and deceptive" practices) to plug some of the worst gaps in consumer privacy law:
But now the burden of enforcing these rules falls to Trump's FTC, whose new chairman has vowed to end the former FTC's "war on business." What America desperately needs is a new privacy law, one that has a private right of action (so that individuals and activist groups can sue without waiting for a public enforcer to take up their causes) and no "pre-emption" (so that states can pass even stronger privacy laws):
How will we get that law? Through a coalition. After all, surveillance pricing is just one of the many horrors that Americans have to put up with thanks to America's privacy law gap. The "privacy first" theory goes like this: if you're worried about social media's impact on teens, or women, or old people, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about deepfake porn, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about algorithmic discrimination in hiring, lending, or housing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about surveillance pricing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. Privacy law won't entirely solve all these problems, but none of them would be nearly as bad if Congress would just get off its ass and catch up with the privacy threats of the 21st century. What's more, the coalition of everyone who's worried about all the harms that arise from commercial surveillance is so large and powerful that we can get Congress to act:
Economists, meanwhile, will line up to say that this is all unnecessary. After all, you "sold" your privacy when you clicked "I agree" or walked under a sign warning you that facial recognition was in use in this store. The market has figured out what you value privacy at, and it turns out, that value is nothing. Any kind of privacy law is just a paternalistic incursion on your "freedom to contract" and decide to sell your personal information. It is "market distorting."
In other words, your boss is right.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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