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I had a friend when I was growing up in San Diego, Marc Reyes. Marc’s father was an angry man, the kind of person who’d shout at his wife and kids even when there was a young stranger in the house. I’d seen him punch a wall hard enough to crack the plaster, over nothing—a failure to bring in the afternoon paper.

The hush in that bullpen took me back to the Reyes household, the tense silence that would fall over it when Marc’s father would come home.

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