Bench Me, Praise Me

MM Baseball Romance
by Chase Power

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Praise Kink, Age Gap (24/35), Grumpy/Sunshine, Teammates to Lovers, Mentor/Protégé, Secret Relationship, Forced Proximity, He Calls Him Good Boy

He thought the worst part was getting benched. Then the man who benched him called him a good boy.

Tyler West was the best player on every team he’d ever been on — until the majors, where suddenly he’s average and overwhelmed. His debut is a disaster: strikeouts, misplays, and a gruff veteran catcher named Logan Price watching him from behind the plate with eyes that miss nothing.

Logan’s been in the league thirteen years. He’s seen a hundred rookies come and go. Most don’t listen. Most don’t adjust. But Ty is different — he listens, he tries, and he wears every failure on his face like a boy who’s never once been told he’s good without a scoreboard attached.

When Logan starts running private sessions — hands on his hips, voice in his ear, there you go, that’s what I want — Ty stops playing for the scouts, the stats, his father’s ledger. He starts playing for two words only Logan can give him.

Logan says it’s a system. Good games get rewarded. Keep your head straight, keep your roster spot. But systems don’t hold you after bad games. Systems don’t whisper you’re still mine against your throat. And when Logan’s body starts running out of seasons, Ty has to prove the rookie chasing his praise is man enough to be what’s waiting for him after the last out.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Gruff veteran catcher × golden retriever rookie MM romance
✅ Praise kink that’s earned, interrogated, and resolved into love
✅ Age gap (24/35) with real stakes on both clocks
✅ Teammates to lovers with forced proximity on the road
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotionally devastating
✅ “Good boy” used as a weapon, a reward, and finally a love language
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, sports-related injury, praise kink dynamics with power imbalance themes, and depictions of conditional parental love and performance anxiety. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One

The call came at 6:14 a.m., and Ty West answered it shirtless, one sock on, holding a protein shake he’d forgotten to drink.

“Pack a bag,” his Triple-A manager said. “You’re going up. Flight’s at nine.”

Ty stood in the middle of his apartment in Lehigh Valley — the one with the air mattress and the single fork — and waited for the punchline. It didn’t come.

“Up,” he repeated. “Up like—”

“Up like the big club, West. Hernandez hit the IL last night. They want you in center by first pitch. Don’t miss the flight.”

Click.

Ty looked at the protein shake. Looked at his one sock. Looked at the wall where he’d taped the lineup card from his first pro game four years ago, the paper gone soft and yellow at the corners.

Then he sat down on the air mattress, very carefully, and made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite anything else.

Twenty-four years of swinging at things, and it was finally happening.

He called his parents from the airport. His mother cried. His father said, “Don’t waste it,” which was, by Roy West standards, practically a sonnet.

“I won’t,” Ty said.

“They send guys back down every day. You know that.”

“I know, Dad.”

“So produce. Day one. Don’t give ’em a reason.”

Ty pressed the phone harder against his ear, like that might wring something else out of it — a good luck, son, an I’m proud of you already — but the well was the same depth it had always been.

“Boarding,” he lied, and hung up, and sat at the gate for another forty minutes with his knee bouncing hard enough to annoy a stranger two seats over.

The clubhouse smelled like eucalyptus and money.

That was Ty’s first dumb thought, walking in with his duffel over his shoulder and his heart going like a bullpen phone. The carpet was thick. The lockers were cherrywood. There was a guy whose entire job appeared to be arranging bats by weight, and a spread table with three kinds of salmon, and a nameplate — an actual engraved nameplate — that read WEST 19.

He stood in front of it too long. Long enough that somebody noticed.

“You gonna marry it, or you gonna dress?”

Ty turned. The voice belonged to a guy folding himself onto the bench two stalls down — big through the shoulders in a way that made his practice shirt look personally victimized, forearms like something off a butcher’s diagram, jaw shadowed with stubble that had clearly never met a razor it respected. Mid-thirties. Catcher’s knees; Ty could tell by the way he sat down in stages, like a drawbridge.

Logan Price. Ty didn’t need the nameplate. He’d grown up watching this man frame pitches on television.

“Sorry,” Ty said. “First day.”

“I know.” Price didn’t look up from his glove, working oil into the pocket with two fingers, slow and methodical. “Hernandez’s knee. You’re the corresponding move.”

The corresponding move. Four years of bus rides reduced to a transaction line. Ty laughed because the alternative was worse. “That’s me.”

“Skip’s got you eighth, playing center,” Price said. “Vasquez is starting for them. He’ll throw you sliders away until you prove you won’t fish. So don’t fish.”

“I don’t fish.”

“Everybody fishes their first week.” He said it without heat, the way you’d say everybody pays taxes. “Try to keep it to a week.”

That was the whole conversation. Price got up — drawbridge in reverse — and walked off toward the training room, and Ty stood there holding his duffel and feeling like he’d just been simultaneously welcomed and weighed.

He found out later from Webb, the first baseman, that this was Price being friendly.

“He talked to you unprompted?” Webb whistled, low. “Day one? Kid, he didn’t learn my name till June.”

The anthem took nine years. Ty stood on the line with his cap over his heart and forty-one thousand people stacked up into the lights above him and thought, very clearly: don’t throw up, don’t throw up, you grew up in a town smaller than section 134, don’t throw up.

Then it was done and he ran out to center field in a big-league uniform with his name on the back, and for about ninety seconds, jogging across that impossible lawn, Tyler West was the happiest he had ever been in his life.

The ninety seconds did not last.

Vasquez threw him sliders away. The first at-bat, Ty fished. Reached across the plate like a man grabbing for a falling drink, rolled it over, weak grounder, out by a mile and a half.

Second at-bat, fifth inning. Vasquez came in with a fastball at the knees, the pitch Ty had murdered at three different levels of the minors. He swung through it. Then he was 2-1 and pressing. Slider. Fish. Strike three, swinging, at something that bounced.

The seventh inning: a soft liner out toward center, the kind of in-between hop ball Ty had eaten alive his whole career. He broke back when he should have broken in. One step. The ball died on the grass in front of him, and the runner scored standing up.

They lost 4–2. The run Ty let score was the difference.

The clubhouse after a loss was a library with better lighting. Ty sat at his stall and stared at his spikes. His phone buzzed. His father: Tough one. Tomorrow’s stats start fresh.

He was so deep in it that he didn’t hear the footsteps. What he got, in a voice pitched low enough that it belonged to him alone, was:

“You press like that, you’ll never see a fastball.”

Logan Price stood there in a half-zipped hoodie, looking down at him with that unhurried, unblinking attention, like Ty was a pitch sequence he was deciding how to call.

“Seventh inning. You broke back on a ball you’ve caught ten thousand times.” Price’s voice never rose. “That wasn’t your legs. Your legs are fine. I watched you run a 4.1 down the line on a rollover groundout nobody’s beating out. That’s not a guy who’s slow.” He shifted his bag. “That’s a guy who’s scared.”

The word went into Ty like a thumb into a bruise. Price was right, and they both knew it.

“You’ve got the swing. I watched the tape from Lehigh before you got here. The swing’s not your problem. Your problem is you walk up there like you’re asking permission.”

And he left. Three sentences of brutal honesty from a stranger, and Ty’s chest was doing the thing it did when a coach he respected said attaboy. Worse than that thing. A hotter, lower cousin of that thing.

He fell asleep at 2:47 and dreamed, mortifyingly, about batting practice.

The lineup card was already posted the next afternoon. Decker — the other rookie, the one with the gel and the .302 average — was in center, batting seventh.

Ty’s name wasn’t on it.

One game. One night in the major leagues, and he was already on the bench.

Behind him, the clubhouse doors swung open, and he heard the unhurried, uneven footsteps of a catcher’s knees coming up the carpet — and he had exactly four seconds to decide what his face was going to do.

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Spring Training, Room 412 — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Two years later. Logan’s coaching catchers in Florida. Ty’s an All-Star. And Room 412 — the original, the dead-end room past the ice machine — is still taking reservations. The full seminar, spring training edition.

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