Crying In Baseball
I just learned of the death of a dear friend today. She was the wife of a fellow I served with on an executive board of a national organization. The two of them were the epitome of a couple being best friends.
James never traveled to one of our board meetings without Donna. I hit it off with both of them because we all shared a deep and abiding love of baseball. They were true blue fans, lifelong St. Louis Cardinal fans, but like me, as much fans of baseball itself as they were of their home team Cardinals.
They traveled to ballgames all around the country, and kept a scrap book of their travels, which included the tickets to the games they went to, pictures of them at the parks, and something memorable about each park they visited.
Once, when I was scheduled to sing the national anthem at a Washington Nationals game, they flew into DC from Springdale, Arkansas, just to hear me sing — and, of course, to attend a game at Nationals Park that day, and at Camden Yards in Baltimore the next day, to check two more parks off their list.
Unfortunately, after a nearly three hour rain delay, the Nationals game got cancelled, so they didn’t get to hear me sing that day, after all. But, they did run into someone who was there to hear one of my fellow choristers sing — out of 30,000 fans milling around the concourse area during the rain delay — and told him to tell their friend to get me to tell my Pete Rose hat story. Out of 50 guys who were singing with us that year, I just happened to be standing right beside the guy, in the runway to the field, who got the call from his friend, telling him to have me tell my story. Crazy how these things work, isn’t it?
Donna, without a doubt, was the biggest fan of my Pete Rose hat story. She just loved it so much. Few people I know embodied the love of the game with such obvious joy, as Donna did. The entire time I was on that board, which included a four-year term as exective secretary, and a three-year term as the headquarters representative, every time the board met, which it did twice a year, Donna would prompt me to tell the story to any new board members that had come on, when we all went out to dinner on Saturday nights. Every time, she listened with rapt attention, and a child-like joy that beamed from her eyes, as if she were hearing it for the first time.
They say there’s no crying in baseball, but yesterday I was crying over a couple of shows I watched, one a movie called “Chasing 3000”, and the other called “Forever Brothers: the story of the 1971 Pirates”. The first one was a movie about a couple of brothers who ran away from their home in California and traveled cross-country, despite the one brother having muscular dystrophy and bronchitis and the other driving on a learner’s permit, so they could hope to see Clemente get his 3000th hit.
The movie itself wasn’t all that, but the story was tremendous (and true!), and the movie had a ton of real life clips of Clemente, playing the game like no other player has played it, before or since.
The other show highlighted the fact that the 1971 team made history when it fielded the first all-minority lineup, consisting of all black and latino ballplayers, in a game late in that season, then went on to win the World Series. Clemente was the unquestioned leader of that squad, and hearing all the players talk about what it was like to play with him, was heart-melting, for me.
Both shows had a clip of the final hit of his career, his 3000th, that came on the last day of his final season, before his plane went down in the sea off the coast of Puerto Rico, while attempting to fly relief supplies to Managua, Nicaragua, after a devastating earthquake there.
So, for the second day in a row, I’m finding myself crying while thinking about baseball — yesterday, for my greatest baseball hero, and today, for my favorite baseball fan, and the biggest fan of my best baseball story.
Both people I’ve found myself crying for made this a better place to be, and my tears are as much out of gratitude for having had my life touched by such people, as out of sadness that they’re now gone from here. People like them are what makes me a better person than I would be, left to my own devices.
I also cry for my good friend James — I can’t imagine how difficult it will be for him to go on without his best friend in life. But, knowing James, he’ll go on, and will live a full life, if for no other reason than, it’s what his best friend and wife, Donna, would have wanted.
Like Clemente, she was the best.
