As baseball season started a year ago, in spring 2023, my dad had been in his retirement community’s memory care facility for just a few weeks.
Moving him from the large condo my parents shared in that community to his newly furnished single room was tough. One of my brothers and I basically had to trick my dad to follow us to his new room, as he’d been adamant against moving. But after many months of my mom caring for my dad by herself, it was time. The veil of dementia was obscuring nearly all his daily thoughts and functioning. My dad, never a violent man, would lash out in anger at times.
Above all, it was heartbreaking—for him, I’m sure, as he no longer lived in the same space as my mom for the first time since they got married nearly 60 years ago—and for those of us who loved him and already mourned the person he used to be. The memory care wing has a few TVs on in the common areas, and at least once or twice, my mom would watch baseball with him during her near-daily visits. I’m not sure how much he still understood the game, but I like to think he enjoyed it.
These thoughts floated through my mind as the Mariners kicked off their 2024 season late last week. It was my first Opening Day without my dad in this world, as he died quietly at the age of 80 well before the All-Star Break last summer.
Love for baseball apparently came early for my dad. Growing up just outside Youngstown, Ohio, his favorite player was Bob Feller, the Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland Indians. Feller’s playing career ended the year my dad turned 14, and somewhere, years later, my dad got a ball with his autograph on it.
My parents took me to numerous games at Dodger Stadium and the Angels’ home in Anaheim, California, in the 1970s and very early 1980s. I’ve written before about idolizing Steve Garvey when I was just in kindergarten (I don’t endorse his current senatorial campaign at all). I was a tiny, clumsy kid who never played Little League, but I nevertheless grew up as a diehard baseball fan.
The Mariners tested my fandom after we moved to the suburbs of Seattle and frequently watched the home team lose in the drab concrete mausoleum known as the Kingdome. By the time that team tasted its first real success in the mid-1990s, I already was in my first job after college, watching the games on TV at my apartment on the Oregon Coast.
After my wife and I moved back to the Seattle area as our first child arrived, we went to games in the stadium formerly known as Safeco Field with my parents several times. My dad, a partial season ticket holder, organized a family get-together in a suite at the stadium for several summers in a row. As our family got bigger, we filled more of that suite from year to year.
Over the years, my family went to see the Mariners in person a few times each year, especially on Little League Day, as my oldest son played baseball for years. His tall, lanky frame made him a pretty good player, though he never took it too seriously. He truly played for the love of the game, hanging up his cleats when he didn’t make the high school team.
My parents stopped going in person so often to Mariners games as the years went by. The COVID pandemic hit just after we started noticing my dad’s memory glitching at times, and none of us went for a couple of years. But my dad and I continued a tradition that started sometime in the past 20 years or so. Because I knew he was almost always watching the Mariners game on TV, he or I would call each other merely seconds after a walk-off win or a shocking, heart-rendering loss by the team. As he became less aware in recent years, those calls dwindled. And then they stopped.
Grief is an uneven visitor. It didn’t wash over me all at once when he died. Frankly, we were relieved for his sake. After a needed intestinal surgery at the start of June last year, my dad stopped eating during his days in recovery. My mom, with our support, knew my dad—who never wanted to be a burden or live in misery—was ready to die. The hospital moved him across the street to the lovely hospice, and he died after less than a week of resting there, mostly in an unconscious state.
As the Mariners struggled to live up to everyone’s high expectations last summer, we eventually had the memorial service. I mentioned baseball and the Mariners in the eulogy I delivered, and I thought about him nearly every time I watched a game last summer, right up until the season’s end, when the Mariners went out with a whimper and missed the playoffs.
I still think of him, grieving bit by bit, as I listen and watch the Mariners play in the early days of this 2024 season. Thanks to Xfinity’s decision to put Root Sports into a more expensive tier, my mom’s not following the team on TV anymore. But when we talk on the phone, I fill her in. She still reads the newspaper stories about how they’re doing. It’s different, but baseball is still a family topic.
While sorting through my dad’s belongings last summer ahead of my mom’s move to a smaller apartment in her retirement community, my mom encouraged us to divvy up the Mariners shrine of sorts that sat on bookshelves in his den. My brothers and their children took some autographed baseballs and Mariners bobbleheads; I’ve already got too many bobbleheads myself, so I mostly declined those items.
But just before the move, as things were being packed up, one of the few things left on the bookshelves was that old ball autographed by Bob Feller. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers how much my dad loved that player, but I couldn’t let that item go to a charity box or thrift store.
It now sits on a bookshelf in my house. I don’t think it’s worth much in the collectable world, but it’s a tangible token of my dad’s lifelong love for both us and baseball.