Fathers and...

All the poets are right.

“Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.”

That line is from poet Donald Hall, and I think it rings true. Fathers and sons are a running theme in baseball, whether it is fiction set around the game (Field of Dreams and even The Sandlot) or the game’s actual history.

The irony of this is that many of the fathers who factor into baseball lore aren’t particularly good ones. Of course, there are exceptions. Based on what I’ve read, Bob Feller’s father, William, was a supportive dad who got along well with his talented son. The sport is full of paternal horror stories though.

Mickey Mantle’s father was abusive and demanding, and his domineering persona contributed to his son’s alcoholism. This was hardly the only issue in the Mantle home, but it played a large role in defining who Mickey became. His father intended to make him into a baseball player before he was even born, and while it’s true Mickey became one of the greatest players of all-time, this approach gave him a lot of baggage he had to carry throughout his career and beyond.

George Brett and Keith Hernandez were terrified of their fathers as kids and carried that fear into their MLB careers. Hernandez developed a drug problem, and Jack Brett’s now infamous reaction to his son falling just shy of hitting .400 in 1980 was, “You couldn’t get five more hits?” So yeah, we’re not exactly talking Father Knows Best here.

Even the greatest father-son baseball story of my lifetime, the Griffeys, is not without a dark side. It was never portrayed that way in the early nineties, as Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr. joined forces and became the first father-son duo to play together for a major league team. By that time, the two of them had moved past their problems and generally got along very well. It was a heartwarming story, tailor-made for baseball sentimentalists, but they had their rough spots in the past.

I’ve written about this before, but Ken Griffey Jr. was constantly at odds with his dad while growing up, and the pressure of being a baseball prodigy and the son of a big leaguer only added to the tumult in their relationship. Griffey Jr. contemplated shooting himself in the head, and actually attempted suicide in 1988 by swallowing a bottle of pills. Thankfully, he survived and eventually patched things up with his dad, but it wasn’t an overnight healing experience. Even after the suicide attempt, the two of the argued in his hospital room until Junior dramatically yanked an IV from his arm, which finally seemed to get his dad’s attention.

The Griffeys’ issues hit home with me, because it hasn’t always been easy between me and my dad. We don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. We’re on opposite ends of the political and religious spectrum, I’m a bookworm writer and he’s a farmer who doesn’t read much, he’s good at fixing cars and I’m a total moron when it comes to anything mechanical, in part because he was an awful teacher.

In that way, we’re a lot alike, unfortunately. As a kid, he would try to show me how to do something, and when I inevitably screwed it up, he got frustrated and did it himself and I never learned. I tend to do the same thing, though I try my best not to repeat his actions. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t.

I don’t say any of this to villainize my dad. In most cases, I don’t even think he’s necessarily wrong. But we are very different people, and because we’re not perfect, and frankly, possess many of the same faults, it can sometimes make it very hard to coexist. By the time my mom died nearly twenty years, I’d moved out of the house and started my own life, and our only real communication came through my mom as a go-between. When she passed unexpectedly, we were faced with a choice. Either we got over our issues and made an effort to reconnect, or we could go our own separate ways permanently.

I’m glad to say we chose the former, and baseball has played a small role in our reconciliation and the relationship that followed. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising. The game has always been present in our lives, even though I’ve been a die-hard fan for decades and he’s never followed sports all that closely.

This speaks more to his character than my own. Despite never being a big baseball fan, he made sure we went to at least one game at the K every season, and he let me take over the television in the living room to watch the Royals on many summer nights, even though he’d just come in from a hard day of farming and probably wanted nothing more than to relax and watch TV.

One time, I even dragged him outside after a long day at work to watch my one-man reenactment of Game 7 of the 1985 World Series. I was only six or seven years old at the time, and I’m pretty sure it would have qualified as torture in some countries, but he took a seat on the porch and watched me. I don’t know if he stuck around for all nine innings, but he sat through at least a few, which probably means I owe him a medal.

These are the memories I try to focus on, even if I’m a little embarrassed by this specific episode. He’s been arguably my most supportive reader since I started this newsletter, though he usually reserves his thoughts for text messages instead of the comments section, which is fine, but I’m a little nervous about his reaction to this piece. We aren’t the kind of family who airs our laundry in public, dirty or otherwise, but I think it needs to be said.

One of my favorite things at this stage of my life is to go to the ballpark with my entire family, including my sons and my dad, and I’m glad we’ve made this a fairly regular tradition. The old man was prepping for knee replacement surgery last season and we couldn’t make it happen, but he’s been on the mend all winter and is ready to go this year. I can’t wait to get out there.

While we’re there, we’ll avoid talking politics and religion and a number of other subjects we’ve learned to steer clear of over the years. There’s no reason to go looking for a fight. Fortunately, baseball provides the perfect venue to tune out all the noise. Besides, it doesn’t matter if we agree on any of that stuff or not. All that really matters with family is you’re there for each other when you’re needed and hopefully you bring a little happiness into each other’s lives. The rest is all window dressing. That’s a lesson I’ve learned from my dad, and one I’ll hopefully pass onto my own sons. But I’ll get to them next week.

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