This is a story about a father and a son, and a belated Father’s Day outing, but mostly it’s about the son, who loves life and adventure and food, not necessarily in that order. He is a reporter and occasional anchor at ABC11, WTVD, in Raleigh, N.C. His name is Sean Coffey and I love him. I drove with him to Victoria, Tex. when he got his first TV job out of college about six years ago. He planned the route by restaurants where he wanted to eat. The most memorable stop was at Saw’s Soul Kitchen in Birmingham, Ala., a legendary barbecue joint that lived up to its billing. I highly recommend the pulled pork and collard greens.
The one thing Sean might love more than anything, though, is baseball. I am writing this in the bedroom he grew up in. It has been repurposed into my office. To my left are three framed 8 x 10 photos: one of Ted Williams, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle, one of Whitey Ford and the last one of Jackie Robinson sliding into home. In front of me are three framed pennants commemorating the Yankees’ 1996, 1998 and 1999 World Series championships. On the dresser to the right is a photo of Mickey Mantle walking back to the Yankee dugout after his final career at bat (he popped up to short against Jim Lonborg in Fenway Park on Sept. 26, 1968), his famous No. 7 stark and lonesome on his broad back. Just above it is a much happier photo showing 10-year-old Sean with his arm around his favorite player at the time, Alfonso Soriano. We were in the Dominican Republic for a story I was working on and the group we were with arranged a lunch with Soriano. It was a party of 10 and the table was long. Sean positioned himself directly across from Soriano, the better to stare and fire questions at him. Questions have long been a major part of Sean’s DNA. The first one came long before the food did.
“Is it okay if I call you Sori?” Sean asked. (Sori said yes.)
Sean, (l.), Sori (r.)
Sean is a Yankee fan to the core, but his passion for the game and its history goes far beyond pinstripes. He was mesmerized by the Baseball Hall of Fame when he first visited for his eighth birthday, especially by the plaque of Lou Gehrig. Sean became fascinated about the feats required to get into the Hall, often wondering if a player was “a lock” or “locked in” to make it. As I tucked him in bed one night when he was in third grade, he asked me about a young All-Star pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers who had a 2.70 ERA and struck out 264 hitters that year.
“Dad, do you think Ben Sheets is locked in?” Sean asked.
I coached Sean all through Little League, and it was some of the best father/son bonding time imaginable. Sean was a pitcher and first baseman, and a solid hitter in the middle of the order. He helped us win a couple of championships, one of them with five innings of clutch relief pitching, but I was most proud of what kind of teammate Sean was. We had an autistic youngster on our team one year. His name was Danny and he lived with his mother and grandmother in subsidized housing. Danny had not played organized baseball before. Nobody worked harder or improved more that year. He got a couple of key hits and his keen eye at the plate enabled him to draw a lot of important walks. Sean was Danny’s biggest booster, always encouraging him. At the end of the season, we decided we wanted to give Danny a special award for being the team’s Most Improved Player. We ordered it at a local trophy shop and had his name engraved on it. Sean and I brought it over to Danny’s home one Saturday. They buzzed us in and we took the elevator up to his apartment. Danny opened the door. Sean handed him the trophy. “We wanted to congratulate you for all your hard work this season,” Sean said.
Danny’s face lit up. “Thanks!” he said. His mother cried.
“I’m glad we did that, Dad,” Sean said on the ride home.
Baseball took us on some special road trips. When Sean was 16, we did a week-long ballpark tour. Sean, who could’ve been Magellan had he been born five centuries earlier, mapped out the whole itinerary. We went to Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati and PNC Park in Pittsburgh, a jewel on the Allegheny River, walking over the Roberto Clemente Bridge back to our hotel afterwards. But the highlight was seeing the Yankees play in Wrigley Field, and then heading west to visit Dyersville, Iowa, the setting for our favorite baseball movie, Field of Dreams.
We drove through miles of cornfields on the way to Dyersville. The field looked as if it had literally been carved out of the corn, which it had. We ran the bases and soaked up the verdant beauty of the grass, and of course, we walked beyond the outfield, into the corn, the way the ballplayers do in the film, except we did it holding hands. The only thing we messed up was forgetting to bring our baseball gloves. Every time Sean and I have watched Field of Dreams we cry at the end when Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner’s character) asks his father, “Hey, Dad, can we have a catch?” And here we were without gloves. There was no way we could leave the Field of Dreams without having a catch, so we found a five-and-dime store and bought two cheap gloves and a ball. We had our father-son catch in right field
Sean got to work on his pitching mechanics on our trip to the Dominican Republic.
One of the perks of writing sports books is that sometimes your kids get to meet famous ballplayers, like R.A. Dickey, former knuckleballer and Cy Young Award winner for the New York Mets. R.A. and I were working on his book, Wherever I Wind Up, in Port St. Lucie in the spring of 2011. I timed the trip during a school vacation week so Sean could join me. He and R.A. hit it off immediately. R.A. called him “S Train.” Every night at the house where R.A. was staying, Sean and R.A. would get in the hot tub and Sean would pepper him with questions about knuckleballs and setting up hitters and getting inside intel for his fantasy baseball team.
Sean couldn’t make it home for Father’s Day this year. He called a couple of weeks ago and asked what I thought about going to see the Yankees and Red Sox at the Stadium. “We haven’t been to a game, just the two of us, in a long time. It’ll be a belated Father’s Day gift. What do you think?”
“Sounds great,” I said.
Sean bought two tickets for the game this past Saturday. He flew home from Raleigh on Friday. On Saturday morning, he went to his favorite deli, Rocky’s in Millwood, N.Y. because of course he did. He got his usual – chicken cutlet on a roll with bacon, lettuce, tomato and Russian dressing – and got me a breakfast sandwich. We took an express train from Tarrytown to Yankee Stadium. It was sweltering in the Bronx, 90 degrees and humid, the air as thick as oatmeal. Sean wore a Don Mattingly No. 23 jersey. I wore a boring Dad shirt. We sweated through our garments just sitting in the upper deck. It didn’t matter. In the bottom of the first, the Yankee leadoff hitter was Ben Rice, a rookie first baseman out of Dartmouth who was just called up from the minors. Sean rooted for him immediately, because of a Dartmouth connection. Sean’s late grandfather, Ed Willi, was Dartmouth class of 1955 and a Yankee fan dating to the 1940s. Ed took Sean to his first game when he was five. They went to many more games, almost always sitting in the upper deck, which was why Sean chose Section 417 for this game. Rice turned on a 2-2 pitch from Red Sox starter Josh Winckowski and belted it into the second deck in right field. Sean and I high-fived. Without saying a word we both knew how much Tata Willi had to be loving this. Go Big Green.
“I’m glad we could do this, Dad,” Sean said.
The Sox rallied to take a 3-1 lead in the third and then a 4-3 lead in the top of the fifth. The Yankees had lost in heartbreaking fashion the night before when they were one strike away from winning, and had dropped 14 of their last 18 games. Sean and I were talking about how they needed a breakout victory to change the narrative, and then in the bottom of the fifth, the Yankee bats came alive, producing four runs and bringing Ben Rice back to the plate, this time with two men on. Sox reliever Chase Anderson came in with a 1-0 pitch, and Rice drilled it over the wall in right for his second homer of the game and third of his nascent career. Sean and I high-fived again, and then he looked Ben Rice up on his phone. Turns out he is a Massachusetts kid who grew up rooting for the Yankees in the heart of Red Sox country, because he idolized Derek Jeter.
“This is crazy,” Sean said.
The score was now 10-4. Sean looked out at the retired numbers in Monument Park in right-centerfield and asked me if I agreed with all of the choices. Usually Sean’s questions come rapid fire, as they occur to him, and this time was no exception. Once a 6th-grade teacher scolded him because he raised his hand so often the teacher couldn’t get through the curriculum. It’s no different as an adult.
“Two through eight – those are no-brainers,” he said, referring to Jeter (2), Babe Ruth (3), Lou Gehrig (4), Joe DiMaggio (5), Joe Torre (6), Mickey Mantle (7), Yogi Berra (8). “But what about the others?”
I said I was not completely sold on No. 9 – Roger Maris and Graig Nettles – even though they were both fine, championship-winning players. I talked to him about Nettles’ three spectacular fielding plays at third base in Game 3 of the 1978 World Series that saved the day for Ron Guidry and prevented the Yankees’ from falling into a 3-0 hole. He went to his phone again, watching replays of Nettles’ heroics.
“Was he the best third baseman you ever saw?” Sean asked.
“He was close, but nobody was better than Brooks Robinson,” I said.
Sean was rolling now. He asked whether I’d ever been at a World Series-clinching game (I had – Game 5 in 1969, when the Miracle Mets beat the Orioles, and Game 6 in 1977, when Reggie Jackson hit three homers on three consecutive pitches to close out the Dodgers); about Jackson’s notorious feud with Billy Martin; about my candidate for the most famous headline in the history of the Daily News, the paper I wrote for for 30 years (I went with FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD), and about my first job out of college, with the Associated Press in Cleveland.
“Do you ever look back at your writing from that time and not like it?” he asked.
“All the time. Most of it makes me cringe,” I said.
In the bottom of the seventh, Ben Rice came up again. Anderson was still pitching for the Sox. The Yankees had two men on. Anderson delivered, Rice swung and the crack of the bat resounded through the Stadium, the crowd rising and roaring as the ball rocketed into the right-centerfield seats. Sean and I completed our third high five of the day, all courtesy of Ben Rice. It was the first time in the storied history of the New York Yankees that a rookie had homered three times in a game. After Rice finished with a gauntlet of back slaps and hugs in the dugout, the crowd demanded a curtain call. Rice wasn’t sure what to do, so his teammates pointed him to the dugout steps by the bat rack and pushed him out to acknowledge the cheers. It was a sweet scene.
Fifteen minutes later, the Yankees were celebrating a 14-4 victory, exactly half the runs driven in by a kid from Massachusetts and Dartmouth. We stayed in our seats for three full renditions of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” as Ben Rice got interviewed on the field.
As we turned to leave, I kissed Sean Coffey on the cheek and thanked him for a beautiful Father’s Day. We headed into the steambath that was 161st St. Sean said, “Hey Dad, there’s a pretty good pizza place just a block away. You want to get a slice?”
Can’t say for sure if this is a baseball book we are reading, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Ok, there you go again, making me cry! I'm happy Sean is still the inquisitive young man I remember. BTW-I believe I know who that 6th grade teacher was, LOL. It sounds like a glorious time was had by both of you. You have three wonderful young adults. Happy Belated Father's Day Wayne.
A beautifully written father-son moment. And baseball - or another sport - can have that effect. Love this.