The Baseball Bond

As baseball returns with the first full team workouts happening on Monday, February 19, 2024, this will be another series of firsts for me. First opening day without my dad, first time I watched a game at the house without him, and first games I will attend without him. Between father and son, in the near 30 years I had with him, we were able to attend a baseball game at all 30 stadiums and we attended spring training one of those years. In 2024, my mom who is trying to learn as much about sports as she can: booked us a trip to Bradenton, Florida for the end of March to see the Pirates in Spring Training action a couple weeks before we attend opening day together. We attended opening day together last season while my dad attended the game in one of the suite level seats, and he brought us down "opening day cookies". He got a nice suite while my mom and I sat behind home plate about 20 rows up. That was a memorable game for us, Andrew McCutchen returned to Pittsburgh where he had started his career and won the NL MVP (most valuable player) in 2013 and got an insane ovation that gives me goosebumps when I think back about it. I think during this season, I will recap our 30 stadium tour by talking about our trips to the stadiums and the memories each time the Pirates have a series in town or out of town against a different opposing team. For this blog though, I am focusing on PNC Park and my baseball relationship with my dad that I formed.

(here is my grandfather Dick Boughner, my dad and I at opening day in 2001)

Baseball had always been a sport that my dad had loved, second to golf of course. I covered this in his eulogy, but when Roberto Clemente was closing in on 3,000 hits, my dad and his dad went to every game until Clemente got to that milestone. Little did either of them know, that would be Clemente's final at bat of his career as he was killed in a plane crash that offseason delivering humanitarian aid. The Pirates during my dad's lifetime won 3 world series (1960, 1971, and 1979), and had winning seasons all the way up until I was born in 1993. I then had to endure nearly 20 years of losing seasons until 2013 when the Pirates finally made the playoffs again. I remember going to game 3 of the National League Division Series in 2013 with my dad at PNC Park, the Pirates won, and had led the series 2-1 in a best of 5 series against the St. Louis Cardinals. They had made the playoffs again in 2014 and 2015, but in both of those seasons finished second in the division despite having the second best record in the whole MLB in 2014, they had to play the Giants and Madison Bumgarner in the Wild Card game, and it did not end well. Same in 2015, when they had to face Jake Arrieta from the Cubs. My dad and mom had attended the 2013 Wild Card game together during the famed "Cueto Game" where Johnny Cueto was so rattled in the second inning from fans chanting his name that he dropped the ball out of his glove. The next pitch to Russell Martin ended up in the left field seats to the joy of Pittsburghers. I still watch that game on Youtube from time to time and the announcers said "I can understand being rattled, but this is ridiculous". Ridiculous it was. Every year for as long as I can remember, my dad and I would go to baseball games together at PNC Park.

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One time while walking to our seats, the Pirates were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, we had arrived late to the game. We were walking in and the whole stadium was booing. My dad said to me "I guess Ryan Braun is up". Ryan Braun: a steroid user who attempted to lie about his urine test and use someone else's cup to avoid getting banned for using performance enhancing drugs. I have never disliked someone more in baseball than Ryan Braun, and that day everyone at the stadium agreed.

To paint a picture of how truly blessed as a baseball fan my dad and I were, one season we had watched the Los Angeles Dodgers play in four different cities in the same year, one of which was Pittsburgh. I believe we caught them in Los Angeles at their home field, San Diego, Pittsburgh, and in Miami in the same season. The Pirates will always be my favorite team and I will always enjoy going to their games, but it was really cool to see another team in so many places in one year.

In the last two years of my dad's life, he worked in a private family office and one of the perks of his job was free baseball tickets to the Pirates, the appeal for me was immense. I had told my dad so many times he could never retire from this job and he would just laugh and agree. We would sit a few rows back from the field a few nights per year and it was such a cool experience.

I remember on a particular day game last season, a game on Peacock during the blistering heat of summer, and talking to the bat boy as well as the MLB Replay official. Kids kept coming up in between innings trying to get baseballs and harass the bat boy and replay official. My dad and I sweating bullets the whole game, finally got to chatting. The replay official, a super nice guy, gave me a free baseball. I said thanks, and said "wow imagine what would happen if more people just were polite and didn't expect things", he laughed and agreed. He talked to us about our favorite stadiums and his favorite place, which was PNC Park. His job duties, which is presenting the iPad to the on-field umps and listening into reviews that happen, as baseball has this "challenge rule" which now makes football challenges look twice as long to decide.

From that experience alone, it was always so cool to go to baseball games and sit so close to the action. A fastball out of a pitcher's hand looks insanely clear when you see it from three rows back. A breaking ball that you can physically see break/move before it gets to the batter is a crazy thing to observe. As I pointed out to a friend of mine we took to the games last year, this is "baseball done right". I have always loved going to baseball games with my dad, for us it was a time to bond over something we both enjoyed. I know my dad's first true sporting love was golf which he loved to play, but I knew his first sporting love that he got to share with me was baseball.

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About two months before he passed, I got to take him to his final baseball stadium. I had already been to citizen's bank park in Philadelphia a long time ago with my cousin Spencer, his brother Blake (who was afraid of the Phillie Phanatic mascot because he was so young), his mother (and dad's favorite niece) Karen, and my mom. We sat in the nosebleeds and watched the likes of Jim Thome (1B), Jimmy Rollins (SS), and Placido Polanco manning second base. I believe it was 2004, which was the first season the Phillies were playing at Citizen's Bank Park. For whatever reason, my dad didn't come on that trip. For his Christmas gift at the end of 2022, I got him a year membership to the baseball hall of fame and a game of his choosing to see the Phillies play at Citizen's Bank Park. We never made it to the baseball hall of fame together, but when talking about it later, Uncle Tom said he would take me. Now I think I might just have to go by myself as a tribute to both of them.

Now to fully understand our undertaking as father and son of going to all 30 baseball parks together, one has to appreciate my dad's love for seeing new stadiums for the first time. He did something that I always knew he did, but didn't grasp the magnitude of what he was doing for himself. My dad, always a man who loved statistics and dimensions of stadiums, when he would visit a new stadium, he would walk to the furthest point of the stadium in all directions and take a photo from there of the field. One could equate his dedication to stadium dimensions to as if he was driving the google maps street view car. In his own essence, he was "Jimmy Boughner's Stadium Viewer". When we went to this Phillies game, it was against the Marlins, late in the season when both Miami and the Phillies were gunning for a playoff berth. The players for both teams were a bit different from when I first visited the stadium, 19 years earlier, but the atmosphere was the same. Philadelphia is a really neat sports town. They have had some ugly moments like the time fans threw snowballs at Santa Claus during a NFL game, but overall it is a really passionate fan base. These Phillies featured Bryce Harper (1B), Trea Turner (SS), and Kyle Schwarber (DH). The Phillies won the game 8-4 over the Marlins who were led by former Pirate Josh Bell.

Onto my dad's love of statistics when it came to baseball players, Kyle Schwarber, the leadoff batter for the Phillies, playing DH that night had a batting average of .196 to finish the night, but Schwarber was almost leading the league in homers. At the end of the season, he had a .197 batting average with 47 home runs and 215 strikeouts. His total at-bats (times he came to the plate to hit) were 585 in the season. He had a total of 115 hits (47 of which were homers), so to my dad and I's thinking, Schwarber either hit a home run or struck out in the bulk of his at-bats in that season, and he still had 47 homers at season end.

One of the things that I did for my dad was when he first got this job for this private family office, I got him a scorebook so he could keep written score of the games we attended. It brought back memories of when you could buy a scorecard with the program in the early days of going to games. I did this for two reasons, I knew my dad loved keeping score, but I also knew that if he kept score accurately, he would spend less time on his phone reading business news during live baseball games. I would always bump him in games to say "pay attention" because between pitches, he would look back at his phone which was likely browsing the Wall Street Journal reading about the stock market for each day. He'd always joke and say "I am paying attention, that pitch was a ball, and this next pitch is going to be a strike", as he looked up for four seconds before returning to his article.

I had this sense of pride when I took him to that Phillies game. He had always paid for our tickets anytime we traveled and he always either paid for suite level or behind home plate. At one of the stadiums we visited, Mile High Stadium, home of the Colorado Rockies, when walking to our seats in the suite level, we passed the owner's box, and my dad was like "Oh I thought we were sitting in that one". We were actually seated a couple boxes over from the owners of the Rockies. In that moment for the Phillies though, it was I who paid for our tickets that night. I made sure to sit behind home plate about fifteen rows back from the action with a great view. For me, it was a sense of accomplishment, getting my dad to his final stadium and getting to pay for his experience. We did end up moving back a few rows because of the way the seats were set up, there was not another aisle on the other side of our row, but it all worked out.

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Personal Reflection:

Baseball would always be a deep bond between my father and I. I had one of my first days of true sadness over this whole experience yesterday afternoon (February 24). It was the first spring training game for the Pirates. The first game I was keeping track of that I knew I couldn't talk to my dad about, or Uncle Tom for that matter. This whole experience has been surreal for me. I have relationships with people again that I have gone years without associating with, I have extended family who I have never had a relationship with, suddenly wanting to have a relationship. It is all weird for me and in a way a part of the grieving process for all of those around us. I have started to do more things with friends of my father's. I went out to get drinks with a coworker of his a couple weeks ago, and the coworker told me, "the last lunch we had with your dad, he shared with me Steve Martin's King Tut video". My dad, in truest form, sharing funny videos with the people he worked with. When old coworkers had to celebrate the first Thanksgiving Week without my dad, they spoke about watching the "WKRP Turkey Drop" video as a tribute to him bringing that into their lives.

All of this exposure from others, new and old, is a bit odd for me. There are people who have never associated with us who want to be in our lives because of who my dad was to them. Old colleagues, golf buddies, and people he met out and about that he remained close too, have stuck with us through this new normal. Family, some of whom I have never associated with, now want relationships despite never being there for us when we needed them the most, now with my dad's passing, feel an amount of regret for not being closer to us when he was alive. I’m an introvert by nature and I find myself either welcoming the new relationships or not. In both Tom and my dad's passing, relationships and friendships with people have been abundant. I have gone out of my comfort zone on a few occasions reconnecting with people either from my past or making new connections. I still feel this sense of closeness in what happened. Those of us engulfed in the "circle of trust" at my dad's viewing, from all relationships my dad had, all became closer. Those same people showed up to Tom's memorial gathering as well.

One of the things Tom never got to do, was be my cousin's manager for his semi-pro wrestling career. We thought it would be an immaculate relationship for the two of them where Uncle Tom would tell the audience "You see those teeth, you can't afford straight white teeth like Spencer Slade's". (Tom was a dentist). My cousin Blake and I were talking to Jeanne at Tom's memorial event, and Jeanne mentioned to us "Although I am a little sad we didn't get to see Tom be Spencer's manager. I am also a bit glad, as I feel like we would have been thrown out". I was going through my dad's old things and found that he kept tickets for every thing he ever attended well before he met my mother. In the summer of 1985, my dad attended Championship Wrestling at the old Civic arena in Pittsburgh. I am guessing he went with Tom. They were both big time studio wrestling fans. Seeing them both attend my cousin's wrestling events, reignited that love of studio wrestling for the two of them again.

Above all of the relationships, I have amassed in this time, the two relationships that have meant the absolute world to me, are the growing bond with my dad's sister Susan who I have engaged weekly phone call check-ins with, and a good friend of my dad's and Tom's: Dec. Just being able to reach out to Mike and talk to him has been such a cool experience for me. He is an amazing person and although we share this inner grief of losing two impactful men/loved ones, he has been there for me since both my dad and Tom said goodbye for now. He grew up with both of them and knew both of them really well. One of the final conversations he had with my dad was about a tweet Mike made about the show "Heidi" after a football game. My dad sent him a text about how he never thought the football game would turn into something bigger, like it became today. The show Heidi was never relevant again, but the AFL turned into the NFL. Just two lifelong friends sharing a joke together via text.

The utmost important relationship though has been the relationship with my mom. I never thought her and I would be in this position together, but for the first time I feel like both her and I relate. On our drive home from Colorado together, we had a political conversation that didn't end in us screaming at each other, and by the end of the trip, both of our tongues were still attached without a single wound to either. We both have this agreement and faith in someday we will see my dad again, and it is quite amazing. I have held onto something she mentioned in the last week as a "look-forward to". She said "this world is not our home, our home is heaven with our loved ones. We need to continue to live our lives the way dad did and someday we will be with him again".