My dad was born in 1960, and should have been a baseball player. He could hit, but pitching was his true love, and he had skill. I’m a bit fuzzy on the order of things, but while at a two year college there was an injury of some sort, he dropped out of school to apprentice with his electrician uncle, had a short and terrible marriage, and then joined the Army. My mother and father had dated in high school, but both went there separate ways, before getting back together in Arizona. Dad was still in the Army, and he took over raising my brother and I, products of my mother’s first and also terrible marriage.
My parents divorced a few years ago, and both remarried fairly quickly. Unfortunately, they both chose some shitty people again. My mother a physically abusive shit-bag that she is still married to today. My father married a not-so-bright toad of a woman. He sunk down into some hard-core depression and turned to consuming large amounts of alcohol. She happily fed him drinks, even up until the ambulance had to come and take him away because he was in massive amounts of pain couldn’t get out of bed (a few internal organs decided they didn’t want to work anymore). A coma was eventually induced, and it didn’t seem likely he would wake up out of it. He did, and was some time spent on rehabilitation, but it seemed like everytime there was good news, something bad quickly followed. The day that he passed away, his wife had told me I should hurry there (he was in Rome, NY, while I live near Boston). As I was heading up the stairs into the attic to grab my luggage, she called to say that she had just signed DNR paperwork, and then I knew I wouldn’t make it out to see him. For quite awhile I had near panic-attacks when attempting to walk up those stairs again; those have subsided, but great dread and sadness hit if I have to do so now.
He used to randomly text me baseball trivia questions. Despite loving the game, my trivia was week, so I usually had to cheat to answer, and to come up with questions in return. I really miss those.
So last year I came up with the idea of creating my father as a rookie in OOTP, my favorite baseball sim. I ran with that for awhile, but the effort sort of petered out. I had been thinking about giving it another go, and report on how things go here.
The first question was what year to bring him in. I decided 1980 fit, since I think that would have been the end of his first college stint. I didn’t think about it when I chose the year, but this also has the huge upside of being a year that the Mets had a first pick. As I always manage the Mets, this works out really well for me (though, my Dad would probably strongly disagree with this plan).
So here we go.