A Father's Day Salute to Baseball Dads

This Father's Day, I would particularly like to salute baseball fathers, for two reasons.

Baseball fathers? you ask.

Indeed. The baseball season is very long, and most baseball fathers don't get to see that much of their kids. It was bad enough when there were only 8 teams in each league - which meant 7 cities to travel to during the season. These days, that number is much higher, and the teams are spread across more of the country (as opposed to the concentration mostly along the east coast in the old days), making it less likely for baseball offspring to see their dads on the road.

It must be pretty tough for baseball players with a family to make it through the season. Even all the money of today's contracts can't buy during-the-season time with one's kids. I mean, theoretically, one could use that money to follow dad around the country on road games, but that's simply not practical nor desirable. No, there's just no easy way to see much of your kids during the season. The one beneficial difference is that today's players don't have to work during the off season and therefore can spend some extra time with their kids while players of old were out working.

So that's the first salute to baseball dads - who have to make fatherhood work in tough circumstances, where their kids may see them more on television than in real life between April and September.

But the second salute to baseball dads rises from the many conversations I had with Golden Era players. So many of them told me that the reason they called it quits was because they were raising a family, kids were reaching school age and the baseball life was not conducive to kids having a stable and steady life. Especially in the days when you could be traded at any moment.

And so far as I can recall, none of those players regrets what they did. Playing was their boyhood dream, but once they became men, they realized they had to balance boyhood dreams with the realities of manhood...and fatherhood. So they found other work, raised their families, and still cherish their baseball memories. But they also cherish the fact that they made the right decision, the decision that put their families, their kids, ahead of the uncertain future of their playing days. Most of them went on to make far more money doing other things than they would have (in those days) if they continued playing baseball.

Happy Father's Day to all baseball fans out there, and especially to those former players who made a tough choice and cut short their dreams in favor of fatherhood.