{"id":781670,"date":"2026-08-18T04:09:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T04:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/781670\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T04:09:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T04:09:15","slug":"playing-catch-until-theres-no-more-catch-to-be-had-twins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/781670\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Catch Until There\u2019s No More Catch to Be Had – Twins"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tI suppose I didn\u2019t have a choice but to be a baseball fan. It\u2019s in my blood, to some degree. My great-uncle died of head trauma, after years of wearing beanballs as a barnstormer in the 30s and 40s. He and my grandfather had the chance to play against Satchel Paige<\/a> and Ted \u201cDouble Duty\u201d Radcliffe when they played for the Bismarck Club (sometimes known as the Churchills) in 1935. Apparently, Grandpa got a hit, but I\u2019m skeptical.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Grandpa passed down his love of baseball to his son, and his son passed it down to me. Really, baseball is something you inherit from someone, whether it\u2019s your parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, or even your persistent friend who begs you to come out to the ballyard some Sunday afternoon; I myself made a baseball fan out of a nerdish grad school classmate with an afternoon Triple-A game. You don\u2019t stumble into being a baseball fan; you\u2019re led.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you became a baseball fan when you were a child, it probably involved a game of catch. I think my uncle was the first one to really play catch with me, but I also played with my dad plenty. At some point, though, you have your last game of catch with your father. You typically don\u2019t know it. It\u2019s something the two of you have always done, but over time, you play less and less catch. Suddenly, you haven\u2019t played in years. And you didn\u2019t even know it. Maybe it\u2019s when you left for college. Maybe it\u2019s when you hung up your glove after two agonizing years of tee ball. Maybe your dad throws out his shoulder, as many middle-aged men do, and you never get back to it. Maybe Dad left too soon, earlier than either of you hoped or expected.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIt’s what Field of Dreams is famous for. Really, ask yourself, if Kevin Costner asked Dwier Brown anything other than if he’d “wanna have a catch,” would you remember the film for anything other than its poor pacing and dialogue? It doesn’t truly become a tear-jerker until we start thinking about playing catch with our own fathers, grandfathers, uncles, what have you\u2014because it’s something that nearly every baseball fan of a certain age or experience understands: that one last catch with Dad. You didn’t know during your last catch that it was your last catch. Or, for some, it’s the yearning for their first catch with their father\u2014a catch that never actually happened.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI had the privilege of knowing I was playing catch for the last time with my father. When I was 24, and Dad was 58, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer\u2019s\u2014a disease that slowly (though much faster than you\u2019d ever hope) and irreversibly erodes the brain, leading to a loss of memory and executive function. It\u2019s a terrible, terrible disease to watch someone experience, and I can only imagine (although I may someday know, or even not-quite-know) how terrible it is to live through.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tA few months after his diagnosis, I was visiting home. My younger brother was spending the summer in our hometown before leaving for graduate school, and we\u2019d planned to play catch that afternoon. My brother called me a bit later, saying he\u2019d gotten busy with some friends and not to wait up for him. So my dad, sensing the opportunity, asked if I\u2019d like to play catch for a bit.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI have no idea when he\u2019d last thrown a baseball, let alone when we\u2019d last played catch together. His arm was shot from years of throwing us batting practice, and I\u2019d hung up my cleats after my junior year to focus on other sports.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI clocked what was happening in the moment, and I think he did, too. He made it through about ten overhand throws, his shoulder stiff from years of disuse, before switching to underhand. We played for maybe ten minutes before putting our gloves away for good. But for those ten minutes, we were both 20 years younger.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s been seven summers since that game of catch. By his 59th birthday, he required a walker to get around, after a lower back injury that he never recovered from. These days, Dad doesn\u2019t do much talking. Or moving. Or even looking around. Once in a while, on a good day, you\u2019ll look him in the eyes, and you\u2019ll know that he knows who you are.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tWe both knew we\u2019d reach a day like today. So I like to think something divine kept my brother away from our backyard that day. We both needed that game of catch. To this day, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth to have had it\u2014tied for first place with thousands of people I’ll never meet, and with Dad.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tMy story isn\u2019t special. As I said, most people reading this of a certain age or experience have their own version of this story. There are an enormous number of people who would do anything to play catch with Dad one more time.\u00a0I suspect many baseball fans think about exactly that every time the Field of Dreams game is played in Dyersville, Iowa. There\u2019s the beauty of the players walking out of the corn, but there\u2019s also the reminder of that final question. Hey, Dad. Wanna have a catch?\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019d planned on telling a version of this story about the man who coached me not only in baseball, but also in football, basketball, and track, at a later date. You know, that later date. But Thursday\u2019s Twins-Phillies game hit home for me in a way that I wasn\u2019t expecting. Every time MLB plays a game in that corn, I lower my head and shed a tear thinking about my own father.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tBut this time was different. Because when I lowered my head on Thursday to think about the big strong man that I used to play catch with, I saw my own newborn daughter, my firstborn, sleeping in my lap. She\u2019d been born less than a week before; it was her first Twins game sitting in front of the TV with me. The Field of Dreams Game could have set an impossibly high bar, but given how the game played, I\u2019m sure there are more magical Twins games in her future, if I\u2019m successful in leading her to baseball fandom.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI have no idea if she\u2019ll be a baseball fan. She might not even be a sports fan of any sort, and that\u2019s okay with me. But I hope that someday she\u2019ll ask me some version of that question.\u00a0Hey Dad. Wanna have a catch?\u00a0Although she\u2019ll never get a chance to play catch with her grandfather, maybe she\u2019ll feel his love playing catch with me. I felt that same connection to my own grandfather when my dad taught me how to throw his dad\u2019s palmball, even though I\u2019d never met him. And I hope that, until she\u2019s ready to see me years later when I\u2019m worn down by life, I can be half the man that I see my own dad as, when I imagine his former, able body walking out of the corn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I suppose I didn\u2019t have a choice but to be a baseball fan. It\u2019s in my blood, to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2388],"tags":[5,4671,822,60,3190,4,148],"class_list":["post-781670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-minnesota-twins","tag-baseball","tag-field-of-dreams","tag-minnesota","tag-minnesota-twins","tag-minnesotatwins","tag-mlb","tag-twins"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117114553183790303","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}