Meet the father and son who started playing catch 49 years ago and never stopped
In a time when the news is filled with doom and gloom and life seems to move at a breakneck pace, sometimes the only right answer to that is to take your dad out to the park and, “Field of Dreams”-style, “have a catch.”
And in Shoreline, Washington — the kind of interior suburb that you have to look at the signs to see that you are, in fact, north of 145th Street and therefore not just simply in Seattle — 51-year-old Steve Peters and his father, Dennis, have had an appointment for a game of catch that goes back so far that when it started over 40 years ago, Seattle’s only Major League Baseball connection was one year of the Pilots best known to baseball aficionados for Jim Bouton’s book “Ball Four.”
Eric Johnson of KOMO-TV in Seattle brought us their story.
Dennis Peters isn’t as spry as he used to be; the 80-year-old has moved into an assisted living facility, his time on this earth over half a lifetime removed from the days when he was a middle-aged father with a young son, but to hear Peters tell it, heaven can wait — he’s grabbing his glove and heading outside.
“What should I be doing?” he says. “What are 80-year-old people supposed to do, get into a walker and go watch Netflix for 18 hours a day?
“It’s fun! It’s great joy! It’s delight! It makes a day like today even more wonderful.”
And indeed, KOMO caught up with the father and son last summer for this story; 43 degrees and overcast in Seattle in January may be fine weather for wisecracking sportswriters to dream of taking a walk down to the waterfront and spending the writing money on a plate of fish and chips, but even the late, great Ernie Banks wouldn’t call this a great day for baseball, much less suggest “let’s play two.”
Father and son, whenever the weather is nicer than Seattle winters tend to dish out, have been playing catch wherever, whenever, a bond between two men thicker indeed than half a genome’s worth of DNA in the younger of the two.
Last year, a blindfolded Dennis Peters got the surprise of a lifetime. Driven by car down First Avenue and loaded onto a motorized cart, he was taken first through a tunnel, then helped off the cart, gently guided to the ground by his son, walking over dirt and grass for a rather unusual walk in the park.
Then, Steve said, “One, two, three, go!” The blindfold came off. The “park” was Safeco Field. The dirt and grass were the playing surface en route to left field. And the gracious hosts, the Seattle Mariners.
“Holy s—” was all the old man could muster.
Collecting himself, Dennis asked his son, “Holy crow! How the hell did you pull this one?”
The old man was surrounded by 47,943 empty seats. The silence of a place usually so raucous and filled with the excitement of baseball at the highest level was a sort of sporting religious experience.
“I’m not usually at a loss for words but … holy cow,” Dennis said.
He gave a lesson in fatherhood when talking to Johnson a few days prior.
“When I was a kid growing up,” he said, “I saw so many guys my own age who would say, ‘I don’t know if my dad ever really cared about me. I don’t know if my dad ever loved me,’ and I said, ‘If I ever have kids, that’s not gonna happen.'”
“What’s really important?” Dennis asked aloud, seemingly rhetorically, before answering his own question:
“THIS minute right now. THIS catch. THAT throw. Those birds flying up there right now. Live today RIGHT NOW!”
There’s a lesson there.
Baseball season is starting soon, and a man would do well to get a ball, a couple of gloves and a bit of open space at the park and build a bond with his kids so that maybe, when those kids are grown with a family of their own, they will never have to wonder if their dad really cared.
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