Homer History: How the home run I never saw changed my perspective

In our Homer History series, writers re-tell the stories of memorable home runs from their perspective. In this installment, Stephen M. Champlin, a Major in the U.S. Army, shares a story with us the unexpected home run from a pitcher that changed his perspective on life. Major Champlin has been in the Army for more than 26 years. He’s watched baseball from Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chad and a few other places, too. He’s currently stationed in Europe.

My father wanted us to play sports. He hadn’t gotten the opportunity to play when he was a kid, and he didn’t want his kids to miss the experience. Of all the sports, baseball was the one I’ve loved more than any other. I’ve played it, followed it, studied it and taught it. I always came back to it, even when life threw me a curveball. And it threw many.

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There are not enough words for me to describe exactly what the appeal of baseball is. Maybe that’s also part of the appeal.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of memorable home runs. Kirby Puckett in 1991. Scott Posednik in 2005. Robin Ventura’s grand-slam single. Bo Jackson leading off in the All-Star Game. Warren Morris in the 1996 College World Series. Quite a few others as well, but when I think about it and rank the home runs that stand out to me, the most memorable home run is the one I have never seen.

It happened in 1999, when I was listening to the Colorado Rockies play my local Florida Marlins while Alex Fernandez was pitching. I was making a drive I wasn’t too keen on making, harboring resentment for things that happened 10 years earlier and listening to a team I had given up one year prior.

And then, as tends to happen in baseball, one home run changed everything.

• • •

I had a childhood. I won’t say it was good, I won’t say it was bad. I was lucky to be adopted by a family that loved me and set me on a path that I’m sure I would not have made it to otherwise. But things weren’t always easy or pleasant. My father, a Vietnam veteran, started having trouble with PTSD after my sister was born.

We struggled for a few years. Things would be good for a few months, and then he would lose ground to the memories and the demons he was fighting. My mom worked extra jobs to pay the bills. We shopped at the Salvation Army and St. Vincent’s. Being the oldest I helped as much as I could, learning to cook, do laundry, pick up my brother and sister from school. Even giving over the money from my paper route with the Hollywood Sun-Tattler to help pay bills.

I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t know the things my father was dealing with. I was confused by the changes in him. I had been taken in by a caring man, one who loved and spoiled me. I think my first Christmas with him I got every Weeble toy set I asked for. For the next Christmas he bought me a bike. In July. Then gave it to me before August.

When my brother and I started playing tee-ball he threw us fly balls that left his hand like a rocket leaving Cape Canaveral. They would rise up and touch the clouds before they came back down. Then I was dealing with a man who sometimes was so stoned he could barely keep himself awake at the dinner table, and at others, could be extremely violent. Police came to our house on many occasions.

One of my sources of refuge during these times was sports. As my friends and I were growing older, I remained one of the smaller kids. I could have been adopted by anybody, but genetics made sure I wasn’t ever going to be six-feet tall. I wasn’t big enough to catch anyone’s attention on a basketball court or a football field, but on a baseball diamond things were different.

I wasn’t the biggest, or the strongest, often times not the fastest either. It was on a baseball field that I learned people would respect me for trying and not giving up. I would often fail to achieve the exact results I wanted from an at-bat, or a quick catch and throw. But as long as I kept trying and improving, my teammates and coaches respected my efforts. Respect has its own aroma. It smells like a mixture that’s equal parts leather, clay and sweat.

• • •

My father’s struggles came to a boiling point when I was 11 or 12. He’d bought a car at a buy-here/pay-here lot while his license was suspended and put it into a canal out on Pines Boulevard where the Everglades started. The officers on the scene found some things he shouldn’t have had in the car. I don’t know what happened when he stood before the judge, but my father spent the next two years as an inpatient at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Miami.

Starting when I was in seventh grade, I was going to school and I was also helping my mom seven nights per week delivering papers for the Miami Herald. We’d be up at one in the morning, drive to a warehouse, fold, bag, and deliver a couple hundred newspapers, which had to be finished by 6:30 a.m. I’d be in school by 7:15 a.m., picking up my brother and sister from their schools in the afternoon, getting them home, managing the house and fixing dinner, as best I could.

When we were done with the route, Mom would get my brother and sister to their schools, go to her job from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., come home and grab a quick shower and dinner (and a nap on a good day) then go to a waitressing job. She wouldn’t get home until sometime after 10:30 p.m.. Then she and I would be back at the warehouse waiting for the papers to come in. On the weekends she’d work two other waitressing jobs and sleep as much as possible.

I am still amazed at the schedule she kept in order to provide for us. She kept this up for three or four years. And with as much as she was doing, we still got government assistance and Christmas presents from a church. I shared as little as possible with my friends.

Again, sports was a refuge. But I didn’t have time or opportunity enough to play anymore, so I read. I followed the Yankees through the Herald’s sports section, I would catch a game on the radio from time to time, and I checked out books on baseball history and lore from the library. I learned the mythos of Ty Cobb, Bob Feller, Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Mordecai Brown, and of course a litany of Yankee legends.

One of the great things about baseball is there’s this list of other people who weren’t legends but did legendary things. Dusty Rhodes with his clutch hitting for the New York Giants, Gene Tenace just about matching his season home run total in the playoffs for the Oakland A’s (five in the regular season, four in the post season), Bobo Holloman throwing a no-hitter in his only major league start, and an endless list of others.

These guys played in the shadows of gods, yet still found a way to steal a little bit of immortality for themselves. They practiced hard and did the right things and good things happened for them. I couldn’t understand why things weren’t working out like that for me.

• • •

Five or six Friday nights per year, as I tried to sleep before going to that warehouse, I would lay in my bed and see the glare of the stadium lights from my high-school football stadium. I would hear the band play and the crowd roar. The stadium was only a few blocks away but it might as well have been on another planet. It seemed like those people, many of them kids that I knew, didn’t have a care in the world. I would often dream that I was one of those legends I read about and the cheers I was hearing were for me in a place far, far from there.

Dad completed the two years in the VA hospital and continued on an outpatient program. He stayed there during the weeks and was able to come home two or three weekends per month. It was about midway through my junior year of high school when he finally came home to stay. Dad had found a way to confront and deal with the demons that had confounded him for so many years.

[Previously in Homer History: Paul Konerko slams door on Houston in World Series]

He was a lot more like the man I remembered when I was little. But now I had changed. My work and sacrifice had helped keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, and even with him back home, the debt was so extensive that Mom still worked the Herald job. Which meant that I still worked the Herald job. The difference was now I had to take a back seat and be treated as a kid again after I had borne so much responsibility. Our relationship grated once more, if for different reasons.

Before things got too bad, I graduated and joined the Army. With distance and time, things got better between us. About my third visit back home, we started to enjoy each other’s company again. Mom took a photo of us before I returned to my base. We’re smiling with our arms across each other’s shoulders. It’s a great moment, one of my favorites. It’s also the last photo I have with him. A month later he had a heart attack and was gone.

(Courtesy Stephen M. Champlin) Mom struggled again without him and I sent money home to help. When my enlistment was over I came home and helped again as my brother and sister finished their final years of high school. It hadn’t been my plan to return home. I’d spent a lot of years swearing I would never go back to that house, but family is family.

This time things were a little different. I had a hometown team I could follow. Now there was the Florida Marlins. Instead of reading about far off teams I could go to Joe Robbie Stadium and watch Major League Baseball played by modern stars like Chuckie Carr, Orestes Destrade, Kurt Abbott, Jeff Conine and some other lesser known guys like Ozzie Smith, Tony Gwynn, and Greg Maddux.

The expansion team struggled, but kept growing and advancing. Kind of like I was doing. I balanced time in the Army Reserves and working as a civilian (which was an adjustment), and I finally found the motivation to become serious about college.

I was excited when the Marlins made the World Series in 1997. I was also lucky enough to be in the stands with the woman who would become my wife for Game 7 of that series. When Craig Counsell crossed the plate in the bottom of the 11^th inning, we were lifted on a wave of euphoria that defies explanation. I was crushed when the team was dismantled in the offseason.

Not wanting to be hurt again I turned my back to baseball. I moved to another city after my sister graduated high school. I became a Sergeant in the reserves. Then in 1999 I was attending the summer session at the University of Tampa and working in the mailroom of Raymond James. The first weekend in August was a drill weekend with my reserve unit. It was also my 10-year high school reunion.

I didn’t want to see them and be reminded about any of it. As I drove down the highway, I turned on the radio and caught the Marlins broadcast for the night. Alex Fernandez, the sole remaining big money player from that ’97 team was starting against the Colorado Rockies.

Just as I had been dead set against returning to my parent’s house, I had been completely against the idea of attending my high-school reunion. I had loathed those years and didn’t want to revisit them. I had harbored a lot of hate and envy for those kids whose lives I thought were easier than mine.

• • •

There were no takers for Fernandez in the Terrible Heart Wrenching Dismantling of ‘97 because of the torn rotator cuff he sustained that October. He spent ’98 in recovery, and the ’99 season was strictly a rehab stint for him. The Marlins had him on a hard 100-pitch limit.

I didn’t expect much that night since he was facing one of the most feared lineups of the day. After all the Rockies had Larry Walker, Dante Bichette, Vinny Castilla, and even a young Todd Helton (who’d gone for the cycle against Fernandez and the Marlins in a game the month before). I settled in for some noise, a little light company as I drove down the highway.

Things changed once the game got started. Fernandez was as good as he had been in ’97. He caught Helton looking in the first inning, and again in the fourth for his only strikeouts that night. He scattered three hits through the game (one a solo home run to Brian McRae) and he crushed a solo home run in the bottom of the eighth for the Marlins’ ninth and final run of the night.

Lowell and Aven hit bigger home runs that night, but Fernandez’s was the best. After his homerun in the eighth, he came out in the top of the ninth to finish the game on only 98 pitches. Joe Angel’s signature call “And the Marlins are in the WIN column!!” sounded just as good that night as it had after Game 7.

As I drove closer to home and listened to the game, my excitement and enthusiasm rose and I changed my mind and went to my reunion.

Everyone was friendly. They were happy to see me and I was happy to see them. I didn’t go to my Reserve drill that weekend. I spent it with some long-lost friends instead.

[Elsewhere: Check out the Dunk History series on Yahoo Sports]

What I learned that night, when I became enraptured with a meaningless rehab game and reconnected with people I’d purposely kept at arm’s length for years, was that part of life is about our struggle, our fighting to get to these small moments that we can hold in our heart and reflect back on. Frozen little snapshots like the one of me and my father that remind us that we all have our battles, but if we try hard and keep pushing forward we’ll be rewarded with moments of friendship and happiness.

Fernandez hit three homeruns for his career, all of them in that ’99 season. I can’t find video of any of them anywhere and if I did, I wouldn’t want to see it. It’d be like knowing the secret to the magician’s trick. It would ruin it.

No, that moment belongs as it is in my memory, tired and dirty from a long day at work, driving across Alligator Alley, hearing Joe Angel’s call, yelling with joy when his voice charted the course of Fernandez’s shot over the “Teal Monster,” knowing for certain that this game was being won by a masterful performer.

And learning that it was possible for good things to happen again.

PREVIOUSLY IN HOMER HISTORY
– The night a hobbled Kirk Gibson broke my heart (by Mike Oz)
– Cal Ripken Jr. wowed us yet again on Iron Man night (by Lauren Shehadi)
– When Albert Pujols silenced Minute Maid Park (by Jeff Passan)
– Bill Mazeroski’s great walk-off World Series winner (by Kevin Iole)
– The Big Papi grand slam that still haunts Detroit (by Al Toby)
– That time Joe Blanton hit a home run in the World Series (by Sam Cooper)
– When Jim Leyritz halted hopes of a Braves dynasty (by Jay Busbee)
– Bryce Harper and the home run almost no one saw (by Chris Cwik)
– Shane Robinson and the home run on one predicted (by Tim Brown)
– The shot heard ’round the world (by Larry King)
– The night Reggie Jackson became Mr. October (by Scott Pianowski)
– Tony Fernandez’s extra-innings postseason blast (by Joey Gulino)
– Dave Kingman takes one out of Wrigley Field (by Andy Behrens)
– Joe Carter’s blast wins the 1993 World Series (by Greg Wyshynski)
– Todd Helton ignites a historic Rockies run (by Mark Townsend)
– David Eckstein once again does the improbable (by Max Thompson)
– Bob Brenly makes up for four errors with a blast (by Rob Schneider)
– Alex Gordon ties Game 1 of the 2015 World Series (by Nick Bromberg)
– Ryne Sandberg takes Bruce Sutter deep twice (by Kyle Ringo)
– Hank Aaron passes Babe Ruth with No. 715 (by Steve McAllister)
– When Frank Thomas showed his Home Run Derby muscle (by Andreas Hale)
– Steve Finley’s grand slam that did not suck (by Marcus Vanderberg)
– Brian Johnson’s unlikely blast in a pennant race (by Jeff Eisenberg)
– Wily Mo Pena’s blast makes an O’s fan hit rock bottom (by Thomas Sadoski)
– Chris Chambliss sends the Yankees to the Series (by Gary Mondello)
– Josh Hamilton’s classic Home Run Derby performance (by Anthony Sulla-Heffinger)
– Paul Konerko slams door on Houston in World Series (by Ryan McKinnell)