There’s something about baseball and fatherhood.*
*I know this is extraordinarily early to put a caveat in a piece like this, but I want to acknowledge two things up front. First of all, saying ’there’s
something about baseball and fatherhood’ does not exclude nor negate all the other wonderful ways that folks get into baseball and is not at all saying that the only way into baseball is through a male parent. Lots of folks are introduced to baseball through their moms, grandmas, aunts, cousins, friends, etc. This is not attempting to reinforce any stereotype about baseball being a ‘man’s’ sport or discounting the incredible women who play, watch, and love baseball. This is just my story .
Secondly, and similarly, I recognize that not everyone has a relationship with their dad like I had with mine. I’m the luckiest guy in the world because I’m Vinnie Salvatore’s son. If you and your dad don’t/ didn’t have a great relationship, I’m truly sorry. This isn’t me humble bragging about winning the dad lottery, it is simply the only way I know how to tell my story. Let’s try this again.
There’s something about baseball and fatherhood.
I’m far from the first person to make this observation, but man, it’s true. Some of my earliest memories of my dad are us watching baseball games, and him patiently trying to explain to me what was happening. I loved baseball as a kid, but it was more about being with my dad and spending time with him than it was about any particular fandom. Because my dad grew up a Giants fan, my Mets partisanship really didn’t take hold until the late 90s when the team was good again and I wanted to establish my own foothold into fandom. I never really liked the Yankees and I always defaulted to the Mets, but it was in that magical period that culminated in the Subway Series that the Mets felt like mine.
I don’t begrudge my dad for not raising me as a die hard fan of one team; it allowed me to appreciate players like Ken Griffey Jr, Matt Williams, Greg Maddux, and Roberto Alomar – all players for whom he would stop and point out their greatness to me – in a way that had nothing to do with winning or losing, but rather just appreciating the beauty of their games.
That said, the household I am raising my children in is not the same as the one I grew up in. We are a Mets house, through and through. One of my wife’s first words was “Mookie.” We have an OMG ornament that hangs above our front door. My son sleeps under a Mets blanket every night. I am raising kids who hear baseball and think “Mets.”
Is this a disservice to them? The cynic in me after another collapse says probably, but I don’t really know; I doubt one of them could really name a non-Shohei Ohtani player who was never a Met, but kids who do musical theater and like to play Dungeons & Dragons aren’t always quick to become statheads. But over the course of the last few years, while I can’t say that their general baseball appreciation has grown all that much, their Mets fandom has.
A huge part of that are two now-former Mets: Pete Alonso and Edwin Díaz.
I don’t think John DiMarsico really knew that when he started filming Díaz’s entrance in such a cinematic fashion that he was creating a touchstone for a new generation of fans to embrace baseball, but at least in the Salvatore house, that’s what happened. When my kids hear “Narco,” whether at Citi Field or in the wild someplace, they start doing the Mr. and Mrs. Met trumpets dance, which my son somehow every time turns into a faux-Psy “Gangnam Style” horse riding move. It has become one of the songs that I use to wake them up in the mornings, and it’s a song we use as a family to hype ourselves up.
Now, you might say, “It sounds like your kids like Timmy Trumpet more than Edwin Díaz,” and you may have a point, but you’re missing the big picture. Some kids got into baseball through Rookie of the Year and relished saying “funky butt loving.” Others chanted “let’s go Mets go” in 1986. Some liked bubblegum enough to buy a pack of cards to get that chalky, brittle treat and wound up reading the cards that were the delivery system for the cuts on the roof of their mouth. Some people find a player attractive and decide to watch for that reason; I’ll never forget a friend of mine explaining his love for the Rockies was forged through the sight of Nolan Arenado in baseball pants.
When my kids would ask what inning the Mets game was, I could say “It’s the seventh, come watch with me and we’ll see ‘Narco’ soon.” And then, with a kid under each arm, I’m explaining to them the infield fly rule or why only one hitter per team is ‘designated.’
And while they like seeing a strikeout, for a young fan, there’s nothing more exciting than a home run. Hell, for many not so young fans, the same is true. And for the majority of my kids’ lives, the preeminent home run hitter on the team was Pete Alonso. And so while Timmy Trumpet may have gotten them in the door, it’s the Polar Bear that kept them there.
We often joke that my son has a couple different, as we put it, Muppet faces. One of these faces is an exaggerated look of shock, which he deploys whenever something blows his nine-year-old mind. This is the face he makes when Alonso really connects with a ball. When we took him to a game in the summer of 2022, he asked us where he could go at Citi Field to “say hi to Pete Alonso.” Sadly, that didn’t happen for him that day (or any day yet).
For both of my kids, Alonso represented what the Mets could be, after years of me explaining to them what the Mets weren’t. “No kids, the Mets aren’t in the World Series this year.” “Sorry, the Mets just traded Justin Verlander, the guy I spent all of Sunday’s game talking your ear off about.” “No, none of the players going into the Hall of Fame this year will wear a Mets cap.”
But Pete felt different to them. When I see Pete, I see a defensively limited player with huge power and a declining bat to ball skill. When they see Pete, they see a guy who can do something that seems impossible when you’re young and in a baseball stadium: he can hit the ball over the wall. And not only does he do it, he does it a lot.
On the train ride home from a Mets game, I was trying to explain to my kids how exciting the triple we saw was; I explained how rare it was and because we were in the upper deck and so got a perfect view of both the ball rolling to the corner and also the batter racing around the bases. While both kids admitted it was cool, they couldn’t stop talking about the home runs. It’s the simplest way to understand baseball: one guy is going to throw the ball as hard as he can and the other guy is going to swing out of his shoes to hit it out of the ballpark. That explanation eliminates a lot of what I love about the game, but you need a foundation to build upon before you can debate the better version of WAR or the different ways of optimizing roster construction.
And sometimes those building blocks are dingers and entrance music. I can’t say for sure if my kids will one day follow in my footsteps and dedicate more time than any person should thinking about a baseball team that consistently breaks their heart, but if they ever do, it is due in no small part to Pete Alonso and Edwin Díaz. And because of that, no matter what happens from here on out, I am thankful for both of them. LFGM always and forever, but I’ll always have a special spot for those two ex-Mets in my heart. Drinks are on me, gentlemen, should we ever wind up in the same bar. I’ll make you take selfies with me to show off to my kids, and I’ll probably cry when talking about them.
But that’s what dads do. They introduce their kids to baseball because they love baseball so much and love their kids so much.
Dedicated to the memories of Vinnie Salvatore and Jack McShane.
