Winning One for The Whimper

By raising me and giving me his last name, my stepfather earned the name of father. After he pitched Southern High School to the city championship in 1948, Connie Mack signed my father, Gregory Tornatore, to play for the Philadlephia Phillies. Like his tested life, injuries debilitated his playing career. He remained a diehard Phillies fan though and his zest for the game of baseball undoubtedly rubbed off on my brothers and I.

I have always wondered the more life-changing event for my father, devoting his life to athletics as a vocation then not being able to play baseball anymore or walking into a hospital for back surgery then leaving paralyzed from the waist down slumped in a wheelchair. As my father’s life sunk into clinical depression from his immobility and cardiac problems over the years, I hoped he would live long enough to see one more championship by a major professional sports team in the city he grew up in. This was not to be. Teary eyed, I placed a baseball with loose laces in his coffin after he died of congestive heart failure in 2001.

This same fallible organ remembers who taught me the game of baseball when the Philadelphia Phillies won the National League pennant earning a spot to play in the 2008 World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays. I trust that there are more important things to do in the hereafter than checking out your favorite team back on earth but this mortal son of his devoted this World Series to him rooting and ranting for the Philadelphia Phillies to win.

During the early innings of game three of the World Series, my younger brother Anthony suffered a significant heart attack. The crushing news and following commotion shot me back like a cannonball to the same hospital my father died in. The shot returned me emotionally to the relationship with my infirmed father. Staring at my brother’s prone unconscious body in an intensive care unit during the past couple of days, I could not help to think that the suspended play in the deciding game five of the World Series mirrored both my brother’s induced coma and a life put on hold.

While every story in roller coaster life cannot hold a fairy tale ending, from God’s ear to the strings of my heart I hope to soon say to my recuperating brother what inevitability denied me from saying to my father….The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series and that we finally won one for the whimper.