We met in a bar on a snowy winter’s night in 1994.  She grew up in Dallas before the Rangers came to town so when she moved to New York she was talked into becoming a Yankees fan.  (She stayed a Cowboys fan.)  So when the talk turned to baseball (as almost any bar conversation I have eventually does) and she starts talking about Bucky Dent and Thurman Munson I get a slightly pained look on my face and she stops and says: “Wait… who’s your team?”  I’m not completely certain she’d ever heard of the Braves at that point, what with being in the wrong league and all.  But she had heard of Hank Aaron because her friend Meryl Streep’s son had been named after him.

We were getting along pretty well, and she wanted to impress on me that she really got baseball.  So she tells me: “No.  I really know it.  I know what the infield fly rule is.”  I didn’t quiz her at that point, but that claim about the infield fly rule was a bald-faced lie.  She was less well versed in the infield fly rule than Sam Holbrook, and that’s saying something.

She introduced me to her world in the arts[1], and I introduced her to the mid-90’s Braves.  We were married in June 1995 and celebrated our first World Championship in October. That’s how you make a year.

I can’t say her love for the Braves and baseball matched mine, but her spousal attention to all things Braves were far more than perfunctory, not just to placate me.  For her, baseball was far more about personalities than prowess.  She shook her head ruefully every time we passed a Hooters Restaurant and wondered if Chipper was in there.  (It didn’t stop her from wearing #10 when we went to a Braves-Mets game, eventually supplanted by Acuña’s #13, pictured above.)  She took a dislike to Tom Glavine for joining the Mets and never forgave him… she wouldn’t listen to him doing color and insisted I find a different audio feed.  She loved Andruw’s mischievous smile.  She (like some of you) was baffled that Freddie would leave.  She loved Mac’s writing here and had the good sense not to read mine. 

For the 2021 Championship, she just assumed (again like so many of you) that the Braves would find a way to blow it and was giddy when they didn’t.  Our celebration was a little more muted, but it was over a quarter of a century later.

She fell in March and suffered a brain bleed that left her with a substantial uphill road to recovery.  In the course of her recovery she developed an infection which resulted in sepsis and I lost her on Saturday.  She’s been in the hospital this entire season, and I haven’t had anybody to watch games with, and I’ll never have anyone like that to watch games with ever again.

This has been a difficult season to write the sort of determinedly light stuff I write, and it’s going to be even harder for the rest of the season. Please bear with me.

I never saw a game in Turner Field because my infrequent visits to Atlanta never lined up with a home game, but we did go there once to tour the Braves museum. She was completely bored but saw tears in my eyes when I looked at some of the exhibits. She said: “You’re willing to shed more tears over the Braves than you will when I die.” She was wrong.

[1] This is a Braves Journal bio, not a real bio, but in her career, she ran the Alvin Ailey and Twyla Tharp dance companies and the Williamstown Theatre Festival, spent 12 years running the national union of Stage Directors and Choreographers, managed soap operas for Proctor and Gamble, wrote soap operas, was the first manager of the half-price Broadway ticket booth in Times Square, was the first Chairman of the Board of Second Stage Theatre Company in NY, and ran a theater for a number of years in Dutchess County, NY.