Being A Parent, Being A Son

I am the father of two wonderful daughters.  I am the son of my mother.  Aside from sleepovers at the homes of friends whose parents have gone through rigorous background checks - fingerprinting, retinal scans, blood tests, Facebook page comb-throughs - my daughters have slept under my roof every night of their lives.  It's "my" roof because I paid for it.  I literally own the roof and the walls and the floors and the air in between.  Maybe not the air.  I don't think any one person can own air, unless you run the balloon concession at Party City and even then it's helium so I go back to my initial statement that air is free, just hard to get if you're under water.  I know where my kids are every night, more now than ever because I'm home every night.  It makes it easier to sleep that way.

When a baseball player is on the road, he "knows" his kids are home every night because that's where they're supposed to be.  On the road, "knowing" something is really just an assumption.  But you're not consciously assuming anything because you're on the road, distanced from family and roof you paid for and all the stuff at home you don't need to concern yourself with because you're living in a hotel suite not owned by you but by some major corporate concern you don't give a poop about unless they sponsor the All-Star ballot, which you definitely want to A) Be on and B) Have the little circle next to your name popped out an awful lot more than the other 10 guys next to you.  See?  You're on the road thinking of personal glory vs. personal embarrassment and where you're going to eat your next meal and what video you should watch when you get back from the game and, oh yeah, the game.  You're not thinking about home or your wife or your kids because you can't.  You can't and you won't because you have to focus on one thing only.  No, not winning.  Take "superstar" or even "star" away from your nametag and you're only thinking one thing: How can I play really well today so I get the chance to do this again tomorrow?  That, my friends, is the focus of a baseball player on the road not named Derek Jeter (why do I always pick on him?) or Albert Pujols or Jake Peavy.  It's like you're a bed-ridden hospital patient, focusing not on your accomplishments or any future beyond your next breath.  Your focus is definitely not on the home, where you are not currently breathing.  It's on you.

Until your world turns upside down.

Two incredibly scary events have occurred over the past handful of years.  The first took place in 2005 when former MLB pitcher Ugueth Urbina's mother was kidnapped from his home in Venezuela.  The second occurred last week, when Rockies catcher Yorvit Torrealba's son was kidnapped from his home in Venezuela.  In both cases, there was a baseball player on the other side of the abduction, a baseball player whose focus took an abrupt shift from baseball to being a parent, to being a son.

Beyond the commonalities of both kidnappings taking place in Venezuela, a place where I have never visited but hear can be equal parts beautiful and terribly depressing, there is little to compare the two events.  When Maura Villarreal, Urbina's mother, was rescued from her kidnappers, her (and her son's) ordeal had lasted nearly five months.  Five months.  That's nearly a full baseball season.  That's opening day, the All-Star break, the trading deadline and roster expansion on September first.  That's a long time made worse when it's your mother who is the one being held against her will.  Now imagine your mother was kidnapped not because of who she is but because of who you are.  You.  The responsibility, bottom line, for your mother's kidnapping was you.  No, you weren't there when it happened and there's nothing you could have done to stop it.  But the situation existed in the first place because you were a Major League Baseball player whose salary each year was made public.  The whole world had the easy ability to know you were making $3 million or $5 million or $15 million per season.  And the whole world is not made of necessarily sane people who want to work hard like you did to earn a living.  Some were born to take shortcuts; one extreme shortcut being the kidnapping of your mother in exchange for money.  Lots of it.

That's your mom being "cared for" by total strangers (strangers not just to you, but to her) for almost half a year.  What if it were your child?  Your son? 

The guilt has to be incredible in either case.  Why?  Look back at the rambling first paragraph.  You're playing baseball and thinking about baseball and your own little world of self-pleasure which does not include family worries (or only the minimal recommended doses without a prescription).  You may say they're always on your mind and you may tell your wife and kids that you're always thinking about them, but the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" was created for professional athletes on the road so they can stay on the road and not get all wussy inside their bellies and have to call every three minutes whining to their families how much they are missed and loved and blah, blah, blah.  That's the thinking of the ballplayer, especially on the road.  You're not thinking of your kids.  You're just not.  That's why the guilt has got to be incredibly strong.  Because suddenly someone you had no hand in choosing is "caring for" your child.  Your kid has been kidnapped and it's your fault.

The fault, again, lies in the public salary.  But, let's be honest, even if salaries of ballplayers (and we shouldn't forget managers & GMs) weren't made public, the assumption would still be there that these MLB dudes were raking in the dough; these dudes filling up your TV screens each night with their glorified muscles and single-eyebrow-hiding caps. 

There is blame.  There is fault.  But it's indirect blame and fault.  Ugie Urbina's & Yorvit Torrealba's sole role in the taking of their loved ones was their jobs.  That was it. 

That can't stop the guilt.  Any parent, or son, whose family member was kidnapped automatically looks inward first.  What did I do wrong?  How could I have stopped this?  How could I have not seen this coming?  For every second your child or parent is held, you throw back and forth ideas in your head of what you did wrong to create this situation.  Yes, you can't stop thinking about getting them back safely and fighting any doubts about their safety.  But you also can't help but fell terrible for not having been there; for not having been there physically or mentally when the abduction took place.  If your son was living in another country while you played baseball here, you question, question, question why you lived under that arrangement.  Why didn't I just have my little boy live in the U.S.?  Sure I wouldn't be around much, but... 

There is one more commonality to these two events.  Besides taking place in Venezuela, both kidnappings ended as well as possible.  Urbina's mother was rescued.  He never had to pay the $6 million in ransom.  Torrealba's son was abandoned by kidnappers who seemed to be more fearful of what they'd done than hopeful of what they'd planned to accomplish.  Mother and son were safely returned.  The guilt, the focus, could, over time - inevitably - go back to equilibrium. 

The Urbina story didn't end happily for Ugueth, however.  He spends his days today in a jail cell after being convicted of attempted murder for an event that took place on his family's Venezuelan ranch just months after the safe return of his mother.

For the Yorvit Torrealba family?  Yorvit's wife and son will now spend their days in Miami, not Venezuela.  Maybe they'll go back there to live in the off season, when Yorvit can be with them.  But during the season, when he's in the States on the road, the focus of his life will have to turn back to baseball, back to the little things of life on the road; of not worrying about your wife or your son or your parents; of only thinking about yourself and baseball.  Because really, that's all a ballplayer can afford to care about during the season.  Not on being a parent or being a son.  That's just how it works.