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Lifetime love for baseball ends with lie

Just before Christmas, tragedy struck, and my father never came home from a holiday party. In a world filled with emptiness, baseball found me.

The following summer, in pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single season home run record, a pantheon of now-legendary players was lighting up the box scores.

For me, Jose Altuve was one such player. In 2017, the Astros ended their 55-year World Series drought against the Dodgers. Two years later, Altuve stood at the plate facing one of the most feared relievers in the game, 6-foot-4-inch Aroldis Chapman of the Yankees. His team was down to their last out, down a run in the bottom of the ninth, a trip to the World Series on the line.

After taking a few pitches and fouling off a few others in a seemingly masterful display of working the count, Altuve swung mightily and sent a Chapman slider far beyond the left-center field wall. The Astros were back in the World Series.

The Astros would eventually be found to have been stealing signals by audio relay in home games against the Dodgers in the 2017 World Series. But on this night, it became deeply personal. My hero had stood there in the batter’s box with an electronic device on his body. He knew the slider was coming.

Greg Lauderdale

Makawao

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