What Was, What Might Have Been

 Clare walked into the kitchen Sunday morning, asking, “Do you know who died?”  No, I answered.  “Jose Fernandez of the Marlins.”  The 24-year old star right-hander was in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a boat that hit a jetty off of Miami’s South Beach sometime around 1 AM.  Golfing great Arnold Palmer died a number of hours later.

Fernandez won 38 games in a four-year career that saw him come back from Tommy John surgery, and he was 16-8 this season with a 2.86 ERA to go with 253 strikeouts.  In the last start of his life last Tuesday against the Nationals, Fernandez pitched eight shutout innings, yielding three hits while striking out 12.  He died in circumstances I constantly tell my daughter to avoid.

The idea, the hope, is to run the race and run it well, the way the 87-year old Palmer did.  For me growing up, Palmer was like Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, always there in the newspaper or on television, whose performances commanded attention, if only between bites of breakfast toast.  Palmer was a west Pennsylvania boy, son of a steel worker turned greens keeper.  He treated the gallery like they were friends, or at least fans, and he never left Pennsylvania.  This was a life well spent.

Fernandez’s might have been, too, a Cuban refugee who at the age of 15 saved his mother from drowning during their escape who went on to….That we’ll never know.