Back when the Mets were called the Amazins and Shea Stadium was the newest version of baseball’s cathedrals, I got my first major league baseball. Didn’t have to throw elbows or fists. It rolled out of the scrum of fans and bounced down some steps into my waiting hands.

Ed Kranepool had hit it foul to my section of the ballpark. Or maybe Ron Swoboda was at the plate. Or Jerry Grote. I never wrote the name on the ball. By the end of the summer I no longer had that baseball. My prize became a contribution to sandlot games and finally, lost.

That’s why Shannon Stone’s death in Texas leaves a hole in so many of us. He reached for a baseball that had value only to him and his 6-year-old son. This wasn’t the fan at Yankee Stadium who came up with Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit, a home run into the seats behind left field. Or a paddler in McCovey Cove in San Francisco Bay, waiting for one of Barry Bonds’ 35 home runs that splashed down. Cha-ching.

That Stone was reaching for a baseball hit foul, fielded and tossed in his direction by Texas outfielder Josh Hamilton, meant it had value only to a father and son. This time you can’t question the purity of the moment. And now, you wish you could wipe away the terrible poignancy.

We’ve been made cynical by scenes of adults pushing children out of the way to retrieve baseballs hit or tossed into stands. We know naked greed when we see it.

We smile at the juggling acts. Catch the ball and drop the hot dog or the beverage. We see the guy who leans too far over his field-level box seat at Fenway Park and tumbles four feet onto the field, then scrambles like his pants are on fire to get back to his seat. After Shannon Stone’s fall we shouldn’t smile so much.

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You want to blame someone but there is no one. A man reached too far. Not everything in life comes with safety nets.

Fans love the stuff of sports, much as people love finding the stuff of history. Clay pipes and old bottles, for instance, buried in the oldest garbage pits on the grounds of the Togus VA hospital. Arrowheads or Civil War-era bullets. Sea glass on beaches.

I’ve watched NASCAR fans roll used and useless racing tires away from the garage areas of Sprint Cup tracks. Who’s to say that particular tire didn’t come off Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s race car? Maybe it turns into a planter.

Young University of Maine hockey fans clamoring for sticks from Black Bears as they leave the ice after games. Doesn’t matter if the stick is broken or not. The plea is for a souvenir and a memory.

Patriots fans cluster where the players walk off the field after games to catch the gloves and elbow pads tossed their way. Everyone wants a piece of their hero or a piece of that moment in time when you can say you were there.

Sometimes there’s a market, but as the credit card ad says, many things are priceless. A man’s life certainly is.

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Sports writers aren’t immune. We don’t ask for autographs but we have stuff. There are a couple of Joey Gamache posters on the doors in my basement. Boxes of press credentials from Super Bowls, to Daytona 500s, to Maine Principals’ Association basketball tournaments. Media books and scorecards. A photo of my son and me flanking Nomar Garciaparra, taken at Seeds of Peace camp last summer. My wife asks if any of it is worth anything. Nope. Only to me.

I have one autograph on a baseball card collected some 45 years ago. Sammy Drake, a long-ago utility player for the Mets was in Augusta a few years ago to visit a friend.

The three of us went to lunch and I showed Sammy the card. He reached for it and signed it with a message. He passed away some months afterward, and that card has value only in its memory of a man.

That’s all Shannon Stone wanted. A baseball to forever remind him and his son of the July day they watched the Texas Rangers play a game. It can’t be any simpler than that, which makes the sorrow that much harder to bear.

Until this week, Shannon Stone was a stranger to most when in fact, he was always one of us.

Staff Writer Steve Solloway can be contacted at 791-6412 or at:

ssolloway@pressherald.com

Twitter: SteveSolloway

 


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