Some memories carve themselves into your heart not because they are joyful or painful, but because they are both.
May 2013 is a month I will never forget—for all the reasons I wish I could and all the ones I’m grateful I can not.
Just a week before Crescenta Valley High School’s final baseball game of the season, I lost someone who had become like family to me. Yoko wasn’t just my assistant—she was my partner, my protector, and my friend. She was a quiet force in my life, anticipating needs before they were spoken, always steady, always there. Her sudden passing knocked the wind out of me. There was no time to process the loss, no space to grieve—only a hollow ache and the blur of unfinished days.
It was May 10. Crescenta Valley was facing Arcadia High for a share of the Pacific League title. It was the last game of the regular season. We were down 4–2 in the top of the seventh with two outs. Two runners on. One last chance. And then, my son Ted stepped up to the plate.
I’ve seen him in that stance hundreds of times. The journey to that moment started the day he was born. I bought him his first glove and baseball that day—a hopeful gesture that probably said more about me than it did about him. Before he was old enough to even join an organized team, we were out in the backyard with a bucket of tennis balls, me pitching underhand and him with a toy wood bat, that looked huge in his tiny hands, swinging with all the ferocity a four-year-old could muster.
It wasn’t long before he outgrew the toy gear. He had a quick bat and a sharp eye, even as a little kid. He didn’t just play baseball—he loved it. He studied it. He mimicked batting stances, lived and breathed Cubs baseball like me, and slept with his glove under his pillow.
When I coached him in Little League, I saw his competitive fire up close. He wanted to win, sure—but more than that, he wanted to get better. To do it right. To work harder. To be ready. And he carried that intensity forward, refining it with every season. The instincts sharpened. The arm got stronger. The glove got quieter. The bat got louder. By the time he reached high school, he wasn’t just a good player—he was a leader, a shortstop you built your infield around, a pitcher you trusted in big moments. He was ready for the big stage.
And there he was—on the biggest stage of his high school career.
He took the first pitch. Then came the second.
Crack.
The sound was unmistakable. The ball launched deep into the Arcadia night and cleared the left-field fence—a three-run home run to give CV a 5–4 lead and ultimately the Pacific League crown. The stadium erupted. His teammates mobbed him at the plate. He rounded the bases with a joy so pure, it broke my heart wide open.
I stood there, still, trying to take it in—so proud I could barely breathe, so heartbroken I could barely speak. Another parent turned to me, eyes wide, and asked, “How did that feel? Watching your son do that?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The truth is, I didn’t know how to answer. How do you describe something like that—something that feels like it belongs to a dream or a movie? So, I just said the first thing that came to mind: “Wow. Just… wow.”
It wasn’t eloquent, but it was honest. It was all I could manage with my heart caught between bursting with joy and breaking with grief.
Because I wasn’t alone in following Ted’s baseball career. Yoko followed it just as closely. She asked about his games before I could bring them up. She celebrated his wins, checked on his bumps and bruises, and teased me for pacing too much in the stands. She believed in him—always. And she would have loved that moment. She would’ve printed out the box score and saved the clipping. She would’ve told me, “He’s going to do something special.”
And she was right.
Earlier that spring, Ted had thrown a no-hitter against Loyola High—striking out nine and scoring the game’s only run himself. He finished the season hitting .408 in league play and was later named the Pacific League’s Most Valuable Player. A few weeks after that game, he committed to continuing his baseball journey at Loyola Marymount University—his dream to play Division I college baseball, so LMU was a perfect place for the next chapter of his story.
It’s impossible to capture what it meant to witness that swing against Arcadia—not just because of what it meant for the team or the title, but because of everything it carried: the hours in the cages, the missed dinners, the long drives, the small-town hopes. And yes, the grief.
The joy of that home run will always live beside the sorrow of losing Yoko. That’s how life works sometimes—grace and loss in the same breath. That week taught me again how to hold both.
If you’d like to see the moment that still gives me chills, here it is:
And if you’d like to know more about Yoko and the extraordinary soul she was, I wrote about her here: 🕊 In a Sad, Awful, Terrible Way...
