Mom & Matsui (One Sixty-Two: Day 17)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Seventeen: Hideki Matsui, Los Angeles Angels

Every year, my mother picks a new favorite Yankee. It’s not an indecisive thing, nor is it a Susan Sarandon-in-Bull Durham kind of selection; it’s merely her way of christening the new season. She sprinkles good luck on one Yankee, goes ahead and roots for them all, but gives an extra little cheer for her “guy.”

If the Yankees knew of her track record, they would pay my mom money not to select a favorite player. Just about every year, the player she has chosen has ended up hurt – often for long periods of time.

Dawn chooses Jorge Posada, and he goes down. She selects David Justice, and he’s soon disabled as well. Robin Ventura: same. Shane Spencer – yup, even him. This year, she picked Andy Pettitte. After his tremendous April start, Pettitte suddenly developed elbow trouble and is now missing his start tomorrow.

But perhaps no Dawn Hynes selection was as crippling as the one she made four years ago, when she chose Hideki Matsui, then the Yankees’ left fielder. Matsui entered 2006 having played in every game for each of his first three seasons in the big leagues. But that wasn’t the half of it: Matsui had actually played in more than 1,700 straight games when counting his career with the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. The guy hadn’t missed a game in nearly 13 years. This was surely a can’t-miss pick. That is, until Matsui dove for a line drive at Yankee Stadium in May and fractured his left wrist as it struck the outfield ground.

It was a gruesome sight, and it left Matsui out of action for most of the year. Of course, he would come back and finish that season, while also playing three more with New York. Last year’s World Series MVP performance made my mom and plenty of other Yankees fans proud. As Matsui plays this year for the Angels, he is missed in New York.

For years, many athletes have talked about the Sports Illustrated jinx. When you’re on the cover of SI, legend has it, you’re doomed. Injuries, slumps, mishaps – they come your way when the world’s most famous sports magazine shines its spotlight on you. In my family, Dawn’s “Yankee Guy” is in that same category of unintended black magic.

Of course, the irony is that my mother couldn’t possibly carry better intentions than she does. Her compassion for other human beings extends far and wide, and includes everyone from her family to her neighbors to her friends to those she doesn’t know well, or at all. The secretaries of her doctors, the family of the man who’s renovating her house, the owners of countless stores and restaurants in the town where she and my dad live – all of them receive heavy doses of Dawn’s sunshine when they see her. As for my brother and me, we know for a fact that our mother is thinking about us numerous times in the course of each day.

My mother does a lousy job of jinxing Yankee players. But aside from that, she is an extraordinary model of compassion, selflessness and love. I could not ask for more from a mother; I can only hope she knows just how much I love her back. Happy Mother’s Day, Dawn. Go Yanks.