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 Eighty-One: Scott Hairston & Jerry Hairston Jr., San Diego Padres
When the family gets together for a few days, as my family did this weekend, it’s often the case that a photo album makes its way into someone’s hands. In between trips to the beach, sittings for breakfast and dinner, and walks to the ice-cream shop, someone pulled out some albums from the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
My brother quickly found some photos of me that he couldn’t resist passing around. One, an early-80s shot, shows an 11-year-old boy wearing glasses that are roughly the circumference of a side-view mirror. As the awkward boy smiles behind the Coke-bottle glasses and beneath his wavy brown hair, he holds aloft a blue-and-white Pinewood Derby car and the trophy he (and his dad – actually, mostly his dad) earned for finishing second in the Cub Scout race.
When it was my turn, I made note of a late-‘70s photo of my brother. In it, Eric is tossing a Frisbee on the beach while wearing the smallest Speedo bathing suit mankind has ever created. He countered with a shot of me in some sort of red velour sweater, sitting on a chair with the aforementioned glasses dominating all aspects of the frame. I pointed out his KISS T-shirt in one photo. He made note of my – ahem – Shaun Cassidy silkscreen in another photo. I can’t offer any excuses or explanations to that.
But the photo that drew perhaps the most laughs was one in which I am standing outside a well-respected Jersey Shore restaurant wearing a Philadelphia Phillies T-shirt, tucked into a pair of red running shorts. The shirt is tucked in somewhere around my navel, calling to mind the old Martin Short “Ed Grimley” character from Saturday Night Live. As if that weren’t enough, this photo also shows me wearing a yellow and brown San Diego Padres helmet on my head. I can recall winning a plastic baseball helmet at a boardwalk roulette game of some sort, but I don’t remember wearing it out to restaurants. And yet, there is proof that I did so, and that my mother and father allowed me to dress in this manner. I don’t think there were other kids in the restaurant dressed like this. In fact, I don’t think there was anyone else in New Jersey sporting this look. There is good reason for that.
As 10 family members gathered under one roof, and as a summer rain brought us indoors for a while, we looked at this 10-year-old boy and laughed, together. More photos were taken of us all this weekend, and we talked and ate and played in the sand. The old photos were hilarious, sure, but they also served as a reminder of the path we’ve been walking together, and how far we’ve all come. The photos also helped inspire us to share old stories with my girls, to broaden their understanding of that path, and to help them figure out their place in it.
The San Diego Padres were never a team I rooted for much. But back in the early ‘80s I liked to wear hats and, yes, helmets of teams that were more exotic than my New York-area ken. My brother preferred his Houston Astros cap to go with the KISS and Empire Strikes Back T-shirts he wore. This weekend, as we dressed in much more boring adult clothing, two brothers in their 30s laughed for a while at the photos. Meanwhile, Sunday’s baseball action found this year’s Padres continuing their surprising first-place run. In a 9-7 win against the Colorado Rockies, the Padres smacked 16 hits. Seven of those hits came from a set of brothers, Scott Hairston and Jerry Hairston Jr. Scott is 30 years old, while Jerry is 34. The two Padre hermanos played well together on Sunday, giving their family more pieces for the scrapbooks and photo albums.
My brother is 36 now, and I’m 39. We don’t play ball anymore, aside from the occasional Wiffle Ball classics. There are other shared experiences now. They build upon themselves, and the photos serve as testament to the power of family. Hynes or Hairston, it doesn’t matter. We keep tucking in those shirts, donning the occasional helmet, and smiling for the photos. We walk through life, side by side, and the snapshots remind us of just how many miles we’ve traveled.
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That 10-year-old fashion-challenged kid and his little brother were among my very best friends. Of course, I had coke-bottle glasses of my own, so it all seemed quite normal to me.
Around that age, my dad took the family to Shea to see the Mets lose to the Padres. Good times. Glad to hear your summer vacation is going so well! Hope to see you sometime.
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