This essay is one of 62 that appears in “Remember Who You Are,” tributes to Pedro Gomez from the likes of Dusty Baker, Bob Melvin, Tony La Russa, Keith Olbermann, Peter Gammons, KNBR’s Brian Murphy, Sandy Alderson, Max Scherzer, South Carolina basketball coach Frank Martin and many of the top sportswriters in the country.
In my dark years, I would turn the pages of self-help books in a frenzy, desperately searching for the secret to happiness. This was like that, except it wasn’t a book I was searching, or happiness I was seeking.
Pedro was gone.
I didn’t know how he had left this world, so suddenly. But the “how” wasn’t what sent me on a desperate search through the pages of Facebook and Twitter, and into the archives of my own correspondence with him. The “how” didn’t matter much to me. Pedro was gone. Nothing was going to change that.
I had looked down at my phone in the third quarter of what forever will be the worst Super Bowl ever, and there it was: A tweet from Charles Robinson, retweeting the shocking news from ESPN.
“Sometimes people just choose to leave us,” an acquaintance offered at one point during the night.
She had done the math we do in journalism: sudden death + no cause given = suicide. Clearly, she did not know Pedro. Pedro loved life. Nobody I’ve known ever loved life more than Pedro. Even allowing for the many years that had passed since I knew him well… no, no way.
As the hours passed and night became dawn and dawn became day, I got reacquainted with my friend. Given his profession and his personality, I wasn’t surprised that Pedro knew so many people. But it was staggering how many of them paid tribute to him with a story about something he had done for them.
I shared this discovery with one of Pedro’s closest friends, maybe his closest friend, his “brother” Steve Kettmann. Steve said he’d been struck by the vast number of people who shared that they’d been in touch with Pedro just that week. I had noticed that too and can bet with supreme confidence which party initiated the contact. The last time I last talked to Pedro… six days ago… five days ago… four days ago… three days ago…
Our shared discoveries were summarized in one sentence, the opening sentence of a Facebook tribute from another friend and baseball-writing colleague (and Mercury News alum), Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune.
“My last conversation with Pedro Gomez on Thursday captured what he was all about — the welfare of others.”
I don’t know if Pedro set out to help so many people. Or just came by it naturally. Whatever the case, he did it. Equally remarkable, he didn’t say much about it.
Last August, out of nowhere, a text from Pedro. No words. Two photos. Me and my son, age 2 or 3.
My son is 28 now. Back then, we didn’t have phones with cameras. We didn’t take pictures of every damn thing we did or ate or saw. These were snapshots, taken the old-fashioned way, developed at the drugstore and shared…. 25 years later?
I thanked him. “Love u, Petey. Forever.’”
“Love you. Also forever.”
It was that easy with him. That easy to say those words, or at least type them and share them. That easy to reconnect, to pick up wherever the relationship had been left however long ago.
“You watching Astros/Rays?” he asked to open a text exchange last October. “Did you see Springer’s shot to lead off the game?”
“What sport is that, Petey?”
We hadn’t been in touch often enough over the last few years for him to know that my love for baseball, and then my interest, had evaporated. He asked what I thought of this Astros pitcher named Scrubb, an obvious set-up line for the Wake of the Week column I used to pen on Saturdays.
“With a name like Smuckers,” I texted back to him, “you better be good.”
“Exactamente,” Pedro replied.
Me: “Tremenda.”
Him: “Jugada.”
Me: “Ayer.”
Tremenda jugada ayer was a three-word piece of our history.
In 1992, when Jose Canseco was traded to Texas for Ruben Sierra, the Mercury News sent Pedro and me to New York for Canseco’s first game with the Rangers. That night we were sitting in a hotel room watching Sierra’s first game with the A’s. They won in a walk-off on a smart baserunning play by Sierra — no, really — that brought him sliding across home plate with the winning run.
Pedro, I said, we’re going to meet Sierra tomorrow night. Give me an icebreaker. He gave me this: Tremenda jugada ayer. (Tremendous play yesterday.)
That October text exchange went on for 7 hours, intermittently. The conclusion breaks my heart.
“Hey,” I wrote, “one thing. I want to be sure we get one loooong hang in sometime before it’s too late. Ya know?”
“I do know,” he wrote back. “Yes. I’m in for that.”
The last sentence was pure Pedro, all Pedro. Absolutely “in” for anything.
I had found the first sentence of his reply curious, out of character. Again due to our lack of regular contact, in tandem with my dwindling interest in baseball, I did not know he’d been off the air for an extended period in 2018 because of a health problem.
I am very much aware that the clock is running on all of us. I’m bent that way. Plus, I’ve reached an age when reminders of mortality seem to come almost daily.
Our last correspondence — Jan, 24, two weeks before Super Bowl Sunday — came after an especially heavy week of those reminders. Don Sutton on Monday. Hank Aaron on Friday. Bud Lea in between. I had history with all three.
Bud Lea was a man I’d grown up reading, a columnist and sports editor for the Milwaukee Sentinel, no doubt one of the reasons this profession found me. When I was hired by the Sentinel in 1983, to cover the reigning American League champion Brewers, Bud Lea was there.
He tipped me to my first scoop. (I blew it.) He had covered the Packers during the Lombardi years, and he regaled us with stories. He traded barbs with Bud Selig in the Milwaukee press box — possibly the last press box that will ever include three Buds.
Bud Lea was 92 years old when he died Jan. 20. Pedro sent me a link to the news story. I had already heard and was too upset with myself to send him a reply.
Two years ago, I’d gone to the trouble of getting Bud Lea’s phone number. I wanted to thank him, to let him know how I felt about him, what he had meant to me. So his name and number went to the top of my To-Do list for the following week.
And that’s where it stayed — top of my list, week after week after week.
I shared this with Pedro when I finally returned his text four days later. Bud Lea was 90 years old when I got his phone number. What was I thinking, that I had all the time in the world, that the clock wasn’t running on a 90-year-old man when it is running on all of us?
I mentioned Don Sutton. Don Baylor, who had died in 2017. A couple of baseball writers, Gerry Fraley and Tom Flaherty, RIP Class of 2019. Mike Shalin, another baseball writer who helped me in my early years, just a month earlier in December. I had something more to say to all of them, and I hadn’t taken the time to do it.
“My regrets are piling up so deep, Petey.”
Pedro texted back instantly. “You should call Frank.”
Wait. His suggestion after all that I had just shared was for me to call someone I hadn’t spoken to in 25 years, a former colleague with whom I’d never been exceptionally close, someone with whom even Pedro had never been exceptionally close?
He gave me Frank’s phone number.
“Let me know if you talk to him.”
Of course I didn’t call Frank. I probably would have eventually. But for nine days I let it sit.
On the seventh day, Pedro left this world.
On the eighth day, I knew what I had to do.
On the ninth day, I did it.
The conversation with Frank wasn’t difficult, at least not in the way I had feared a week earlier. Pedro had provided a reason for this call out of the blue, this blast from the past. I was calling about Pedro, not about Frank’s terminal diagnosis.
Pedro had given me the terrible news in the same text exchange he had suggested I call Frank. But I had missed it. While I was texting him a flurry of questions — Why should I call Frank? Is he not well? You’re suggesting I call him out of the blue? Why would I do that? What will he think? — Pedro had given me the answer.
I found it the next morning and shot Pedro a text.
“I somehow missed the one where you told me Frank has pancreatic cancer,” I wrote. “That’s the worst.”
“It’s definitely not one of the good ones,” Pedro replied. “Horrible way to go.”
That was our last exchange.
Frank and I talked for 90 minutes that Tuesday night. We talked about Pedro mostly, how amazing he was, how full of life, that he was one of a kind, all the things we say about people in the immediate aftermath of their final departure. Except there was nothing empty about these platitudes. They were full, completely full, to the brim, overflowing. And they will be said, forevermore, when the name Pedro Gomez is mentioned.
In that desperate search of Facebook and Twitter on the Sunday night that became Monday morning and then Monday afternoon, I read so many tributes to Pedro. From the young reporter he had stepped in to defend against a Hall of Fame manager’s verbal assault. From the female reporter he had helped climb a fence after they’d been locked inside a stadium. (She was wearing a skirt; ever the gentleman, he promised her he would look away while she climbed). From the Cubs fan who told of him reaching into his backpack at the end of a conversation to give her a gift: a champagne cork he’d retrieved from clubhouse floor the night the Cubs celebrated ending the curse. Apparently, he’d made a practice of gathering corks during champagne celebrations to give to fans.
For people he knew to people he’d just met, Pedro made the world a better place, a happier place. What he did for me over a 30-year friendship ended with a line of four words.
You should call Frank.
I don’t think about Bud Lea with regret anymore. I can’t pay him back. I can only pay it forward.
I call Frank once a week. I just now realized that I call him every Sunday, around the time that Pedro left us. Frank is mystified by these calls. You do know you’re not going to cheer up a dying man, right? He expresses surprise every time. When we hang up, he always expects that will be the last time we talk, not because of his declining health but because… Who does this? Why would you do it?
One of these times, I’m going to tell him why. It’s WPWD.
What Pedro Would Do.