Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A father, a son and a baseball journey
Dave MacDougall bought five tickets for another Miami Marlins home opener. Upper deck. Thirdbase side. He’ll go Tuesday with his 9-year-old son, Tommy, and his father and brother, who are in from Boston.
The fifth seat for his other son, Johnny, will sit empty.
“We loved Opening Day together,” says MacDougall, 49, of Fort Lauderdale.
Maybe that’s where his grand plan started, at one of their nine Marlins openers going back to 2003 when Johnny was just six months old and burrowed against his father’s chest the whole game.
Or maybe it started at a Washington Nationals game five years ago on vacation when dad suggested they visit every majorson’s league ballpark.
“That would be great!” Johnny said.
But the full idea came to the father when he tried to write his eulogy three years ago and stared down at the empty paper in pain. Johnny died suddenly, at 9,
of an aneurysm. A congenital condition, the autopsy showed. No symptoms. No warning.
As the father struggled for what to say about his son, he thought of their shared, good times. And as he thought of those times, baseball was a common theme. And so later, full of grief and clutching an idea, he wrote a Marlins official.
That led to him walking on the field before the 2015 Marlins opener, before the park was open to the public, and putting a pinch of Johnny’s ashes in the third-base dirt. Just enough to hold a memory.
“Johnny played all over in Little League, but he really liked playing third base,” MacDougall said. “So I decided that was the best spot.”
He then wrote officials of other major-league teams with the same idea. The idea was father and son would go to every ballpark together, after all. Just as they’d dreamed. But either MacDougall didn’t get the email to the right person or the teams didn’t support the idea. No team answered him. “That’s when I decided to do it myself,” said MacDougall, a yacht salesman who is divorced from his sons’ mother.
A couple of months after putting Johnny’s ashes in Marlins Park, MacDougall got into his 1976 Volkswagen bus with Tommy and drove north. The bus had no air-conditioning. They stayed in campgrounds to lower costs.
MacDougall wrote an online diary so people who supported him on GoFundMe could follow along. Cincinnati was the first ballpark stop.
“Awesome club seats in 301 with free food — and tasty brews,” he wrote. “Johnny was there, too. He would have loved the great seats. I spread a pinch of his ashes during the seventhinning stretch while singing, ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame.’
“The tears streaming down my face felt good. Very therapeutic. We always sang this together and that moment, this song, will forever have gravity to me.”
That became the routine for honoring Johnny. During the seventh-inning stretch, as the fans sang all around, MacDougall would place a pinch of ashes on the ground wherever they sat and say a prayer. No one would be told. No public display made.
“It’s a private thing and, besides, I don’t want anyone to freak out,” he said.
Once, in Pittsburgh, the final of three ballpark stops that first year, a neighboring fan became concerned as MacDougall set down the pinch of Johnny’s ashes. The fan feared an illegal substance was being disposed of. When MacDougall told the story, the fan said a prayer.
Last summer in Arlington, Texas, on their second trip, MacDougall was asked by a fan why he’d come all the way from Florida as they charged cellphones. When MacDougall told the story again, the man demanded the MacDougalls leave their upper-deck seats for his in the third row.
“Johnny would’ve loved those seats,” dad said.
Last summer’s trip West covered 7,200 miles and 11 ballparks. Tommy isn’t a baseball fanatic like his brother was. And that’s fine. He loves the ballpark junk food.
“I call him the CottonCandy Kid,” dad said.
On Tuesday, the MacDougalls go to another Marlins opener together. They’re excited. Then, on the final day of school in June, dad will pick up the Cotton-Candy Kid for a drive up north for another summer of ballparks.
“I figure this summer and next we’ll have visited most of them,” he said.
It’s not all baseball, of course. There’s other sights. There’s the campgrounds. Once, at a campground near Phoenix, MacDougall shared his story with a neighbor. That man went to his camper, grabbed his two sons and brought them over.
“Tell them the story,” he said.
They were also crossing off ballparks as part of a shared journey between a father and his two sons. Except that family’s trip was different.
“You think you have your whole life to do something like this,” MacDougall said. “I thought like that, when I first mentioned it to Johnny.”
He’s not a lecturer or a philosopher, so he just leaves it at that. But the lesson is clear. Assume nothing. Hold your loved ones close. Leave no words unspoken. And if you want to take a trip, go take it, which is precisely what Dave MacDougall is doing to every ballpark with his late son.