Dickey delivers while in mourning

Emotions high after Jays pitcher helped beat Mets

TORONTO • For just a moment, at the end of his postgame scrum, traces of tears welled in R.A. Dickey’s eyes.

Earlier, more than 27,500 fans at the Rogers Centre had given him a rousing ovation as he walked off the field in the eighth inning of the Blue Jays’ 7-1 win over the Mets. He had allowed three hits and a run.

When he was asked about the fans’ response, his eyes glistened.

“That was really sweet,” he said. “Regardless if I win or lose as a Blue Jay, I always pour my heart into the game. Any time you come off and people are glad that you pitched, it feels good. I really appreciated that.”

If his emotions were running high at that moment, there was another reason. His father had died two days earlier. Dickey decided to stay with the team and make his start, then return home to Nashville to be with his family.

His father, Harry Lee Dickey, was 63. A memorial service will be held on Saturday, the day before Father’s Day.

In his best-selling autobiography, Wherever I Wind Up, R.A. Dickey wrote that his relationship with his father was distant throughout much of their lives. Yet as a child, Dickey and his father enjoyed a close relationship, focused almost entirely on sports. Dickey wrote that he loved to play ball with his father, and watch his dad — an outstanding pitcher in his youth — play baseball and basketball.

Shortly after Dickey was born in 1974, his dad turned down a US$2,000 contract offer from the Cincinnati Reds because he felt he needed to finish his education and support his family, Dickey wrote.

Dickey’s parents divorced when was eight years old.

At the end of the book, published in 2012, Dickey wrote about his longing for a closer bond with his father.

“There is so much that remains unspoken, a chasm that I do not pretend to understand, one that has widened as the years have passed,” he wrote. “It makes me sad and makes me yearn for something more. I love my father and want to share the closeness we once had. I have prayed for that for years, and pray that in some way this book will help achieve that.”

After his parents divorced, his mother had custody of Dickey and his sister, but Dickey decided to move in with his father when he was 13. As Dickey developed into a standout athlete at Montgomery Bell Academy, his father became increasingly aloof, he wrote in his book.

“My father is becoming a man I don’t understand,” he wrote, reflecting on that period, before he went on to become an All-American at the University of Tennessee and then a major-league pitcher.

In a 2013 profile in the New Yorker, Dickey said his father never contacted him after publication of the book, which also details Dickey’s childhood sexual abuse by a female babysitter and, in a separate incident, a teenage male.

“He has to know it exists, and what’s talked about sensitively in it,” Dickey told writer Ben McGrath. “You would think it would be, like, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you.’ But I don’t know if he is really ready to go there or not.”

Harry Lee Dickey remarried and, according to an obituary in The Tennessean, worked for Thomas Nelson Publishing Company and World Bible Society. He also served in the U.S. Army.

Early in his autobiography, Dickey wrote about his dad taking him to minor-league games in Nashville when he was a child.

“I dreamed about playing in Herschel Greer Stadium one day, with my dad — the best ballplayer who ever lived — watching me. More than any- thing,” he wrote, “I wanted to throw like my dad.”

The Blue Jays have placed R.A. Dickey on the bereavement list and called up infielder Muenori Kawasaki from Triple-A Buffalo to fill his roster spot. Major League players can take from three to seven days for bereavement leave.