Reach out to people now, before it’s too late
How do you thank someone who has died?
Óscar Zamora was a native of Cuba who grew up in Miami and was a relief pitcher for the Chicago Cubs in the mid-1970s. He wasn’t very good, to put it kindly. During his Wrigley Field tenure, Cubs fans would serenade him as he exited a game, often in mid-inning after having surrendered a blizzard of runs. Here’s a sample verse, sung to the tune of the Dean Martin song “That’s Amore.”
When the pitch is so fat That the ball hits the bat, That’s Zamora!
From the press box where I sometimes sat, he seemed to accept the razzing with equanimity. I was a young reporter at the time, and after games I’d pass him in the clubhouse while I sought out one or another of his more prominent teammates. Zamora pitched for the Cubs for parts of three seasons, and I can’t remember ever interviewing him for a story or even stopping to chat. He didn’t last long in the majors.
Zamora was in his second big-league season on the day in May 1975 when we came closest to sharing a real conversation. My target that afternoon was one of his teammates, a star infielder I knew slightly. I had a favor to ask.
Like Zamora and his Cubs teammates, I too played the game, though not well enough to have made my high school team. Still, baseball was my passion. I played shortstop for a bar-league softball team, and my bucket list dream was a new glove. Not just any glove — a major league-quality one, made of a grade of leather and stitching so fine, it was manufactured exclusively for professional ballplayers.
No problem, the infielder said. He named a price; I handed him money. A week later, the infielder tossed me a new glove.
I thought he was joking. It was a Wilson A2000 — a popular model readily available in any decent sporting goods shop. Not pro quality. Not at all what I’d asked for or desired. I stood there feeling taken, staring at this unwanted object.
Word spread around the clubhouse about what had transpired. Another Cub, centerfielder Rick Monday, shook his head. “If you wanted a glove, why didn’t you ask me?” he said.
Then Zamora, the pitcher to whom I’d never spoken, approached. “Here,” he said, “take this.” In his hand was a Rawlings Heart of the Hide professional-model glove. “It’s my backup,” he said, meaning the one he used during pregame drills.
I was too stunned at first to speak. I took his gift and turned it gingerly in my hands. “I don’t know how to thank you,” I finally managed and kept repeating. The glove was the stuff of my dreams.
You’d think after such unprompted kindness that I would have sought him out regularly in the clubhouse, sat with him at his locker and gotten to know him as a treasured acquaintance, if not as a friend. But I was 25, self-absorbed, oblivious. To my shame, I never did. By the time I realized my error, my loss, he had left the game. I never saw him again.
Zamora’s glove was a different story. I would take the field wearing his gift for the next 45 years, until I turned 70 until, suddenly, ground balls I had once handled easily seemed to come at me like sniper fire. It was time to retire. Over the years the glove had taken a battering, its leather worn raw and thin.
I’m 73 and haven’t played catch since hanging up my cleats. But every so often, I slip on Zamora’s glove and flex it till the pocket brushes my palm, till it feels as it did on the ball field, like a second skin. And I think, too, of the man who’d once worn it and of his selfless generosity.
Last December, I tried to contact Zamora, to tell him about the glove and what it still means to me. But mostly, I hoped to get to know him. A Major League Baseball Players Association representative, wanting to help, mailed a letter to his last known address but received no response. Later, I learned he had opened a Miami shoe store after retiring, and I located Cosme de la Torriente, the attorney who had handled his business affairs.
I was too late, the attorney told me. Zamora died of a heart attack two years ago. He was 77.
“Oscar knew everybody and everybody knew him. He loved people,” de la Torriente said. “What he did for you, that was his character. You would have liked him.”
I wished I had made the effort.
Ron Berler is the author of “Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000 Failing Public Schools.” This article originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.