AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Ninth Inning: The Baseball Bond

Far-flung families held together by messages, letters and a love of baseball

Editor’s Note

For nine innings this summer, The Denver Post will share stories that capture our state’s love of baseball. We spend the ninth inning with families who share how much the game has meant to them through text message, instant message on Gmail and even the handwritten letter.

They allow you to receive mail in hell.

Editor’s Note

For nine innings this summer, The Denver Post will share stories that capture our state’s love of baseball. We spend the ninth inning with families who share how much the game has meant to them through text message, instant message on Gmail and even the handwritten letter.

At boot camp, they take recruits into a gas chamber. And they send them through “the crucible,” a 54-hour ruthless regimen in which you’re lucky to sleep eight total hours. This boot camp isn’t spray-tanned trainers motivating moms to do one more burpee. This is a soul-sucking, will-confronting, actual boot camp, where they forge young men into Marines they can trust for war.

“Letters,” Aaron Crane said, “are your only connection to the outside world. It’s a total escape, just to be able to read a letter.”

His parents in Littleton wrote their baby boy every day. Handwritten letters, because it’s more personal that way.

“I cried through a lot of these,” said his mother, Carol, seated next to his father, Wayne, while looking at a thick pile of old letters. “I was missing him. I didn’t know what he was going through. One thing he told us to write him about — he wanted to know about the Rockies. And we know how important the Rockies are to him.”

Aaron Crane

Andy Cross, The Denver PostAaron Crane followed the Rockies online while he was a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan and in 2010 noticed in a box score that Ubaldo Jimenez had allowed no hits over nine innings against the Atlanta Braves. Crane called home to Colorado to confirm the no-hitter.

The bond of baseball. It sounds cheesy, until a Marine tells you about the letters he got during boot camp. Or the ones he got in Afghanistan.

So many of our parents taught us to love baseball, to believe in baseball. But today, more than ever, families split apart, with the children living far from home. As such, the text message, the instant message on Gmail and even the handwritten letter, these are what keep our bond stitched, like a Rawlings.

• “I haven’t cried here, but I’ve seen about 20 guys break down, and I know there are more. It’s tough here, but it has to be,” Aaron wrote from boot camp on July 2, 2006. “Go Rockies. Second place, 1½ games back! YES!! Buy good seats for when I am home.”

• “I can’t wait to go see a game when I get home,” Aaron wrote his parents on July 7, 2006. “I really won’t want to miss the national anthem now!”

• “The Padres come in town tonight. I might go to the game,” his father wrote on July 27, 2006. “… I hope you don’t get tired of me saying it but I’M PROUD OF YOU and I love you.”

• “They made a roster change,” his father wrote him on Aug. 30, 2006. “(They) sent Luis Gonzalez to Colorado Springs and brought a 21-year-old kid up from Tulsa to play shortstop. The guy’s name is Troy Tulowitzki.”

An excerpt of a letter from Wayne and Carol Crane to their son

Courtesy of the Crane familyAn excerpt of a letter from Wayne and Carol Crane to their son Aaron when he was in boot camp to become a Marine in the summer of 2006.

An excerpt of a letter from Aaron Crane to his parents

Courtesy of the Crane family​​An excerpt of a letter from Aaron Crane to his parents Wayne and Carol Crane, when he was in boot camp to become a Marine in the summer of 2006.

A shared passion

When the Giants’ Buster Posey hits one out, the grandmother becomes a grandkid, texting his last name in all CAPS, followed by so many exclamation points you wonder if her phone will run out of them.

“My mom and I just have this shared passion,” said 41-year-old Geoff Van Dyke, a current Denverite and San Francisco fan, raised in the Bay Area. “We’re all so spread out, it’s not like back when my mom was a girl. But technology has given us this ability to have these shared experiences.”

There are so many Geoff Van Dykes in Denver — transplants who love a team from another town. You see them at Coors Field, thousands of them, draped unapologetically in their Giants orange or Cubs blue or Red Sox red.

And so many of these Denverites stay connected back home by way of baseball, using a phone as basically everything except, well, a phone. You can watch live games or take pictures from Coors or look up fancy stats or gleefully text POSEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cathryn Van Dyke was first Cathryn Dettmann, a young girl who moved to the Bay Area shortly before the Giants did in 1958. Her father, Art, would take her to Candlestick Park, where the wind whipped.

When it came to baseball allegiance, the only question concerning Geoff’s fandom would be how much he’d love the Giants.

Art died when Geoff was around 10. Cathryn gave Geoff the best of Grandpa, teaching her son to cherish the Giants, a team Art never saw win a championship in San Francisco. And today, Art’s daughter and grandson have now seen three.

To this day, Geoff holds onto Art’s money clip, with the Giants logo from the 1970s.

“It’s real cheap,” Geoff said. “… but it’s one of my prized possessions.”

During the Denver summers, Geoff watches numerous Giants games — “Kruk and Kuip on the call” — and he’ll text his mom during many an inning.

“The baseball season is like your friend for all those months,” he said. “You can just turn it on, have it on, and it’s like this warm, fuzzy blanket.”

Aaron Crane

Brent Lewis, The Denver PostGeoff Van Dyke and his mother, Cathryn, are proud fans of the Giants, as shown by their framed copy of the San Francisco Chronicle the day after the team won the 2010 World Series.

Geoff Van Dyke holds his grandfather's money clip

Brent Lewis, The Denver PostGeoff Van Dyke holds his grandfather’s money clip that bears the San Francisco Giants logo from the 1970s. Geoff and his mother, Cathryn Van Dyke, keep in touch during Giants games by texting each other.

Cathryn Van Dyke holds a picture of her father

Brent Lewis, The Denver Post​​Cathryn Van Dyke holds a picture of her father, who played on a team from Cashton, Wis. A love for baseball has remained in the family.

Cathryn loves the unsung heroes, and she’ll gush about Gregor Blanco or Travis Ishikawa, who hit a three-run walk-off home run last fall to give the Giants the National League pennant. She’ll text her son trivia, such as the hat size of the giant-skulled Giants skipper, Bruce Bochy (8 1/8). And she loves pitcher Tim Lincecum almost like a son — and definitely more than her son does.

“I remember a few years ago, I was like, ‘They should get rid of him,’ ” Geoff recalled. “And she was like, ‘Nooooo! They can’t!’ ”

Cathryn turns 70 next year. Recently, she suffered from severe back pain and needed surgery.

“My two sons really made her happy, and baseball really made her happy. You know?” Geoff said. “When she was not feeling well, it was nice to have those games, and we could text about Tim Lincecum struggling or Hunter Pence getting injured.”

Or, perhaps, POSEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No-hit news in Afghanistan

The Marine in Afghanistan checked the Rockies score from inside a bomb shelter.

Aaron Crane was used to spending time in there. During his seven months of deployment, he said his base was fired upon 92 times. But on this April day in 2010, he hid in there for another reason: It was an ideal spot to get wireless Internet.

“Some civilian contractors worked right next to us and they had an unsecured wireless network,” Crane explained with a sly grin. “Our work computers blocked all of the sports websites … so we used their Wi-Fi on an iPod Touch and hid in the bunker so they wouldn’t catch on — and put a password on their network.”

The Rockies won that day, 4-0.

“Oh, nice, who pitched?” Crane wondered to himself.

It was Ubaldo Jimenez, their young ace.

Crane looked a little closer.

No hits?

“We had what was called a DSN phone line in our shop, so I was able to call back to my base in Arizona, and there was a lance corporal on duty,” Crane said. “They were able to patch me through, and I called my parents to confirm: Did Jimenez really throw a no-hitter?”

About a month later in Afghanistan, the sergeant in the Marine Corps received a small package, sent from his mother in Colorado. There was a Rockies T-shirt with JIMENEZ 38 on the back. And a DVD — Rockies at Braves, April 17, 2010.

“In Afghanistan, you’re so disconnected from everything,” Crane said. “Day is night, night is day. But to escape into the Rockies and watch history? I remember watching the whole game, waiting for the catch Dexter Fowler made, to keep it alive. And Drew Goodman saying, ‘If you know what’s going on, remember that play’ — because they were refusing to talk about it.

“In Afghanistan, it’s a connection to home. You can read about the Rockies or watch Ubaldo’s no-hitter, and you take your mind away — and imagine you’re watching it on the couch in Denver.”

Aaron Crane

Andy Cross, The Denver PostAbbey Shea and her father, Dan, text each other while watching Rockies games and have a knack for sending identical messages at the same time.

Linked by texts

The E key fell off her BlackBerry.

Perhaps if it had been the Q, she could have managed, but the E is the cleanup hitter of all letters, the alphabet’s Albert Pujols.

But instead of splurging for another costly cellphone, Abbey Shea, college student, went to Wal-Mart and bought a $20 “GoPhone.”

“They’re indestructible,” she declared, weirdly, proudly, of this mini-Nokia brick phone with its T9 texting and Snake game.

And so, this was the phone. The phone that kept her in touch with her father. This antiquated device helped make the University of Kansas seem like it was located at 20th and Blake.

“If we could watch every game together, we would, but we can’t,” said Shea, who grew up in Highlands Ranch and attended Kansas, starting in 2008. “So texting is as close as we can get. … We’re so similar in our fandoms that I know what he’s going to say before he says it to me. We sometimes send the exact same text message at the exact same time.

“My dad instilled a love for the game early on in my life.”

As a kid, Shea referred to the family’s dog as “Dog Baylor.” She played in the backyard, pretending to be a switch hitter like Quinton McCracken. Dan Shea and his daughter once visited Cooperstown, and as Abbey said, matter-of-factly, “We’ll be back for Helton’s Hall of Fame induction, of course.”

Dad and daughter first went to Rockies spring training when Abbey was in elementary school, and they go annually, unquestionably, sometimes dragging along her sister, who doesn’t get it.

“My sister thought we were going to Arizona to hang out by the pool,” said Shea, now 25. “But we’d get to the field probably around 8 in the morning — we never paid for parking, because we got there before they charged for the lot.”

Shea was a high school senior in 2007, during Rocktober. She had “one of those super-skinny Nokia” phones, and after Matt Holliday’s slide in Game 163, “my phone vibrated for 15 minutes straight. I thought it was going to break.”

She went away for college, but never fully left, perpetually texting with her dad about the nuances and inanities that made baseball baseball — and made them them.

While in Kansas, Shea became an assistant high school softball coach, and she would text her dad “almost an entire book after every game. He knew every single player, having never met them.”

She’s away at school again. She’s a law student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and her father is in Highlands Ranch, more than an hour’s drive away.

“We live-text a lot of games,” said Abbey, who has now splurged on an iPhone. “Then, it’s like you’re together.”

The real thing

Wayne and Carol Crane would Skype their son from their living room in Littleton, and they’d tell him about baseball, and he’d tell them about war.

Five years later, they all recall a particular day.

Wayne: “We were just talking back and forth. And all of a sudden, he just dropped out of sight.”

Carol: “We were sitting there, looking at a blank screen.”

Wayne: “WHAT HAPPENED?”

Carol: “We could hear the sirens. What happened to Aaron? Where’s Aaron?”

You hear their words; you cannot feel their words. You think of the emotions of these parents, who, in real time, watched their son disappear from the screen, as rockets attacked the base.

Marines were taught to hit the floor when sirens blared. Aaron wasn’t hurt that day. He ultimately popped up and said to the people he loved most, “I gotta go.”

Aaron returned to the States in September 2010. The hugs felt tighter.

Nearly half a decade later, he’s sitting beside his parents at their Littleton home. It’s summer sunny outside. The Rockies-Cardinals game is on the TV in the background.

“Matt Carpenter just hit a home run,” Aaron suddenly said of the St. Louis third baseman.

“He’s been struggling, too,” his father replied.

Aaron Crane

Courtesy of the Hochman familyIn 1995, Benjamin Hochman, right, and his father, Jere, visited the Field Of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, where the famous Kevin Costner baseball movie was filmed.

Dad and me and Jack

I heard my first baseball game when I was 17 hours old. It was May 5, 1980, and I was nestled in my father’s arms, dozing off to the lullabies of broadcaster Jack Buck.

Jere Hochman, my dad, grew up listening to Buck, often on a transistor radio at his Nana’s kitchen table in St. Louis.

In the mornings, he’d read the box scores and replay the games in his head. At night, he’d listen to KMOX radio, and loved when the Cardinals were on the West Coast, “because you could fall asleep listening to the game.”

He listened to the 1964 World Series in Science class, sneaking the cord from a transistor radio up his sleeve, up his shirt and into his ear. It’s become something of Hochman lore, though “I probably did it for two minutes, even though I probably think I listened to the whole game,” Dad said.

Baseball just does something to Dad and me. It’s our thing. We’re baseball guys. We’re romantics. We allow this game to overtake us. We give it unlimited access to our hearts and souls, acknowledging that there are indeed going to be some downs — but if we make it through those, and it’ll just make the ups seem that much higher.

We didn’t just play catch like we were in “Field of Dreams” — we actually drove to Iowa to play catch at the actual Field of Dreams. We didn’t just attend baseball card shows — Dad bought me access to a table at a show, so I could trade and sell my cards with hundreds of people. We didn’t just follow players — Dad ran a fantasy baseball league for my friends and me.

This is our 15th summer in different cities, Dad and me. But over the years, we’ve texted about baseball on flip phones and iPhones, and we’ve instant messaged on America Online and Gmail.

“It’s just an instantaneous connection,” Dad said recently when I interviewed him at my sister Emily’s home. “It’s not a phone call — how was your day? — it’s just kind of like a quick hug. It’s out of the blue. I’ll text you or text Emily: ‘NOOOOOO!’ Or, ‘Are you watching?’ And maybe if you are, we have a conversation back and forth. Or it may just be ‘Yadi, Yadi Yadi,’ because Molina hit it over the fence or he nailed some guy at second base.”

I tell him there’s a warmth to this. I like that word. We compare the connection to one of Dad’s favorite fun pastimes — staring at the moon with Mom in one city, knowing his kids are looking at the very same moon while in another city.

This, of course, reminds us of Buck’s radio partner, Mike Shannon, who once said from a game in New York: “I wish you folks back in St. Louis could see this moon.”

These days, I’ll text Dad photos from where work takes me — say, a big-league dugout or even the field before the World Series. These moments are surreal for me, for us. I sent him a photo the day they gave me a nameplate at Coors Field. There, in a major-league press box above home plate, was a seat reserved for me, Benjamin Hochman, sports columnist. As I type this, I get choked up, thinking about what this meant to Dad.

That day at my sister’s home, I asked him if there’s a way to put into words the emotion of sharing something you love with the people you love.

“Probably not,” he said, chuckling. “I don’t know how you describe something that special. We can talk about 100 different topics on other occasions, but there’s just something about this … this is ours. This is like playing catch.”

We then talked about that first shared baseball game, in the hospital, May 5, 1980.

“I was in there with the gown and the gloves, and I was rocking you,” Dad said. “There was a symmetry to that, just like sitting next to you at a ballgame for all those years, or now, it’s the same thing with texting a thousand miles away.”

There it was. I knew I had my final quote.

“You survived the interview,” I told him.

“I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that would fit in,” he said. “But yeah, you got it. It’s really tough to put into words.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Aaron Crane

Photo courtesy of Emily HochmanBenjamin Hochman, left, and his father Jere Hochman play with a Willie McGee bobblehead doll.