Be a Hitter

He taught me a lot about money. Most of it he never said out loud.

I was small, and I had a good eye. In Little League that meant I could get on base laying off the bad pitches. It was a perfectly reasonable strategy for someone with a small strike zone.

While my dad initially taught me this strategy, he ended up changing his mind. As I got older, from the stands, every time I got up: Be a hitter. Now. I didn’t fully understand what he meant then. I think I’m still figuring it out.

“Be a hitter” isn’t about baseball. It’s about stepping up to the plate and not playing small.

My dad was a doctor, and he loved being a doctor. He worked a lot, made good money. What I saw was someone who loved what he did, even though he said his mother forced him into it, and happened to be well compensated for it.

He was also quietly generous in ways I only understood later. My parents never told me what they gave to charity. No announcements, no performance. The giving was just part of who he was: something I absorbed more than I was taught. I later found out that in medical school at the University of Florida, he organized a clinic so people who couldn’t afford health care could see a doctor. One day I found myself on the Giants field with Felipe Alou before a game. Turns out my parents had been quietly helping prevent violence against women. I had no idea.

Once, on a trip the two of us took together, a trip we needed, a trip to try to close some distance that had opened up between us, we were supposed to take the ferry back. My dad saw a seaplane and decided it didn’t matter how expensive it was. We flew. Somewhere over the water an orca breached below us. He hadn’t planned any of it. That was also a lesson. Sometimes you can use money like that.

He invested in my hat company. We made hats that Method Man, Steph Curry, and Lil Wayne wore. We did not make much money. My dad never said a word about it. Not once. Take that back. He did think it was cool about Steph Curry. When you’re young and someone bets on you and then quietly eats the loss without making you carry it. You don’t always recognize what’s happening. I recognize it now.

He bought Jordans before dads wore Jordans. I wanted them, so he looked at them, decided they were actually cool, and wore them too. He was seeing me. That kind of attention is its own form of generosity.

But here’s the thing about all of it: the seaplane, the hat business, the Jordans, the way he kept yelling be a hitter from the stands.

He was always my backstop.

The reason I could swing — in baseball, in business, in life — was because I always knew he was behind me. Just in the way a father can be there: completely, quietly, with $10,000 cash in a heartbeat and no questions asked if it ever came to that. It never came to that. But knowing it was available changed what risks felt possible.

Before he died, he told me to be generous. By that point he’d been showing me for forty years. He was a doctor until the day he died. He loved what he did. He gave quietly. I have two boys now. More than anything in the world, I want to be their backstop.