Mi Abuelo

My grandfather loved the Dodgers. He loved baseball and was an amateur pitcher in Teocaltiche, Jalisco, Mexico, so of course he fell in love with the Dodgers when he moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s.

My grandfather loved to talk. He could hold a conversation about anything and create one out of thin air. His main fault in that category is that he often repeated the same story, sometimes in the same day.

Some of my favorite stories of his:

• He and his cousin Roberto would travel to Guadalajara to make money by visiting boxing gyms and sparring the local boxers. Roberto’s son, Roberto Jr., my cousin, keeps the boxing spirit alive in the family as an amateur trainer. He trained me for over a year when I took up boxing for exercise.
• He spent many of his childhood summers at his grandparents’ ranch with his other cousins.
• He worked multiple jobs seven days a week for years all over L.A. county. He’d often ride a bike through downtown Los Angeles to travel between jobs. “I didn’t care if it was raining or what the weather was,” he’d say. He rode his bike on the streets, over the hills, and through the tunnels of DTLA.

My grandfather took me to dozens of Dodger games when I was a kid. I still have, somewhere, an autographed baseball from one of the games he took me to for autographed baseball day. I was probably about six years old. He walked me over to the table inside the stadium where two Dodger players were sitting at. It was my first time face-to-face with professional athletes I’d seen on television. My grandfather guided me to the table to take a sticker, grab a ball, and hand it over to the players (whose names I’ve completely forgotten!) to sign before returning it to me.

I used to daydream about being a Dodger player when I was a kid, but in a different way than other kids. I didn’t daydream about hitting homeruns, stealing home, or anything like that at all. My daydreams were of me showing up at my grandparents’ house in my Dodger uniform to surprise them after each of my games at Dodger stadium.

One of first things I did when the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020 was buy the official World Series winner’s cap to gift to my grandfather. He wore it almost everyday until he passed away on Thursday night.