Baseball doesn’t promise you a happy ending, but it always leaves room for one. ‌ A comeback is always possible in baseball. It doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but math is on the side of the underdog, and the optimist. That’s why it worked as a framework for a story about grief, family, and redemption. If I could figure out how to forgive my dad on the sidelines — and even come to see him as the hero of the story, for all the ways he knows how to be with his grief — maybe there’s hope for the most messed up family relationships. “It ain’t over til it’s over” — that’s a much better quote about baseball and life. ‌ Yogi Berra wasn’t a therapist, but he was a catcher, and that’s maybe the next best thing. ‌ For my dad and me, the bleachers were a place to process all the ways life could screw you over, and all the ways it could be beautiful, and to experience both, sometimes within a single inning. We rode out the things we couldn’t control, inhaling them along with bug spray and the salt...