What’s this about a baseball odyssey?
In my second year of law school, I met my husband Dave—an all-American first baseman and College Baseball Player of the Year for Stanford. Right after our engagement in 1991, Dave was drafted third overall by the Minnesota Twins, beginning a strange journey that would last 15 years through 9 different baseball organizations, 7 different big league teams, and finally, an end to an 86-year-old curse.
But we didn’t know that then. Then we thought Dave would be a Minnesota Twin for the foreseeable future. So in 1993 after a short swing past AA Orlando and AAA Portland, we loaded up the truck and moved to…no, not Beverly Hills, but Minneapolis.
I worked for two years at a fantastic law firm in Minneapolis (I’d passed the California bar and waived into Minnesota’s) doing mostly copyright and antitrust litigation. Unfortunately, Dave’s career with the Twins didn’t last. He was traded to the San Francisco Giants (via the Cincinnati Reds) in 1995 and we moved back to California.
The Giants were the beginning of a long roller coaster ride for Dave in the major and minor leagues that continued with the Seattle Mariners, the Detroit Tigers, the Oakland A’s (twice), the Kansas City Royals, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (don’t ask), and the Boston Red Sox. Through it all, the kids and I stayed in California; commuting when we could to whatever city Dave happened to be living in at the time. But perseverance was rewarded when he was part of the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox. Dave’s baseball career ended in 2005, but the excitement surrounding the World Series was an experience we’ll never forget.