At Safeco Field: Ken Stutz, Pete Cafone, me.
In Seattle, a trip planned on an impulse a couple of months back. I came up here because a guy I used to work with at the San Francisco Examiner, Pete Cafone, mentioned on Facebook he wanted to see the Mariners play at Safeco Field.
I’ve seen Pete all of three or four times since I left the Examiner early the morning of January 2, 1996, when I completed my final shift and went on to a Web startup. (It is hard to believe that was nearly 20 years ago, but here I am walking around with a bunch of people my age all saying the same thing.) The last time Pete and I met was at a memorial/celebration for a copy editor we’d worked with, Courtenay Peddle, who died several years ago of kidney failure, the last of a series of health crises that began almost immediately upon his retirement.
At work, Pete and I weren’t particularly close. I worked a series of newsroom desk jobs while he was one of the evening editors in sports. He seemed loud, tough and funny; he seemed to be a hard drinker, not that we ever drank together; he was from Philadelphia; I knew his birthday was on Christmas; and he liked to talk. Anyway, we got along, and in the few times we crossed paths, it was always good to see him.
So Pete and I aren’t really best buddies. How did it happened I offered to meet him up here for a game — not exactly a casual trip?
I see Pete’s posts on Facebook. He’s detailed a long series of road trips he’s taken since he took a buyout from the San Francisco Chronicle six years ago. More recently, he’s recounted a series of health challenges of his own. Here’s what he posted on March 22:
Pete, aka Mr. Positive, has some negativity to report, something we seldom do. As most followers of these postings know, Humpty Dumpty was recently put back together to restore his plumbing to its original form. Unfortunately Humpty has cracked in 3 places and the leakage has created numerous infections — including cdif, an infection in the colon — over the past 5 weeks. As a result, early this coming week we will have our 5th operation in the last year and a half since the first one on Halloween 2013 to remove a rectal tumor. The plan calls for a return to an illeostomy bag while the current mess gets cleaned up and heals. Mr. Positive expects to recover well & soon enough to go on an 11-day trip to Alaska starting May 18. The first 6 days will be on a cruise out of Vancouver, the next 4 on land which includes a fantastic train ride and stays at 2 different spots in Denali National Park and the final day is set for Safeco Field in Seattle to see the Mariners against the Indians. Safeco will be Pete’s 29th baseball ballpark of the current 30 in use — leaving Miami’s new park the only one still to go (we saw a game in the old one the last year before they moved to the new one). So as you can see, there’s no time to be lamenting the latest setback. It’s on to new frontiers.
On the surface, sure, that’s a pretty graphic medical report. You got any pictures to go with that?
But there’s a lot more there, too: frankness, courage, optimism, and joy in new adventures are the first things that come to mind. And without really thinking about it too much — or at all — I found myself making plans to meet Pete up here. Just as a gesture, I guess, in admiration of all those qualities; and also because I knew it would be fun and because I hadn’t seen a game up here, either.
One final piece of this journey fell into place a couple of weeks after Pete’s post. I was having lunch with another friend, Garth, in early April and mentioned I might be coming up to Seattle. When I told him what the trip was about, he said he had a connection for Mariners tickets. He got us four seats in the lower stands, right by first base. All I really had to do was show up and make sure the tickets were at will call for Pete.
The evening was beautiful and I never had to put on the jacket I brought. Pete was with his friend Ken Stutz — Ken’s father gave Pete his first job back in the mid-1960s at a local paper in Burlington County, New Jersey, and Ken is a veteran of sports desks in Philadelphia and San Jose. We kept score, though the slick paper in the Mariners program wasn’t easy to write on. Pete bought me a beer (he stopped drinking years ago). Then the game was over (though not before the Mariners’ closer, Fernando Rodney, did his damnedest to cough up a two-run lead). Before the post game fireworks started, Pete and Ken left for the parking garage so they could beat the mob out of the park.
