A tradition interrupted

Tom Berenger plays Jake Taylor in "Major League."

You may have known him as Pete. You may have known him as Martini or Pizzle. You may not have known him at all.

If you didn't, I wish you had.

I met Pete in 2001, when I was the assistant sports editor at the local newspaper, and he spent the summer interning as a sports reporter. One thing became apparent quickly: This guy LOVED sports. Especially baseball. And since he was a summer intern, one of his main duties was covering the local short-season Class A baseball team. We didn't spend too much time together, but baseball was usually at the center of our conversations.

Mark Lemke of the Atlanta Braves.

When autumn rolled around, he went back to college and we lost track of each other. A few years later, my newspaper hired Pete to work in our sports department - and he became one of my closest friends. Then Rich started working there, and the three of us formed a tight bond.

We traveled together, too. Like the time Pete volunteered to drive up us to Seattle during a heat wave and didn't tell us the air conditioning in his car didn't work. On that same trip, we wandered into a military artillery range looking for a Starbucks and then saw the Red Sox defense bungle a Jon Lester no-hitter bid against the Mariners.

But when it came to MLB, Pete was passionate about the Braves. He loved Mark Lemke. Hated Kent Hrbek for pushing Ron Gant off second base. Loved Maddux-Smoltz-Glavine. Hated Charlie Leibrandt for lobbing a meatball to Kirby Puckett. Loved the 1995 championship team. Hated the Mets. Oh, did he ever hate the Mets.

I bought Pete the DVD set of the 1991 World Series as a gag gift, and he couldn't bring himself to watch it because it was too painful to relive the memories of Atlanta's loss. This was 20 years later.

Speaking of gags, Pete loved to tell the story of the time we got a crew together for a pickup baseball game. I joked beforehand that if I got the chance, I would throw him out at first base from left field. Sure enough, we ended up on opposite teams, and there I was in left field when Pete came to the plate with a runner on second. Pete hit a sinking liner directly at me - the perfect opportunity for me to charge the ball and come up firing. We were playing on a field with a smaller-than-regulation infield, so Pete only had to run about 70 feet to get to first base before my throw. But Pete was a large fella and ... not fleet afoot. So here's Pete, chugging up the line, and the only frozen rope I ever threw in my life arriving at the bag at the same time ...

And the first baseman had vacated the area to cover home because we didn't have enough players to fill every position. Pete's foot hit the bag, and the ball clanked harmlessly off the chain-link fence behind first base. We'll never know whether he would have been out. Pete thought he would have been; I wasn't so sure.

Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series.

It's one of those classic "you had to be there" stories, and Pete had a way of making you feel like you had been.

But that's how it was with Pete. Everyone who knew him heard one of his tales that started with "So I was at a bar last night..." And he'd laugh at his own misfortunes as much as he did ours. But I digress.

In 2012, Rich asked me to join FBLG as his pitching coach. That year, the league was one owner short - and Pete came off the bench to fill in, calling his team Hammerin Hank. He filled in again last year with his team the Pizzle 76s. That name stems from the joke I made about him wearing his orange high school football jersey (No. 76) and slowly rotating in front of a gas station.

Over the years, we'd get together at Rich's house for Oregon football games - when Pete wasn't covering them as a reporter - and bust out a deck of cards afterward to play hearts. When spring rolled around each year, we'd meet up and watch "Major League" around Opening Day even though we could damn near recite it line by line. It became our spring-training ritual. If the card game wasn't over by the time the Indians won the pennant, we'd just restart the movie.

It's been a few years since we got together to watch that movie. Covid ruined 2020, and then Pete was diagnosed with cancer. Four kinds, in fact.

He kept working during most of the next three years, and he said that focusing on work helped take his mind away from his health. But I think it was focusing on sports, his truest love, that kept him going. In our three-way text messages, we'd hit all our usual topics. I'd come up with baseball trivia, and Pete would say he couldn't wait to beat cancer so we could hang out again and watch the 1988 World Series and Seinfeld episodes.

They say everyone "bravely" fights cancer, but Pete really did. He kept his optimism up until the pain became too much. In late 2023, Pete privately told us that his prognosis had changed; the cancer was terminal.

The press box at Autzen Stadium.

I never got the chance to see him after that. In fact, I hadn't seen him since 2021, when we briefly got together after he was supposed to be done with treatments. I think Pete was embarrassed to be seen in such a weakened state. I just wanted to see my friend again.

He told us he loved us - and we said the same. He'd done that so many times throughout the process, so there was no sign that the end was as close as it was. I suppose that was the goodbye he wanted. No funeral, no service, no Irish wake.

How ironic: The big guy with the big personality didn't want a big fuss.

Now here we are at the end of spring training, our traditional time to watch "Major League." But I can't bring myself to watch it. It might be a while until I can.

I admit I haven't watched much baseball during the past few seasons. I'm beginning to think it's not a coincidence.

Goodbye, Pete. We'll miss you, buddy.

-bd