by Cathy Byrd
Listening intently, Christian had a very serious look on his face when he nodded his head yes.
“It isn’t always the fastest man who wins the race or the strongest man who wins the fight,” Tommy continued. “It’s the one who wants it more than the other guy. If you want to play for the Dodgers badly enough, and you’re willing to put in the work, you can do it.”
Then, out of the blue, Christian said to Tommy, “You used to play for the Yankees.”
“Yes, son, I was with the Yankees organization for one year.”
I was astonished when Tommy confirmed that he had indeed played for the Yankees. This is not something Christian could have known, and I didn’t even know it myself. I later discovered that Tommy’s brief stint with the Yankees as a left-handed pitcher hadn’t even made it into his Wikipedia bio.
This shift in the conversation provided a perfect opportunity for me to hint about Christian’s stories of being a baseball player in the 1920s and ’30s. I was curious to see what Tommy would have to say about it. I gently eased into the topic.
“Christian is a big fan of Lou Gehrig. Did you ever see Lou Gehrig play?”
Tommy leaned down to Christian.
“Oh, you picked a good one,” he said in a soft voice, “one of the best. He was my hero when I was a kid.”
Christian listened intently.
“He was a good man—the hardest working man in baseball.”
Now I jumped in.
“Christian has been telling us that he used to be Lou Gehrig since he was three,” I told Tommy. “He told us things he could have never known at the time, like, ‘I used to stay in hotels nearly every night’ and ‘I rode on trains.’”
Tommy smiled and said, “The kid’s got a good imagination.”
This wasn’t exactly the response I was hoping for, but I didn’t have the nerve to explain further. I still wasn’t sure what to make of Christian’s past-life claims myself, but I had come to the conclusion that some things in life do not need to be fully understood in order to be appreciated.
Tommy put his hand on Christian’s shoulder.
“When I was fifteen years old, I used to actually dream I was pitching in Yankee Stadium. Bill Dickey was my catcher, and Lou Gehrig was my first baseman. Then years later, in my real life, they called me to pitch to Yogi Berra. There I was, warming up in the bullpen in Yankee Stadium. I said I’d been here many times, but in my dreams.”
Tommy patted Christian on the back.
“Never stop dreaming, son.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I JUST KNOW
“I see great things in baseball. It’s our game—the American
game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with
oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to
relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set.
Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.”
WALT WHITMAN
The next time we crossed paths with Tommy Lasorda was a month later when I took the day off of work and surprised Charlotte and Christian by letting them skip school to attend Opening Day at Dodger Stadium. I picked up Cinthia at 10 A.M. in an effort to beat the traffic jam that would inevitably result from 56,000 people racing to get into the stadium before the opening pitch at 1 P.M. We made our way through the crowd and to our seats just in time for the pregame festivities. Patriotism filled the air as jets flew overhead and hundreds of military servicemen and servicewomen in uniform unfurled a billowing American flag across the field.
Following the national anthem, Magic Johnson emerged from the dugout, and the crowd roared as he walked toward the mound with a ball in his hand. Just as Magic started his windup to toss the ceremonial first pitch, he was interrupted. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly ran out on the field with one of the greatest pitchers of all time to relieve Magic of the duty. The fans went wild when legendary left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax pitched a perfect strike.
Then the real game began and Christian was elated to see Clayton Kershaw take the mound. Clayton hit his first career home run that afternoon and made it into the baseball record books by being one of only two players in history to ever pitch a complete-game shutout and hit a home run on Opening Day. The crowd celebrated their home team’s 4–0 victory over the rivaled Giants as Randy Newman’s iconic 80s song “I Love L.A.” blared throughout the stadium. I found myself so immersed in the excitement of the game that it was hard to imagine my life before baseball.
After the game we met up with Tommy Lasorda in the Dodger Stadium Dugout Club. This is when we received the news that the award-winning photo of Christian’s first pitch, taken by AP photographer Mark J. Terrill, was now hanging in the private Owners’ Suite at Dodger Stadium. An executive from Magic Johnson Enterprises, who was also in the Dugout Club after the game, told us he had been in the Owners’ Suite earlier that day when Sandy Koufax had seen the framed photo of Christian hanging on the wall. He said Sandy had loved the photo so much that the Dodgers owners had offered to send one to his home. Tommy gave me, Christian, Charlotte, and Cinthia a legendary Lasorda hug before heading to his car.
We later found out that the photo of Christian’s first pitch was also hanging in the Dodgers Stadium Club and in the lobby of the Guggenheim Partners’ headquarters in Chicago. The photo of Christian’s first pitch had been selected as a top photo of the year in 2012 by The Atlantic magazine, ESPN, and FOX Sports, but we never imagined it would show up on the walls of Dodger Stadium or in the home of Sandy Koufax. Christian was one lucky four-year-old.
Michael and I were still completely exhausted by Christian’s relentless pleas to play baseball with him day in and day out, so we sought revenge by signing him up to play baseball in two different baseball leagues that spring, which he absolutely loved. Between Charlotte’s softball schedule and Christian’s baseball schedule, we found ourselves at a grassy field nearly every day of the week. Christian’s appetite for playing baseball was like that of a border collie playing fetch—enough was never enough. After playing baseball outside for hours, he played inside of our house, throwing tennis balls against the walls and hitting foam balls over our second-story banister until it was time for him to go to bed.
To capture this special moment in time, Michael and I created a video montage of the many creative ways Christian had discovered to play baseball within the confines of our home, and uploaded it to YouTube. Much to our surprise, the video became an instant hit and garnered millions of views. Thankfully the casualties from Christian’s indoor baseball practice were limited to small holes in the drywall that were easily repaired, cracked glass in our picture frames, and numerous drinking glasses caught in the line of fire. We learned to stop using our expensive glasses after Christian’s line drive shattered Michael’s favorite crystal wine glass. Without missing a beat, Christian said, “Daddy, you can’t make friends with a wine glass. Just grab a new one.”
The fields where Christian played baseball were the same fields where I had played softball as a kid in the 1970s. Although I never had any conscious desire to be a baseball mom, the joy of being a parent in the stands far exceeded my wildest expectations. My initiation into the sisterhood of baseball moms had occurred a year earlier when Christian was hitting balls with his tiny wooden bat at the Honolulu airport while we were waiting to board our flight.
A friendly woman approached me and reminisced, “I remember those days. When my son was a toddler, he used to take rolled-up socks from my laundry basket and throw them against the wall to practice pitching. Now he is the first baseman for the New York Mets.” She proudly pulled out her son Ike Davis’s MLB card from her wallet and said, “Enjoy every moment! There’s no better place to build character than a Little League baseball field.”
I never imagined at the time that this quintessential American pastime would be such a blessing in our lives. There was something about moments spent on the Little League baseball fields that eased everyday worries and made it seem
as if all was well in the world. The Little League pledge, which was written in 1954, sums up the principles at the heart of Little League baseball: “I trust in God. I love my country and will respect its laws. I will play fair and strive to win. But win or lose, I will always do my best.”
Following the regular season, Christian was invited to play on a travel baseball team made up of five- and six-year-old boys with an equal love of the game. The majority of our weekends were spent at baseball tournaments where these young boys poured their hearts and souls into playing up to five games over the course of two days. Our habit of attending Sunday morning church services became increasingly sporadic as baseball took over our lives. My weekend mornings now started with a ritual of packing up the car with all of the essentials for our long, hot days under the sun. While the boys played as many as three baseball games per day, Charlotte and the other siblings kept themselves entertained by making rainbow loom bracelets in the stands.
The world of travel baseball united families of all different ages, races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We developed an undeniable sense of camaraderie through our time spent together in the trenches. The barriers that may have existed between us in more formal settings didn’t exist here, and long-lasting friendships were forged on and off the field.
Michael made quite an impression on our travel baseball team at our parents versus kids scrimmage. First, because he had no idea how to catch with a baseball glove, and second, because he didn’t realize he was supposed to drop the bat after hitting the ball. When Michael was called “out” for running all the way to second base with a bat in his hand, he argued in his German accent, “How was I supposed to know that?” The kids and parents broke out in uncontrollable laughter when it became obvious that Michael was not joking. After this embarrassing moment, he promptly bought himself a baseball glove, and Christian taught him how to catch with it. I was thrilled to be relieved of some of my baseball duties when Michael mastered our new pitching machine and started playing baseball with Christian in our front yard. He also spent countless hours hitting tennis balls to Christian with a tennis racquet for fly-ball practice—the diving catches were Christian’s all-time favorite.
In the midst of travel ball season, Christian’s bedtime storytelling ritual about his life as Lou Gehrig resumed without warning. However, this time he expressed his feelings about Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth with a surprisingly mature perspective. What Christian had shown through raw emotional reactions to Babe Ruth as a toddler, he now talked about with a deeper understanding of the emotional context. One night before bed, Christian said out of the blue, “Babe Ruth was a very jealous man.” When I asked him why Babe Ruth was jealous, he immediately replied, “Because he was not related to Lou Gehrig’s mom.” This made no sense to me at the time, but it did inspire me to resume my late-night investigations into the life of Lou Gehrig.
My research revealed that Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who had been the best of friends since 1925, vowed never to speak again after a falling-out between Lou’s mother and Babe in 1932. Prior to making this statement about Babe Ruth being jealous, Christian had no way of knowing that the feud between Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth had originally stemmed from a disagreement between Babe Ruth and Lou’s mother, Christina Gehrig. I read that Christina had become like a surrogate mother to Babe Ruth, who had been raised in an orphanage and didn’t have a mother of his own. It was written that Babe spoke German with Lou’s mother and loved her German cooking. By 1927 Babe Ruth had become a fixture at the Gehrig home, where Lou still lived with his parents.
When Babe remarried in 1929, he began leaving his 11-year-old daughter from a previous marriage in the care of Christina Gehrig while he and his wife, Claire, traveled. When Lou’s mother told Babe and Claire she felt they were neglecting his daughter, it was the end of the relationship between Babe Ruth and the Gehrig family. I read an article that said Babe sent his Yankees teammate Sammy Byrd to deliver the following message to Lou: “Never speak to me again off the field.” As legend has it, the two men never acknowledged each other from that day forward. The fact that Christian was able to explain the emotional context of the feud between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, without ever being exposed to this information, just blew me away.
Christian looked at a photograph of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig standing together.
“Even though Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth played baseball together and took pictures together,” he said to me, “they didn’t talk to each other.” It was a statement right out of the baseball history books, but Christian still didn’t know how to read, and there was no reasonable explanation as to how he would know such a thing.
When I asked him how he knew, he replied, “I just know.”
Christian continued to offer up new details about Lou Gehrig’s life with astounding accuracy, but he now spoke about Lou Gehrig in the third person, rather than speaking in the first person. For example, where Christian used to say things like, “I stayed in hotels and rode on trains,” he now said, “Lou stayed in hotels and rode on trains.”
During my research I stumbled upon a radio interview from 1939, in which Lou Gehrig named young Ted Williams out of Minnesota as a promising up-and-coming player in the Major Leagues. This was the same Ted Williams from the photograph that Christian had persuaded me to purchase for him at Fenway Park when he was two years old. As fate would have it, Ted Williams made his Major League debut against the Yankees on April 20, 1939. This was the only game in which Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams ever played against each other because Lou announced his retirement from baseball shortly thereafter.
An even stranger discovery I made that summer was when I noticed the remarkable resemblance in Christian and Lou Gehrig’s hitting mechanics. When I showed Michael a YouTube video of Christian’s first baseball tournament, and we compared it to videos of Lou Gehrig playing baseball, he agreed that the similarity was undeniable. Christian and Lou both stood at the plate with their front elbow fully extended, rather than slightly bent like the majority of batters. We also noted a similarity in the unique way that both Christian and Lou Gehrig slid into the bases with one arm up in the air and one arm dragging behind them.
Watching the YouTube video of Christian’s first baseball tournament, we noticed for the first time that Christian removed his batting helmet right after scoring a run and waved it in the air, much like Lou Gehrig’s customary tip of his hat to the crowd after hitting a home run. All the other kids in the video removed their helmets after walking into the dugout. Although Lou Gehrig was once a top pitcher at Columbia University, there didn’t appear to be any surviving video footage of Lou pitching on YouTube, so we were never able to compare their pitching mechanics.
For Christian’s fifth birthday in August 2013, I made arrangements for him to throw a ceremonial first pitch at a Minor League Baseball Reno Aces game while we were visiting friends in Lake Tahoe. There was nothing Christian enjoyed more than fraternizing with the “big” baseball players. Despite the fact that he had come down with a bad cough due to wildfires in the nearby Tahoe National Forest, Christian trotted out to the pitcher’s mound and gave it his all. After the first pitch, we practically had to drag Christian away from his new pal, Reno Aces’ manager Brett Butler, who also happened to be an ex-Dodger and fellow lefty. The Aces were up by three runs at the top of the third inning when Michael and I noticed that Christian’s breathing was becoming increasingly labored. The combination of the high altitude and smoke from the wildfires was more than his fragile lungs could handle.
My good friend Mela, who lived nearby, offered to take Michael and Charlotte to the Circus-Circus Hotel and Casino for a much-needed distraction while I drove Christian to the emergency room at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center. Watching our son gasp for breath and seeing his heart practically beating out of his chest at what felt like a hummingbird’s pace was something I had grown accustomed to over the past five years. Yet it still broke my heart every single time. Christian clung to
me with fear in his eyes as the ER doctor injected him with steroids to treat his breathing difficulties. When he was finally stabilized and released from the emergency room, I vowed to do whatever I could to keep this from happening again.
The following day I flashed back to Carol Bowman’s book, Children’s Past Lives, and the e-mail she had sent me. Carol had suggested in her e-mail that Christian’s breathing ailment could be related to Lou Gehrig’s tragic death from ALS. I was alarmed to discover the most common cause of death among people with ALS is respiratory failure. I recalled Dr. Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia School of Medicine having a similar theory.
Dr. Stevenson’s research had revealed that the majority of cases of children who remember past lives involve a premature death from unnatural causes in the previous lifetime. Carol Bowman took the scientific data a step further by suggesting the spontaneous appearance of past-life memories in childhood could be the soul’s way of resolving “unfinished business” from the previous lifetime. She believed that simply acknowledging children’s past-life memories could provide healing and closure. Even though the idea of a physical ailment being caused by a tragic death in a previous lifetime struck me as completely irrational, I was willing to consider anything that might provide healing for our son. I had already exhausted every rational treatment for Christian’s asthma under the guidance of the top pediatric pulmonary doctors in Southern California.
The combination of Christian’s asthma attack and the resurgence of his past-life memories had created the perfect storm. It inspired me to seek the expert advice of Dr. Jim Tucker, the current Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine founded by Dr. Ian Stevenson in 1967. I was delighted when Dr. Tucker offered to make the trip to California to meet our family.