On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles.
Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who served as commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months until he died suddenly in 1989, famously wrote that baseball is “designed to break your heart,” because it “leaves you to face the fall all alone.”
Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart.
After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief.
So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives.
So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.
“This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.”
The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio.
Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips.
But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages.
And a shared love of baseball.
“I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”
“Baseball has a calming effect on them,” she added, “and they want someone to share it with.”
‘Friends for the rest of my life.’
Ms. Strub is a lifelong baseball fan, having grown up just outside Kansas City, first rooting for the Athletics before they moved to California, and then for the Royals when M.L.B. expansion brought the franchise to her hometown. She loved George Brett, the Royals’ star third baseman, and Lou Piniella, who played five seasons for the team.
She and her husband began raising their four children in South Dakota, but moved to Olympia, Wash., 24 years ago in search of better jobs. She had a career as an engineering consultant and retired in 2016. She then began to devote much of her time to taking care of Wyatt, whose health problems worsened steadily until he died in 2023.
By the end of this baseball season, Ms. Strub had attended games with about 30 strangers and found that the people she connected with needed her as much as she needed them. She built an online community, bringing together the people she had met in a private Facebook group, calling the project “Strangers to Friends.”
If she couldn’t attend a game — she had to miss a few when her husband, Mike, had brain surgery — she handed off her tickets to strangers who had reached out to her but didn’t know each other.
She said she was “gobsmacked” by the reaction to her post.
“I have made so many friends this summer,” she said. “I have friends that will be my friends for the rest of my life.”
Over the summer, Jack Barrie, a young documentary filmmaker from Los Angeles, reached out to her. Mr. Barrie, who grew up in Seattle and roots for the Mariners, said he felt Ms. Strub’s story of grieving in public “needs to be shared.” The two began meeting and filming a short documentary, “You Sit Here,” a reference to the words on a silhouette next to her in her original Facebook post.
Already, people are booking games with her for next season.
“I just needed something to snap me out of the fog of grief I was in,” Ms. Strub said. “I don’t ever expect to be over his death. I don’t expect to ever recover. But I have been able to find joy again.”
Others found joy through her.
One woman who has a disabled child came from Australia to meet Ms. Strub at the ballpark. Steve Hayburn, a probation officer from Ketchikan, Alaska, flew to Seattle in September after the death of his father and the dissolution of a long relationship.
“When I saw her story, I knew I had to connect with her,” Mr. Hayburn, 55, said. “She kind of reminded me of my mom.”
They met up at the stadium for the second to last game of the season, on a Saturday night. Ms. Strub walked in with her cane, her hat on sideways, a pink chain around her neck holding her cellphone. “She kind of reminded me of a gangster, the way she was walking,” he said.
They watched the Mariners play the Los Angeles Angels and shared a tub of popcorn. “It was like I was spending time with my mom all over again,” he said.
Mr. Hayburn, who grew up in Ohio and rooted for the Cincinnati Reds, added, “It helped me deal with my trauma I’ve been through this year.”
Another new friend, Sheila Cook, lost her wife, Michelle, a few years ago, also to muscular dystrophy. Ms. Cook was shattered by the loss and felt angry and confused about why doctors told her Michelle was ineligible for a heart transplant.
Then she met Ms. Strub, who explained the disease in a way that finally made sense to her. (Ms. Strub also has three grandsons who have been diagnosed with the disease, having passed it down through her daughters with a mutation on one of her X chromosomes, she said.)
“We were just weeping and crying all the way to the ballpark,” said Ms. Cook, 74, who has a dog named after Ken Griffey Jr. “It was a wonderful gift. I truly believe it was a gift from God, that Rhenda was a gift from God.”
In the middle of the summer, the Mariners honored Ms. Strub as their season ticket holder of the year. For one night, she moved up from her regular seat to watch the game with friends in a luxury suite.
She was also asked to throw out the first pitch at that game. It was a nerve-racking proposition because she had never learned to throw properly.
It turned out that one of her new friends, Liz Brown, was a retired schoolteacher who had once taught gym class. So before Ms. Strub took the field at T-Mobile Park, Ms. Brown met her near her home in Olympia and taught her how to throw a baseball.
A closing tribute
At the ballpark on the final day of the season, Ms. Strub stood to cheer for one of her favorite players, the pitcher Logan Gilbert, who was being removed from the game in the fifth inning.
Then she continued talking about her son, Wyatt, who had enjoyed going to a ballgame with family even though baseball wasn’t really his thing. He loved online games and singing and acting, and as a teenager, he had appeared in several musicals, including “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” and “Peter Pan.”
“He always played the strong voice character,” she said.
All day at the game, the Mariners played tributes on the video board for Rick Rizzs, the longtime radio voice of the team who was retiring after 41 seasons. Fans offered testimonials about how they, like Ms. Strub, turned to baseball in their grieving. Ms. Strub noted the “constant theme of healing” in the videos and “the peace they found with Rick through baseball.”
Ms. Strub thought more about Wyatt as the game continued.
He had refused to meet with the chaplain as he was dying in the hospital. Then, on his very last day, with hours left, he asked for him.
Wyatt was quiet for a time when the chaplain appeared at his bedside, according to Ms. Strub. Then he turned to the man and said, “You’re not here for me. You’re here for my mom. I need to know she’ll be OK.”
Ms. Strub nodded to her surroundings at the ballpark — the thousands of people around her, the expansive green lawn, the ballplayers.
“This is me trying to be OK for Wyatt,” she said. “I know he’s with me. I can feel him all the time. This is a peaceful place where I can connect with him and feel joy.”
The post One Grieving Mother, Two Mariners Tickets and a Season of New Friends appeared first on New York Times.
