"Bet" — On Dave Parker, and THAT Throw

As the years roll by, it gets harder and harder to explain how things used to be. The other day, we asked our older daughter, Liz, if she was coming home for Independence Day, and she just texted back “bet,” and we had to ask our other daughter, Katie, to translate.

“It means like, ‘yeah! I’m there!’” Katie said.

“So, it’s like ‘you bet,’” I said.

“No. It’s not like that exactly.”

“It sounds like it exactly means ‘You bet.’”

"It’s not like that.”

“It kind of sounds like it means ‘You betcha!’” Margo said.

“No,” Katie said. “That’s not it.” And then she paused and said, “Did you guys really say ‘tubular’ back in the day?”

Getting old means never fully understanding and never fully being understood.

In that way, it’s hard to explain to somebody today what exactly Dave Parker meant to us. The easy part to explain is how cool he was. That carries through the years. I mean, show anyone this photograph of the Cobra in his Boys Boppin T-shirt and no matter their age, they will go: “Um, yeah, that guy was cool.”

What’s harder to explain is that sports were very different back then. We almost NEVER saw Dave Parker play baseball. He was this boxscore phantom boppin baseballs in Pittsburgh. In this miraculous time, when we can watch every pitch Tarik Skubal throws live and watch every home run Shohei Ohtani hits on repeat, greatness feels tangible, like something you can hold in your hand. You want to be reminded how good a shooter Steph Curry is? Go to YouTube, search Steph Curry shooting,” and the first thing you will see is a video called 10 Minutes of Steph Curry Shooting 3 Pointers.

Or you can go down two videos to watch Steph Curry’s Top 30 CRAZY Threes 🤯.

Or Steph Curry threes but they get increasingly more ridiculous.

It’s endless. You can do this with Connor McDavid, or Kylian Mbappé, or Caitlin Clark, or Rashid Khan, or Patrick Mahomes, or just about anybody else.

It wasn’t like that in the late 1970s, of course. And it wasn’t just the lack of highlights. Dave Parker was never on our family television set in Cleveland, Ohio. Why would he be? He played in Pittsburgh. That was a whole other city in a whole other league. Sure, we’d see Dave Parker in the daily leaders section — there in batting average with Pete Rose and Steve Garvey and those guys, maybe in home runs with Dave Winfield and George Foster and Greg Luzinski. We’d see a box score like from the Pirates-Cubs game on Aug. 8, 1978, and go, “Huh, looks like Parker went 5-for-5 with a homer at Wrigley!” We pull his baseball card and shout out, “I got a Dave Parker!”

We might barely catch a glimpse of him doing something amazing during an episode of “This Week in Baseball,” — which was on sporadically in our market (the most likely place to see it was when the Game of the Week was in a rain delay).

We’d imagine the rest.

I say we’d never see Dave Parker play, but that’s an exaggeration. Now and again — rarely, but sometimes — the Pirates would be featured on the Game of the Week. The 1979 Pirates played in the World Series, so we saw him then.

But most of all: There was the All-Star Game. I feel a bit silly missing what the All-Star game used to be. It’s just an exhibition game, always was, and you can understand why it became collateral damage as the world changed. I mean, one pretend game in July was not going to stop the league from adding interleague play. It wasn’t going to be significant enough for teams to risk injuries to their biggest stars. It wasn’t going to stand in the way of free agency or streaming games or endless highlights of regular-season action.

No, the Baseball All-Star Game was not going to halt the Internet.

But it WAS great. You’d go to a ballgame, and an usher would give you one of those All-Star Game punch cards.

Yes, that would build a crazy amount of excitement. That was true all over America. The 1979 All-Star Game drew a 45 share. Yes, it was a Tuesday night, and there was nothing else on television, but forty-five percent of all the televisions on in America were pointed to the Seattle Kingdome for that game. There were 115 million fewer people living in America in 1979 … and yet 24 million more people watched that All-Star Game than the one last year. It was just that big a deal.

And that 1979 All-Star Game is famous for what? Right: It’s renowned for two throws that Dave Parker made.

The first throw came in the seventh inning, and it tells you all you need to know about the All-Star Game at that time: it involved the two 1978 MVPs, Jim Rice and Parker. I say “It tells you all you need to know” because Rice and Parker started that game. And they were both in the game in the seventh inning.*

Anyway, Rice hit a pop-up to short right field, and Parker lost it in the lights or something. The ball bounced high off the artificial turf, and Rice tried for third. Parker grabbed the ball, turned, and fired a one-bounce strike that nailed Rice at third. It felt super important because the score was tied, and the National League had won the All-Star Game seven times in a row.

But that was just the appetizer. The main course came in the eighth, with the score still tied, and Graig Nettles lined a single to right with Brian Downing on second base. Parker was playing WAY back — and I do mean WAY back, it looks almost like he was standing on the warning track — and he raced up, leaped to catch the high bounce off the artificial turf. He unleashed a throw that rings through the years, an on-the-fly miracle that Gary Carter caught in time to slap down the tag on Downing.

The throw still holds up. It still makes you shake your head in wonder. But in THAT game … in THAT moment … in THAT world in which we lived, it was like watching Superman fly or David Copperfield walk through a wall or the Road Runner disappear in a cloud of dust.

That was Dave Parker to us. That single image. We’d keep seeing his name in the paper, and we’d wonder how many more throws he’d made just like that.

Maybe there was a bit more wonder in the world back then.

Or maybe that’s just the bluster of a man getting older.

Either way, when we lost Dave Parker the other day, I — like everyone in my age bracket — thought about the throw. I’m happy that Dave knew he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame before he died. I’m sad that he will not be there later this month when he gets enshrined.

I last saw him a couple of years ago. He was already battling Parkinson’s, and struggling to communicate, but he was still as cool as ever. And when I mentioned the throw to him, he smiled, and he nodded.

I’m so glad I voted for him in that 1979 All-Star Game.

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