deal Baltimore a hand that flush.
While Peter Angelos was wrecking the Baltimore Orioles, these two guys took their class and magic elsewhere.
Lucchino and Steinberg – after being essentially tossed onto the scrapheap by the Angelos family – went on to San Diego and then Boston, leaving behind a trail of success, community involvement and “magic” wherever they’ve gone.
In early April of last year, when Jenn was just starting to feel the awful effects of the chemotherapy and her evaporating immune system, local attorney Michele Bresnick Walsh came to my wife’s bedside to guide her.
They were kindred spirits.
Bresnick Walsh had her life saved on the same floor five years earlier with a bone marrow transplant from a woman in California. After her recovery, she helped fellow survivor Erik Sauer found There Goes My Hero, which helps patients in acute need with meals and swabs at events to help find more donors for the registry, which saved both of their lives. Sauer, too, had his life saved by a 19-year German girl who was found on the bone marrow registry. They met on the fifth floor at Johns Hopkins in 2009 and pledged to save more lives if their lives were saved.
The day Bresnick Walsh visited, Jenn was really ill. She could barely lift her head off the pillow but I sat in the room and talked about mutual friends and passions with Bresnick Walsh. She knew about my radio station and career and knew that we both loved baseball and the Orioles.
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While Jenn was asleep, she told me that she was going to Fenway Park the following weekend and would try to get a #JennStrong banner on the MASN broadcast. I told her that I might be able to do better than that.
With the help of Lucchino and Steinberg, the Red Sox welcomed Bresnick Walsh and Jenn’s sister Jessica and her cousin Marilyn onto the field as guests. It just happened to be a Sunday team photo day when the players lined the circle of Fenway Park to take pictures with fans.
That day Jenn was extremely ill and found the pictures hours later on social media after all of her friends and family shared them during the game.
8A week later, they brought her that #JennStrong 14 jersey.
She vowed to wear it at Fenway Park one day.
A year later, the real #JennStrong would return to Fenway Park on Day 4 of the tour to be honored on the field before the game.
Thanks to the Red Sox generosity, our most important work was happening behind home plate before the game where her family and former Ravens Super Bowl Bowl winning center Mike Flynn joined us for swabbing, beers and fun at Fenway Park.
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We also were joined on the Green Monster by cancer survivor Shonda Schilling – wife of Curt Schilling and my lifer friend from Dundalk – who brought her daughter and her boyfriend to be swabbed for the bone marrow registry.
In the end, Jenn joined me for 16 of the 30 games on the #GiveASpit tour. The tour was completely inspired by her and as you can tell from the pictures, we had a great time everywhere we went in June and July.
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IT’S NO SECRET THAT I love San Diego. I wrote about it in Chapter 12 of my 2006 baseball book. So, returning to Petco Park for only the second time in its existence was really a thrill but also another chance to get my family activated as well.
I’ve written about my Aunt Jane, my Pop’s sister who loved the Padres all the way back to the Pacific Coast League. Well, her daughter has been married to my favorite relative, Gaetano Marino, for a couple of decades and I love going to Padres games with him when I’m in San Diego.
My cousin Tommy with the handlebar mustache.
He volunteered to help us at the swabbing booth that the Padres generally supplied under the Jerry Coleman statue and about fifty feet from the Tony Gwynn monument. We set up and swabbed as many people as we could corral walking into Petco Park near the center field entrance.
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My appearance earlier on sports radio that afternoon on The Mighty 1090 with Scott Kaplan and Billy Ray Smith (listen here) really helped stoke swabbers in San Diego.
It was the same way in Tampa, where I visited the Chris Thomas Studio with “The Big Dog” Steve Duemig. Those two shows put over a hundred people on the registry. Our media friends really pitched in on those two.
Jenn had her family in Boston and Tampa, which made it even more amazing that those teams were so kind to us.
My family is much smaller despite having all sorts of adoptive and native little circles of folks flung all over the place.
Our families felt a little happily “obligated” to help but many
