A Shared History of Cancer, a Love of Baseball and a Cubs-Mets Game
Two weeks ago, Sandy Alderson was sitting in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, has been cancer-free since May 2016, but he has to go for checkups every four months.
While waiting, Alderson picked up the spring issue of the hospital newsletter. The cover story — written in the first person — was about a fervent Chicago Cubs fan named Abby Wood, and how her favorite team and her lucky Cubs hat helped her get through her battle with lymphoma. And that when the team won the World Series last season — after an epic 108-year wait — it felt intensely special to her because two of the Cubs’ most prominent players, Anthony Rizzo and Jon Lester, are also cancer survivors.
Alderson knew the Cubs would soon be in New York to play the Mets, so he decided he would invite Wood to one of the games.
As he was preparing to do so, Alderson was also getting ready to join a large contingent of former and current Mets players and employees in Little Ferry, N.J., for a ceremony dedicating a newly renovated softball field in honor of Shannon Forde. A beloved public relations executive for the Mets, Forde, after a long battle, died of breast cancer at age 44 in March 2016.
So over the course of a week — at the hospital, on the phone, at a recreation site — cancer became the backdrop for Alderson in ways both sad and uplifting. And because cancer is such a constant in almost every walk of life, none of it, in the end, was surprising for Alderson to encounter.
“It’s all around us,” Alderson said of the disease. But baseball is a constant, too, Alderson noted, played day in and day out, month after month.
“Baseball influences people on an everyday basis,’’ he said. “It has the ability to divert one’s attention from an illness. It’s a way of inspiring people at a time when they may need it. It’s kind of the dailiness of the game that provides that kind of respite.’’
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