Backup plans be damned. It was baseball or bust.
Lisa French could have stressed to her son the practicality of having a fallback option. As a single parent working two jobs, she knew how rarely life aligned with the future constructed in a child’s mind.
But she worked too hard to tell him to put a 9-to-5 in his back pocket. She worked so he could dream.
“He had so much talent and he worked very hard at it, I knew there was something special about him since he was playing ball at 5 years old,” French said. “We never had a Plan B. There was no, ‘If you don’t make it, what are you gonna do?’ Even with everyone around saying, ‘You’re never gonna make it,’ he and I never said the word never. It wasn’t in our vocabulary. I knew in my heart there was no path that could make him happy like playing baseball.”
