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Read this one in The Athletic today. Jason mentioned it during the broadcast but I'll share it here since it's behind a paywall
Quote: On Friday night on the South Side of Chicago, a father and son will sit side by side at a baseball game, like so many fathers and sons before them. But here’s what will separate them from all those other fathers and sons:
They’ve never spoken. They’ve never met. For more than half a century, by all indications, neither was even aware that the other existed.
And there’s more. The father spent 14 seasons pitching in the major leagues — two more than the son he never knew. The father pitched in five All-Star Games. The son pitched in one.
They shared remarkably similar journeys, connected by the same magical allure of the pitcher’s mound. Yet they shared virtually nothing else in life.
Even now, as they’re about to share a moment that has connected parents and children for generations, they will share it not in the flesh but through cardboard cutouts. Yet there is something special about the presence of those two cardboard figures, seated behind home plate at Guaranteed Rate Field, that makes this the coolest real-life baseball fable of 2020.
The story behind that story — the improbable tale of how former White Sox pitcher Richard Dotson and his mysterious father, Dick “Turk” Farrell, wound up in this spot, in Section 130-S, row 4, seats 5 and 6 — is a saga right out of a Hollywood movie lot.
A family secret, never revealed … a DNA kit that sat in a drawer for years … a surprise message from a total stranger … a shocking revelation … a son’s pursuit of a never-told story … and a global pandemic that created a kind of connection that could never have happened in any other baseball season in history.
Are we sure this isn’t a movie?
“There’s a lot of this where it feels like that at times,” Dotson says. “And it’s funny because I lived my life. I know what went on. But OK, now here I am, at 60, and it turns out that what you thought you knew isn’t really what you knew.”
Richard Farrell was born in Boston in April 1934. He was 22 when he first pitched in the big leagues, for the Phillies, in September 1956. He was 35 when he threw his final major-league pitch, on a Friday in September 1969 — striking out John Boccabella of the Expos at Parc Jarry in Montreal. Soon thereafter, he moved overseas to work on an oil rig off the British coast.
Richard Dotson was born in Cincinnati in January 1959, six months after Turk Farrell struck out the great Ted Williams in the 1958 All-Star Game. Dotson was drafted by the Angels in the first round in 1977 and traded to the White Sox later that year, in a deal in which the headliner was Bobby (father of Barry) Bonds.
Dotson was just 31 when he threw his last pitch, which was lined to right by Luis Polonia for an RBI single. Arm troubles ended his career. But Dotson has spent the last 19 seasons as a minor league pitching coach for the White Sox, finding joy in working with young pitchers and being around a baseball field every day of every summer.
He grew up in Cincinnati, the son of two loving parents — James Dotson and Jean Bailiff. Dotson’s mom and dad had enough rocky times that they were married and divorced twice, but they were still his mom and dad.
“And the biggest thing,” he says, “is that I know that I love my parents. … I love them, and I was blessed. And the part about not knowing Turk and that part of my family — hell, I’m 60 now. So that doesn’t really matter.”
Dotson grew up a baseball fan, at a time when Turk Farrell was still pitching, but he has no recollection of any part of Farrell’s career. Yet more than 40 years before fate would connect them in any tangible way, their stories would converge via an odd, circle-of-life link to the same life-altering week in June.
On June 7, 1977, the Angels chose Dotson with the seventh overall pick in the baseball draft. Three days later, across the ocean, his biological father died in an automobile crash in England.
Dotson was on his way to Idaho Falls to join his first minor-league team at the time. It would be four decades before he would even become fully aware of what that week would actually represent in his life.
“My mother had mentioned there might be a family secret — and I guess I might be the secret.” — Richard Dotson to his newfound cousin, in 2018
There are days Dotson wishes he could build a time machine and ride it back through the years. … To April 1958, when his mother apparently met Turk Farrell, while his Phillies team was on a road trip to Cincinnati, during a period when she and Dotson’s father were separated. … To the 1960s and ’70s, when Farrell was still alive and traveling to Cincinnati every year to play baseball. … Even just back to a time five or 10 years ago, when Dotson’s mother was still alive. (She died in December 2015.)
He wouldn’t take that ride to relive the past. He’d merely love to travel back and ask questions, just to know. Was Farrell ever aware he had a son in Ohio? There are no signs that he did. Were Farrell and Dotson’s mom ever part of each other’s lives again? No signs of that, either.
If only he had taken that DNA test sooner, Dotson wonders. If only he hadn’t been the last holdout in his family to explore his genealogical roots.
“Everybody had taken it but me,” he says. “I guess there was a reason why, because after the fact it was like, boy, that would have been funny. OK, so now I’m the surprise. How the hell did this happen?”
But in truth, those details aren’t important anymore. It’s the modern-day details that are. And those details begin with a DNA kit that Dotson’s sister, Patricia Hicks, gave him as a Christmas gift a decade ago. Dotson tossed it in a drawer and forgot about it.
“Then I think he decided one day, on his own, to do it,” Hicks says now. “I mean, I talk about this. I’ve done a ton of books on our family genealogy. And I think he just heard me talk a lot about it … and decided to do it.”
Years before that decision, Dotson’s mother had dropped hints to the family that someday there might be a shocker in store for all of them. Maybe it was because she’d already taken one of those genealogy tests herself, at Hicks’ suggestion, and had a feeling her 50-year secret might eventually be discovered. Like so much of this story, we’ll never know.
“That’s true,” Hicks says. “She had indicated that there was a secret that she was never going to tell, related to some family member. I had no idea who.”
And neither, for that matter, did anyone else … until one day in October 2018, when this message flashed on Dotson’s phone:
“Hello Richard. AncestryDNA has you as (my) likely first cousin.”
That message, from a stranger in New England named Shannon Kos, piqued Dotson’s curiosity. But he didn’t respond immediately — until Kos sent a followup message a few days later, admitting that her family also had a feeling its DNA tests could reveal a big surprise.
Kos is Turk Farrell’s niece. They never met, but she’d done enough research and heard enough stories about her uncle to know that he was, well, let’s just say a fun character.
So before she even sent off her own Ancestry kit for analysis, she told her family to brace for what might be coming.
“I said to my mother, ‘You know, it’s very possible that your brother had a child that we don’t know about, or that maybe even he didn’t know about,'” Kos says, “because I never knew my uncle. He died when I was 5 years old. But I hear stories about him. I knew that he had — you know — gotten around. So I knew it was possible.”
Then, a month or so later, Kos got her test results back. They revealed the name of a “Richard Dotson” who not only was a first cousin, but had a closer DNA match than any other cousin. She immediately knew what that meant, and began researching who this Richard Dotson was.
“Are you the former White Sox pitcher?” she messaged him. “If so, there are striking similarities.”
She apologized for delivering such “shocking” news and told him she would understand if this knowledge would be so upsetting to his family that he didn’t want to pursue it. Instead, a little more than an hour later, Dotson wrote her back.
“I’m all in, for all the information you would like to share.”
It was then that Shannon Kos delivered the news that would change Richard Dotson’s life.
“My uncle was Richard Joseph ‘Turk’ Farrell. He was an MLB pitcher for the Phillies and Colt 45s/Astros. … If I am your first cousin, then he is your biological father.”
“And that,” Dotson says, “is how this started. … So this is the surprise. I’m related to this man who I never met.”
How could this be, really? How could this father and son who never met, who spent not one second in each other’s presence, have followed such similar paths?
How could this be, seriously? Was it just coincidence that Turk Farrell would spend all those years pitching in the major leagues — and then the son he never knew would follow and do exactly the same thing? Or was it some force beyond sheer coincidence?
It feels as though baseball has never been more touched by tales of one rising star after another whose dads were also big leaguers. Now what do we make of this tale — of father/son big leaguers who weren’t even aware that’s what they were?
“That is pretty surreal,” Dotson says. “It is. Look, I don’t think I was as good a pitcher as he was. At least my career wasn’t as long. … But still, it’s kind of a select group. And the fact that we didn’t even have anything to do with each other, and we both ended up in baseball, wow. Maybe there is some divine guidance in some of these things.”
But if there is divine guidance, that wasn’t all that was involved. Study a photo of Turk Farrell when he was in his mid-20s. Then study a photo of Richard Dotson at the same age. DNA is a powerful thing, it turns out.
“It explains a lot of things,” Dotson’s sister says. “We always assumed my brother just looked like my mom’s side of the family, because he doesn’t at all resemble my dad. … When you see certain pictures of Turk Farrell, it’s pretty incredible.”
How incredible? Roll back the calendar a little more than a year and a half. Richard Dotson had gone to visit the father he grew up with, then 91 and in the final months of his life. He pulled out a photo and showed it to James Dotson.
“I said, ‘Do you know who this is?'” Richard Dotson recalls. “And he pointed at me and said, ‘That’s you.’ And it was Turk Farrell. I covered up the name because I didn’t know if he knew or didn’t know. And I wasn’t gonna tell him …
“So I said, ‘No, that’s not me,’ and I just dropped it. And I didn’t bring it up ever again, because to me, I got an answer. If he knew, I mean, you’d know.”
For Dotson, this was the moment that essentially completed the circle of knowledge he would need to move forward. The man whom he’d known all his life as his father never knew otherwise. The man who turned out to be his biological father almost certainly never knew, either. And his mother never had any intention of spilling this big, complicated pile of beans.
What he and his family couldn’t be totally sure of is whether his mother knew the full story. But about two years ago, Dotson took his family to Nevada to help his sister go through boxes of his mother’s most precious keepsakes. The first thing his daughter Claire pulled out of her box? A Turk Farrell baseball card.
“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding me,'” Dotson says. “She had his baseball card in all her personal stuff. Which meant maybe she did know that Turk was the father. I don’t know. And now I’ll never know.”
But inside his heart and his mind, it felt to Dotson as if he’d been freed of any of the baggage that could have come along with this staggering revelation. Instead, he was consumed by pride, by exhilaration, by a hunger to learn as much as he could about the father he’d never expected to drop into his life.
He started asking questions, searching for people who knew his father, grateful for the memorabilia Farrell’s family sent him, hunting everywhere he could for photos, videos, vignettes.
He began contacting relatives all over the world with connections to Turk Farrell, from Texas to Ireland. He has plans, once this pandemic cloud lifts, to go visit them all and soak up as much knowledge as he can about his new family’s past.
“I think it would be cool to see where the parents came from and the grandparents and all that,” he says. “It’s just that big, long … journey now that I can take later in my life, hopefully, and enjoy it and learn some things.”
In reality, though, this is a journey he has been inching toward all his life. He simply didn’t know it — until now.
“It’s just neat,” Dotson says. “It’s a very neat thing. I mean, just playing baseball — we’re kind of blessed to do what we do, I like to think. And we love it. And now, to have that kind of lineage or heritage, it just makes it that much more important.”
Before he can begin that journey to Ireland or anywhere else on this earth, Richard Dotson has one very important place he needs to be first.
At a ballpark in Chicago. On Friday night.
Well, in spirit anyway. Or, to be more specific, in cardboard spirit.
He was watching a White Sox game one night and admiring all the cardboard fans spread out through the empty seats. Then it hit him.
“I thought, wow, that would be cool — to get a cardboard cutout,” he says. “Then the next thing I thought was, hey, it would really be cool to have Turk and I in cardboard cutouts. I mean, I had pictures. And there was a resemblance. So …”
He contacted Christine O’Reilly-Riordan, the White Sox vice president of community relations and the executive director of White Sox Charities.
“Are you still doing those cardboard cutouts?” he asked. “I’d like to get one of me and my dad.”
“Of course,” O’Reilly-Riordan said. “We can do that.”
He offered not merely to buy the cutouts, but to make a generous donation to White Sox Charities to boot. Then he sent O’Reilly-Riordan something that took her breath away.
“He sent a couple of images, and one of the images was of his dad on a baseball card,” she says. “And I replied back to him and said, ‘Oh my gosh, Dot. I had no idea your dad was a baseball player.'”
“Well,” Dotson told her, “neither did I.”
O’Reilly-Riordan was so moved, she tried to pick out a special spot in the ballpark, a few rows up behind home plate, where the TV cameras might happen to capture the sight of these two men, father and son, watching their first ballgame together — in their baseball uniforms.
“It’s like a storybook,” she says. “You know, there’s something unique about baseball, in terms of how people remember their first ballgame. They remember who took them to their first ballgame. There’s something about baseball where that’s just a really treasured experience.
“So how cool, after all these years, that even with these crazy cardboard cutouts, that Richard is going to be able to have that experience and be at a game with his dad?”
It’s an experience that would never have been possible in any other moment in baseball time. After all, there has never been a year like this. There has never been a season like this. And there has never been a time when every ballpark on the continent has nothing but a vast expanse of empty seats — and nothing but cardboard to occupy them.
There’s a sadness to that emptiness. But in some ways, there is also opportunity. And this is one of those opportunities. Their likenesses may be in cardboard. But the pounding of the heart — that’s real.
O’Reilly-Riordan showered Dotson with heartwarming stories behind so many of those cutouts. “Now,” he says, “that’ll be us.”
For a long, long time, after he first learned this news, he had kept this story to himself and his family, new and old. Finally this spring he began sharing it with his friends in baseball. On Friday night, he will share it with the world.
“Now that I’m more mature, I can handle it,” he says. “I don’t know how it would have affected me 30 years ago.”
Think of all the forces in the universe that had to line up for those two cardboard ballplayers to be sitting in Section 130-S on Friday. Then think of the story of these two men and their eerily parallel paths in life.
If we can’t wave them both out of a cornfield, we can at least station them behind home plate, in a spot that allows us to mull the sheer improbability of it all.
“I know there’s a lot of stories out there,” Richard Dotson says. “But this is just one small story that I just found out. It’s interesting that I didn’t find it out until later in life. But who knows? Maybe there’s a reason for that.”
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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson
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