Fathers and sons. The column I’m reading this morning is one from June 25, 1999. A quarter-century ago when baseball dreams were still out there somewhere in Iowa and reality was a cloud somewhere else on that day, nowhere near the clear blue sky over Clinton that afternoon. A young man had embarked on his dream, his dad was just watching, praying maybe. And they were far away from home, which is where you go to chase your dreams.
They had been sitting in the hotel room, softly chatting when the young man, using a three-letter word he had been unable to utter for four years, finally spoke up. “Dad” he said.
“I stopped calling him “11” the day after the Series and started calling him ‘Dad,’ ” Mike Martin Jr. explained to me from his Iowa hotel room all those years ago.
Then Dad picked up the story.
“He looks over at me and says, real serious, ‘Can you pitch?' ” Martin Sr. says, a laugh in his voice. “And I said, ‘Can you hit?' So we went over to the stadium, out against the right-field fence and hit for an hour. It was great. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere, me and my boy…”
Iowa. Like it was written in that long-ago column. "If you want to get technical, the real 'Field of Dreams' isn’t in Clinton, Iowa, it’s in another part of the state. Only don’t ever try to tell that to Mike Martin. Either of them.”
That particular column was written a couple of weeks after witnessing one of the most cathartic events ever seen in a post-game press conference. Martin’s No. 2-ranked Seminoles had just been eliminated from the College World Series, 14-11 – a game they had trailed 14-2 at one point – and the coach’s son sat alongside his father in the press room. Only he didn’t say a word, as I recall. He had a white towel wrapped around his hand and he began crying, truly crying, uncontrollable tears, burying his head in the towel.
“Aw, he’s just upset for his Daddy,” his father said, patting him on the shoulders. It was a little while later, Coach Martin was in his closet back in Tallahassee, looking for a sweater, when he told me he did the very same thing. “Just started crying,” he said. “Couldn’t stop.”
Fathers and sons. When I wrote those columns in 1999, I was out in Omaha to watch those Seminoles, and my own son was only six. They knew him, of course. He was at the ballpark almost every time I was there, playing wall ball with “Dirt” – Stephen Drew, J.D.’s younger brother. Or flipping the ball up on the screen behind home while his dad talked to Coach Martin.
I didn’t know then, of course, that in a few years, my own son would get to wear a Seminole uniform – his dream (The Colonel, Chip Baker commandeered him No. 3, the Colonel’s old number) and he'd get to play for Mike Martin himself. Once when I was interviewing Martin, the coach seemed to be distracted, watching my son flip the ball up off the screen and snagging it again and again and again. Martin looked at me and smiled. “He’s going to be good,” he said. “He’d better be a Seminole.”
And he was. The day John got out of the car as we arrived on campus, the FSU band was off practicing somewhere and the moment John opened the door, it just so happened they let out a “Taaaa Daaa.” “Hey,” I said. “That’s a good sign.” Inside the tradition room, Jamey Shouppe, who recruited John, watching him from his dirty T-shirt days at the Mike Martin Camp at Meridian Park, jumped up when John told Coach Martin he wanted to be a Seminole and they hugged.
It made me remember the afternoon years earlier when John, maybe five or six, decided he wanted to do something nice for Coach Martin, who had always been so nice to him. “I want to take him to lunch,” he said, little freckled face all smiles. And he did. Blimpie’s, I think it was. Dad wasn’t invited.
Fast forward to the end of May 2014 and Florida State’s season – and John’s run as a Seminole – may be over. Alabama’s up 6-0 in an elimination game and John, a junior, is to lead off the 9th. An All-ACC first-team choice, there’s a chance that Nogo will forgo his senior year if he’s drafted. He opens the inning with a single and Coach Martin, thinking this might be Nogo’s last game as a Seminole, sends out a pinch runner so he can get one last hand from the Seminole fans, who sweetly oblige with a lovely ovation. We have a picture somewhere of John lifting his helmet to salute them. But the hit sparks a rally, FSU makes it 6-5 and guess who’s spot in the order comes up with a chance to win it?
FSU loses. The first thing John says to me after the game is “Dad, I would have gotten a hit. You know it!”
Fast forward to 2023 and now I’m in Iowa, Sioux City, it turns out. About 400 miles from Clinton. When Mike Martin Sr. was visiting his son in Iowa, he was just three at-bats into his minor-league career. For me, my son was having his 3,380th professional at-bat, possibly winding down a roller-coaster career that got him to the major leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates in 2020-2021, but was possibly closing things out here in Sioux City in Independent baseball. He got three hits that night and they won! But we both were a long way from home, weren't we?
Mike Martin Jr. didn’t get to play in the minors much longer after that 1999 column. He became a coach and after his dad retired as the winningest coach in the history of college baseball, took over the program, then got replaced. His dad, sadly, saw that.
When I heard the news last Thursday – my son texted me – I immediately thought of that column I read that morning, 11 and his son just weeks after the heartbreak of Omaha, out in the middle of nowhere, putting the future and reality on hold for just a little bit, father and son, playing the game that was a huge part of their life.
Sort of like I was this past September, sitting in the top row of the stands on a chilly Iowa night, watching the kid Mike Martin used to watch flipping the ball off the home plate screen.
“Watching him that day,” Martin told me in his office years later. “That’s when I knew he was going to be good.”
Here I was, in Iowa, too a few months back. Holding off the future.
The Martins invited us over to their home shortly after John signed to become a Seminole. In a quiet moment in the kitchen, Carol Martin pulled me aside, laid a tender hand on my forearm and whispered, “You know, he won’t say this, but Mike is thrilled, too.”
Fathers and sons. Baseball.
John Nogowski has been a sports writer for decades, including his coverage of Florida State for the Tallahassee Democrat in the 1990s. He's also the author of a number of books and recently retired as a teacher.
