It was the first pitch Dane Gilbert and his late father had dreamed of since his teenage T-ball days.
Dane stood on the pitcher’s mound at the Miami Marlins‘ stadium earlier this month and threw out the first pitch as the team prepared to face the Cleveland Guardians.
The stadium was one of 30 that U.S. Air Force Col. Erick Gilbert had set out to visit with his family nearly a decade ago. Erick had proposed that seeing all the MLB fields would be a good way for the family to bond before his oldest son, Dane, turned 18 and left for college.
But the Gilberts only made it to 28 fields before Dane’s father died unexpectedly in January 2020, at the age of 43.
For years, the idea of visiting the final two stadiums after Erick’s sudden death was unimaginable to Dane, his younger brother and their mother. Then this season, a program that helps military families organized the Gilberts’ final two trips, to the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field and the Marlins’ LoanDepot Park, just weeks before Dane’s 18th birthday.
Dane, along with his brother Chase, took the mound on June 9. He wore a white Marlins jersey signed by the players, with “Gilbert” on the back above the number 30, marking the realization of his father’s dream.
Under the bright lights of the stadium, the brothers threw out two honorary first pitches.
“That’s where we felt it the most, right there,” Dane told the Washington Post.
The Gilberts have loved baseball for as long as they can remember.
Erick, who grew up in Southern California as a Los Angeles Angels fan, coached Dane and Chase during their little league games, signing them up for sports teams as soon as they were old enough.
Although Dane doesn’t remember those first games, family photos show Erick joining his sons playing baseball at a young age. One photo shows him and Dane behind the field fence, Erick holding a baseball glove and wearing a maroon T-shirt and cap matching his son’s uniform. Another shows Erick crouched next to Chase on the diamond, putting his arm around his son as he gives her a pep talk.
“He was always willing to help,” Dane said of his father. “If he just wanted to hit, he’d always come pitch to me or he’d always hit ground balls to me on the home field.”
For the Gilberts, baseball games were a favorite family outing, whether it was Dane and Chase’s recreational games or the Major League playoffs. Dane still remembers talking to his father about what it would be like to walk through the dugout of a Major League team or stand on the floor of a professional field, he said.
Erick was about to deploy to the Middle East in 2014 with the Air Force’s 95th Fighter Squadron when he proposed an idea to his children and his wife, Kasia. They had just watched the Atlanta Braves play at Turner Field, his last vacation before his deployment, when he said, “You know what he would be really great at?” We hit all the big league stadiums before Dane turns 18,” Kasia recalled.
The question was how they would fit in stadium visits around Erick’s deployments and training schedule. But Erick, a meticulous planner, took pen to paper.
He made a list of stadiums next to a map of the United States and began planning dates and routes for each visit. He marked each stadium with the symbol of a baseball mitt holding a ball.
“I think he just wanted to do something that we would always remember,” Dane said.
They began checking out the fields during a 40-day trip in 2016. The family visited 17 stadiums during that vacation.
While Erick planned the trips, the rest of the family took care of other tasks. Chase searched for the best stadium food, Dane researched the stadium’s history and tourist sites near each field, and Kasia took photos and videos of everything, preserving every step of the family’s pilgrimage to baseball.
Over the next three seasons, they found time between Erick’s assignments to watch a dozen More stadiums. They usually cheered on the home team, unless Erick’s beloved Angels or the Kansas City Royals, Kasia’s family’s team, were playing.
Erick went on to serve as commander of the 95th Fighter Squadron and then vice commander of the 57th Wing, before the family moved to the DC area in 2019 for what would be his final assignment.
In Washington, they visited Nationals Park, one of the last stadiums they saw as a family of four. That year, the Nationals won the World Series.
Each visit to a new field was as fun as the last, the Gilberts said. They filled road trips with games of car bingo and sang along to custom playlists. They collected caps, jerseys, tickets and other souvenirs from each stadium along the way.
Erick marked each visit on his handmade baseball map, which the family used as the basis for a framed canvas version, placing thumbtacks at the location of each field they had visited.
In January 2020, the Gilberts had just two more to check off their list when he died suddenly.
Suddenly, a trio, Kasia and her children were left heartbroken. His stadium tour was stopped.
The Gilberts decided to leave Washington almost immediately and moved to Colorado, where they went skiing every year. It was one of the last places they visited as a family.
Since 2020, they have found ways to honor Erick. Every Father’s Day, they go out to eat pizza or chicken wings, their two favorite foods. They celebrate his birthday with visits to Top Golf and Dave and Buster’s, which were always his favorites.
But completing the 30-stadium tour felt final, Kasia said. In a way, leaving the goal unfinished helped her hold on to a moment when her husband was still with them, she said.
“I think it was a subconscious thing: I didn’t want to close another chapter,” he said.
But this season, as Dane approached his 18th birthday, the Gilberts knew Erick would have wanted them to break up.
Working with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a group known as TKeynoteUSAS that supports military families, they planned this month’s visits to Florida’s remaining stadiums.
It was bittersweet, but an “incredible tribute” to her husband, Kasia said.
“I feel like he was looking down and had something to do with it,” she said.
When they returned to Colorado, the Gilberts pressed the last two pins on the stadium canvas map.
In the weeks since fulfilling their father’s dream, Dane and Chase have discussed what might come next. Someday they’ll want to take their own kids to every MLB ballpark, Dane said.
But in the meantime, he said the brothers are considering another idea: “Go to all the minor league stadiums.”
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