Jim and Matt Griffin, courtesy the Griffin family
SCOTTSDALE — Jim Griffin lived with the San Francisco Giants, and then he died with the San Francisco Giants.
He was born in 1954, making him the big brother of a team that moved to San Francisco in 1958. He grew up in Indianapolis, where baseball fans have to make a choice because fandom doesn’t come naturally. It’s a sort of Bermuda Triangle, a Major League Baseball dead zone in which you have to reach out in any direction to find a favorite team, and Griffin reached far.
“He hated the Reds, he hated the Cubs, he hated the Cardinals,” son Matt said recently over the phone. “I think that it was more out of spite because his friends liked them.”
It’s possible he was a contrarian, but Matthew’s brother Dan had a simpler explanation.
“It was Willie Mays,” Dan Griffin said.
How does a fan growing up in Indiana in the ’50s and ’60s get access to San Francisco Giants games? He gets a paper route. He saves up that money to buy a radio that can pick up signals miles (and miles and miles) away. And he gives himself a lesson on Indianapolis topography.
Jim Griffin — “Griff” — came to discover the best elevations around town to steer toward so he could get reception. He’d bring chairs and friends and hang out with Mays’ cracks of the bat.
“Him and his buddies would drive up to the top of the hill and listen to West Coast baseball,” Matt said. “From that point on, he was a lifer.”
Griff is a reminder, after a season when fans were shut out of parks, how much they mean to the game. He’s a reminder how much the game means to fans. He’s a reminder that taking a moment out of a day can change a life, can comfort a life, can mean the world to a person whose world was the Giants. Griff’s life and death is a reminder that pouring your soul into a team makes the team part of your soul, too.
Griff grew with and grew to love the Giants, but his acquiring the taste allowed the trait to become hereditary. His three sons, Dan, Chris and Matt, were born fans — they didn’t really have a choice in the matter — and there were plenty of two-hour car trips to Cincinnati’s park to see the Giants come to town.
In the backyard of Griff’s parents’ home resided a lot that became known as “Grifflestick,” where Griff and pals played wiffle ball. The games continued when the boys were being raised in the yard outside their home, a second Midwestern Candlestick that Griff created.
“I was more Kevin Mitchell,” Dan said. “But my dad and my brother Matt, they bat left-handed, so they were Will Clark. They’d stand there — you know Will, he’d kind of stand up straight and just twirl his bat around. That’s how they’d be.”
They lived through the good, the three World Series in the 2010s, with Dan and his wife able to make the trip to now Oracle Park for Game 2 against the Royals in 2014. The last trip that Griff and his wife, Laurene, took brought them to San Francisco and Giants games in May 2019.
They lived through the bad, because there are always both sides of any relationship as tight as the Griffins and the Giants. Like Game 6 of the World Series in 2002, when Dusty Baker pulled Russ Ortiz and it all came apart.
“When they blew that one, that took a toll on my dad, I’m telling you,” Matt remembered. “He just wasn’t right for a couple of days — I would almost say weeks after that. Such a devastating thing for us as Giants fans.”
Those were dark days for Griff, though, away from his Giants family. He had been hospitalized in the late ’80s and diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the years of medication to manage it gradually affected his personality.
“He was not the same person,” Matt said, and the medicine, too, cut into Griff’s white blood cell count. He was admitted to a state hospital in 2010, the type that Matt said many enter and do not leave.
And yet, Griff did. With the help of doctors, and with the help of his family — both the nearby and extended. The 2010s were one of the best decades of his life, and not a bad one for the Giants.
“I remember talking to him in the hospital. You could just hear the joy in his voice,” Matt said, flashing back to the moments after the Giants’ 2010 World Series championship. “He didn’t always get to watch it, but I think that had something to do with his rebound.”
Today Matt’s a 36-year-old golf and weightlifting coach and teacher at Tavares High School, outside Orlando; Dan a 40-year-old doctor at Deaconess Women’s Hospital in Evansville; and Chris a 37-year-old Dean of Students at Center Grove Central Middle School in Greenwood, Ind. They enjoyed their father’s resurgence until he took a turn in October 2020. Griff was battling cirrhosis of the liver — a result of the medication — and the family came together. He was moved from IU Health Methodist Hospital in downtown Indianapolis and brought home, under hospice care, to Mooresville. After nearly 70 years together through the highs (sometimes literally, in Indianapolis) and the lows, the Giants had to be included as part of Griff’s family, too.
At his hospital, Dan works with Christina Ryan, whose daughter, Jennifer, is now Jennifer Rogers. When Dan Griffin’s family would invite the Ryans over for crawfish boils, Tyler Rogers, then a minor league pitcher in the Giants’ organization, would come, too. As Griff’s health suffered in February, Christina Ryan let Jennifer know about the situation.
“She knew he was a Giant fan,” said Jennifer, who married Tyler Rogers in November. “So she came up with the idea of seeing if Tyler could get some players to send some videos.”
Tyler immediately was onboard, but no one realized the urgency until Griff began to deteriorate on Feb. 23. The messages spread urgently from phone to phone until Jennifer texted Tyler that “Jim is not doing too good,” Tyler remembered. “He might not make it through the day. Can you do the video now?”
From Scottsdale Stadium, Tyler immediately complied and sent a video at the park in which he thanked Griff for his longtime fandom and hoped they could have fans at the park again soon. He mentioned how cool it was that Giants fans stretch all across the country.
The video was sent, and Jennifer asked Tyler if he could urge a couple teammates to contribute, too. But Tyler had a live batting practice to throw and no time to hunt friends down. Rogers told his wife he felt terribly, but he couldn’t do the recruiting at that moment.
“You know what?” Jennifer Rogers thought to herself. “I’ll text a few of the wives because they can get a lot done.”
She sent quick texts to the wives of Tyler Beede, Mike Yastrzemski and Alex Dickerson. The wives connected with their husbands, who acted fast.
Unfortunately, the videos from Yastrzemski (a personal Griff favorite) and Dickerson arrived a bit late for Griff, but the family at his bedside enjoyed each one. In Griff’s last moments on Feb. 23, his senses were dulling, but Rogers’ and Beede’s voices brought him the soundtrack of his life: Giants baseball. Tears were coming from the family that surrounded Griff, who might as well have been at elevation in Indianapolis.
“That was probably one of the last things he was waiting for, is to hear some reassurances from some Giants players. That probably helped him go a little bit easier,” Matt said.
That afternoon, the 67-year-old passed on, but he brought the Giants with him. At the showing, the last time he would be seen, Griff wore a throwback, gray, road Giants jersey.
“We all knew what he would want to go out in,” Matt said.
The grandchildren had Giants shirts, and the family protected themselves with Giants masks. In the days afterward, a “Griff” Giants jersey arrived at Dan’s house, a gift from a college friend.
There is a jersey to wear and videos to watch. Tangible evidence not just that he lived for the Giants, but that the Giants watched out for him, too, like a good little brother.
“My whole family, we’re just so appreciative to the Giants players for thinking about my dad,” Dan said. “It’s definitely been a comfort to all of us to know that people were thinking about him.”
It’s what family does.