I know he loved it a lot.”įor the fight against ALS is a personal one. “Lou Gehrig looking down and my aunt and grandma holding hands and walking the stairway up to him,” Nottingham described. Nottingham honors his family members with a massive tattoo on his left arm. That’s your dad, you look up to him all your life. To see that and to see my dad go through that process, it’s not fun. It kind of just slowly takes away your body and your life. “One day she is limping and then a couple weeks later she’s in a wheelchair and a couple weeks after that she’s not able to use her hands. “My dad was very young when he lost his mom, but I saw it first-hand with my aunt when I was a freshman in high school,” Nottingham said. For something like that to happen to him, it just shows you nothing is promised.”Ĭatcher/first baseman Jacob Nottingham is another Mariners player who is all too familiar with the disease as it has claimed two family members, his grandmother and aunt. Could run, could hit, could play hockey, could do anything. He was one of the best athletes I’ve seen. “It’s just one of those reminders in life, just don’t take it for granted,” he said. If he can look at what was essentially a death sentence and go to his family and say that ‘my goal now is I don’t want anybody else to ever have to go through what I am going through,’ he’s a hero, he’s a legend, and he will live with me forever.” He kind of showed me no matter what I am going through in life, it will never be as bad as that. I can go out and have last year not be the best year of my life, I can look at it as a negative, or I can be diagnosed with that disease and have a smile on my face every day like he did. “I can go back and pull up DMs he put a lot of things in perspective. Just a special human being.”Īs Dunn made his way through the minors and encountered struggles, he would often receive texts of encouragement from Frates. It’s definitely a sad story, but for what he did for ALS, with what he went through, it just shows you what kind of person he is. Would run through a brick wall for the team, would do anything for you. Team captain, one of the best people I have ever met. He was a guy who would just sit down, eat breakfast with you and just want to talk to you about your life, and that never changed. He just made me feel so welcome from the get-go. “He’s the man,” Campbell said, voice cracking with emotion. Campbell counts that encounter as the main reason he chose to attend BC. Infielder Eric Campbell, currently with the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, was Frates’ teammate at Boston College and was actually taken under Frates’ wing when he made a recruiting trip to the school.
Anything I can do to help continue to find a cure is what I told Pete I was going to help him do when I met him in 2013.”ĭunn is not the only Mariners player to have been inspired by Frates. “To see the effect that disease actually has on people’s lives, the families, it’s terrible. “It means everything to have this day,” said Dunn, who celebrates his friend during Mariners games with the words “Team Fratetrain” and “Strikeout ALS” embroidered on his glove. That includes pitcher Justin Dunn, who as a member of the Boston College baseball team got to know Pete Frates, former BC team captain and co-founder of the Ice Bucket Challenge, who succumbed to the disease in 2019. The disease, which has no cure, has touched a number of Mariners.
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