Baseball legend and Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver passed away Wednesday after a battle with dementia. He was 75.
Zach Gelb, who lost his grandfather, Papa Eddie, to dementia, reflected on Seaver’s passing on CBS Sports Radio.
“Here’s something I’ll say,” Gelb said on The Zach Gelb Show. “If you haven’t talked to a loved one in a while or if you fractured some sort of relationship with someone and you’re trying to repair it – especially now with what we’re going through and how important communication is with texting and emailing and talking to someone on the phone when people are getting very down in the dumps with this pandemic, and mental health has been such a big thing – reach out to people that you have fractured relationships with. There’s a reason why the relationship got fractured. There’s a way, though, to fix it, you would think. Life’s too short. You never know when someone can get taken away from you.”
Gelb, 26, knows this from experience. He has had several close friends pass away.
“It’s not dementia. It’s everything,” he said. “We’re only on this world for a certain [amount of] time. You never know. It usually happens in the most unexpected moments when that life does get taken away. Once again, you look back at Tom Seaver, there’s a reason he’s called Tom Terrific. If you look at the resume, you just look at the stats.”
Seaver played 20 seasons in the big leagues. The 1967 Rookie of the Year was a 12-time All-Star, a three-time Cy Young winner, threw a no-hitter, and is a member of both the Mets and Reds Halls of Fame. He was also a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 1992 after garnering a then-record 98.84 percent of the vote.
Dementia didn’t care about any of that.
“No matter how famous you are, sometimes you get dealt something that’s so unfair,” Gelb said. “That’s what happened with Tom Seaver. He should have been on this earth for at least 15 more years. He’s 75. He should have seen 90 years. Once again, when you see people of fame pass away, we try to discuss it on this show. People are always going to pass away, but you never know when someone is going to get taken from you. Obviously we’ve been dealing with it this year because of COVID and all the problems in the world, but look at Kobe Bryant.”
Bryant, a global icon, died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California, in January. He was 41.
“Really, the message in times like this, you never know when someone could go,” Gelb said. “So if you have unfinished business with someone and you think that that relationship needs to be fixed and there was once a strong bond there, now more than ever pick up the phone and tell people what you were feeling and try to rectify those relationships.”