Frates' legacy is leadership, on and off field

I would occasionally email with Pete Frates, the ALS patient who became the face of the Ice Bucket Challenge as it grew into a worldwide phenomenon in Summer 2014. We were both Boston College alumni, and he had played first base there for my friend Mike Gambino, BC's baseball coach.

"There was a time when Pete's teammates followed his lead," Gambino said to me once. "Now it's the whole world."

The Ice Bucket Challenge was simple, social-media driven and fun. And, quickly, it was a movement: You made a video of yourself pouring ice water over your head, you made a contribution to ALS causes and you challenged other people you knew to do the same. As it was taking off, I took the challenge myself, and then I nominated Joe Torre in a column in the New York Daily News, along with Commissioner Rob Manfred.

It turned out they needed no encouragement to get involved. Before long, there were more than 150 people, including Torre and Commissioner Manfred, in front of MLB's offices on Park Avenue, taking the Challenge. Baseball was bringing even more attention to the fight against a terrible disease that had first become known to the country when it took the life of Lou Gehrig, one of the greatest Yankees of them all.

In the end, the Ice Bucket Challenge would raise more than $220 million worldwide for ALS causes. It wasn't Frates who invented the Ice Bucket Challenge; he'd learned of it from a fellow ALS patient, the great Pat Quinn of Yonkers, N.Y., who continues to raise money for ALS causes and research. Frates took the Challenge to social media. The BC community embraced it and kick-started it. Suddenly, the Challenge had brought an amazing and wonderful meaning to the concept of something going viral.

And Frates, a kid who had gone to BC to play baseball and dreamed of being a big league ballplayer, became the face of it. He told his parents he was going to get Bill Gates involved. Eventually, he did.

One day, I emailed Pete -- who was still able to communicate because of a miracle called eye-gaze technology -- and I asked how he felt, having watched the Ice Bucket Challenge become the great and inspiring moment that it had, especially in America.

This was his reply:

"Hungry. I will not be satisfied until we see this thing through. Incredibly thankful. Restored faith in God. I know why I am here."

With everything Frates' disease had taken from him, it had not taken away his faith. When we found out that he had passed away on Monday afternoon, my middle son, Alex, also a BC grad and the first to tell me about the Ice Bucket Challenge, texted me and said, "We could all only hope to do in 100 years what Pete did in 34."

Frates' mother, Nancy, once told me that the experience of the Ice Bucket Challenge and her family's journey because of it, was "fuel for our souls."

Frates was some ballplayer in college. He once hit a grand slam, a three-run homer and a double in a single game. He went 4-for-4 at Fenway Park in the Beanpot Championship game against Harvard when he was a junior, and he hit a home run over the right-field wall and into the visitors' bullpen. After college, he played in Germany for a while and in amateur leagues in the United States.

In 2011, Frates got hit on the wrist playing for a team called the Lexington Blue Sox. The injury was slow to heal. He was diagnosed with ALS the following year. And then, Frates was the college ballplayer who put his name and his face to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis the way Gehrig once had more than 70 years earlier.

In addition to Gates, LeBron James took the Ice Bucket Challenge. And Oprah. And Lady Gaga. Masahiro Tanaka and CC Sabathia poured a bucket of ice over Derek Jeter's head in the Yankees clubhouse. You saw Frates at Fenway Park and in front of the Massachusetts State House. He eventually met Commissioner Manfred. Members of Frates' family stood at home plate in Kansas City when he was honored before Game 2 of the 2015 World Series between the Royals and the Mets. One more time that night, the country cheered for Frates.

Here is part of the statement released by Commissioner Manfred after Frates' passing:

"All of us at Major League Baseball are proud that Pete and his family are members of the baseball family."

The disease finally took everything from Frates the way it does all others afflicted by it -- everything but his courage and the great heart that had once made him such a terrific ballplayer. Frates was not the only ALS patient who became an inspiration because of the way he fought on. He was just the one we first knew in the BC community because he was a BC guy, the son of John and Nancy, a ballplayer who became Julie's husband and Lucy's father.

Gehrig, as he said goodbye to baseball because of ALS, called himself the luckiest man in the world. All of us who knew Frates, who came to know his story, we're the lucky ones. His mother is right: He fueled everybody's soul. Frates said that his own fight against ALS restored his faith in God. He said he knew why he was here. Now the world knows.