How baseball continues to bond father with late son

DETROIT -- The Comerica Park usher didn’t recognize the guy in the Elon University baseball cap and the personalized Tigers jersey. But the MLB Network camera crew following his every move was an obvious tipoff that he was somebody of note.

So the usher had to take the opportunity to find out more about this seeming celebrity in his midst.

“Are you Fan of the Year or something?” the usher cheerfully asked the man as he strode by.

Scott Yelle stopped and laughed. Then he shared his story.

About how he and his son, Jackson, had a goal of visiting all 30 Major League ballparks together in their lifetime. About how they had crossed 12 stadiums off their list before Jackson was killed in a hit-and-run last year, at the age of 21. About how Scott decided to complete the tour without his son and donate $1,000 to the Nike Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program at each of the 18 remaining stops, as a way to honor Jackson’s love of baseball and penchant for kindness and inclusion.

That’s not an easy story to tell a stranger.

That’s not an easy story to tell once, let alone the dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of times Scott had to tell it over the course of his nearly three-month, 17,000-mile tour, which reached its conclusion at the Tigers’ 10-2 win over the visiting Brewers last Sunday at Comerica.

Scott, though, gained strength and confidence and clarity in telling his story, which we were proud to amplify in a Father’s Day feature -- “For Jackson” -- that debuted Friday on MLB Network.

“Just overwhelming,” Yelle said of the experience, “in such a positive way.”

Though fate had cruelly forced him to finish this ballpark journey without Jackson, Scott’s tour showed him the power of love, community and baseball. We can all take part in this powerful example by donating to the Jackson Yelle Family Foundation and its mission to encourage moral character and positive growth in young people or simply by fostering the kind of grace shown to Scott and his family in our own communities.

Consider, for instance, Jackson’s closest friends and teammates at Elon, where he played for the club baseball team. Jackson passed away during a team trip to Myrtle Beach his junior year. He was walking along a bypass on foot late at night and was struck by a vehicle. The driver left him there to die.

That was April 30, 2023.

Exactly one year later, we visited Elon’s campus to find Jackson’s teammates about to play a winner-take-all playoff against North Carolina State, with a chance to advance to the National Club Baseball Association Division I postseason for the first time in school history. But on the eve of the big game, they weren’t taking batting practice or fielding grounders; they were convening at the tree that had been planted in Jackson’s honor.

Dozens of students showed up on a pristine spring day, sitting in folding chairs for hours, eating, drinking, chatting. Many of them were about to graduate and head on to the next chapter of their lives, and all of them were still processing the very sudden and gut-wrenching loss of one of their own. Rather than bury their grief somewhere deep inside, rather than retreat to their individual frustrations and fears, they came together as a community.

They did that often in the year after Jackson’s death.

“It's not always a place for sorrow and feeling bad or sad that we miss him,” Jaden Ryan, a member of Jackson’s team, said of the tree. “It's just a place to hang out, a place to celebrate Jackson or just have fun. There are nights where it's sad and a lot of people share things that they feel, things that they’ve got going on. And then there's nights where we play music and we'll hang out until 1 a.m. and just talk.”

They are there for each other, and they are there for the Yelle family, which resides on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Jackson was especially close with his maternal grandmother, Carol. The two would watch “Survivor” and Boston Celtics games together. With Jackson gone, his friends from Elon have made Carol a priority in their lives. They’ve become text buddies with Carol, checking in with her during the latest season of her favorite reality show and on the Celts’ run to the NBA Finals.

“She gains great energy from the guys,” Scott said of his mom. “It’s a thrill to her to have these kids adopt her, essentially, and step in and fill that void that Jackson left. She loves it.”

Scott reciprocated that love by visiting Elon’s campus several times in the aftermath and checking in on Jackson’s teammates, who have become like sons to him.

“We stay in constant contact with him,” Ryan said. “He's so invested in all our lives and wants to see us succeed. The commitment that he's shown to the club and our family has been really incredible, because, especially in a tragic moment like that, a lot of people can shut down and kind of push away what Jackson might have been a part of. He's embraced us all, and I think he views us as the family that Jackson had.”

When Elon won that winner-take-all playoff game, no one was more pumped than Scott Yelle.

Rooting for Jackson’s team and embarking upon the ballpark tour helped Scott process his pain. In the last few months, he’s come to realize how much baseball had built his bond with his son. It was a constant in their lives, from Scott hitting a 2-year-old Jackson Wiffle balls in the yard and hearing his infectious giggles as he swung with pure joy, to all the travel games and practices they drove to together from the time Jackson was about 10 until he ventured off to college at age 18. And of course, there was the father-son ballpark tour, which began accidentally as a function of visiting MLB ballparks en route to travel tournaments and eventually became an earnest goal.

“Time,” Scott said. “We spent time together [through baseball]. When you have kids, it’s not always easy. There are distractions with technology and them wanting to hang out with their friends. But a trip to a ballpark to see a game or even just to go to Little League or travel ball games, there’s just a lot of hours together. There weren’t always necessarily a lot of deep conversations, but, you know, just joking while listening to Dad’s music and realizing he liked it, too, or talking about girls or school and grades and trying to instill some life lessons while we had quality time.”

That all happened because of baseball. Scott’s journey this spring -- and the donations he made along the way to the RBI program -- were his way of giving back to a game that had given him so much precious time with his son. Time that means even more to him now that Jackson is gone.

Throughout the tour, Scott, wearing Jackson’s Elon hat at every stop, told his story. To strangers on airplanes, to stadium employees, to fellow fans in the stands. What he encountered throughout was the kind of love and grace Jackson’s Elon teammates had shown him. The teams would have him throw out a ceremonial first pitch, promote the Jackson Yelle Family Foundation on the scoreboard and just generally treat Scott like, well, Fan of the Year.

Early in the tour, Scott struggled to know how to accept that support, to feel worthy of it. He shared with us that he had a verbally abusive stepfather as a child, and the scars of that experience are still with him. But the more support Scott received on this tour, the more he learned to embrace the positive influence that others can have on him and the positive influence that he can have on others.

“Jackson’s playing the teacher,” he said through tears in the stands at Comerica. “He’s teaching me how to love myself.”

One could feel Jackson’s influence at the final stop on Scott’s ballpark journey. Scott was joined there not just by his wife, Andrea, and 18-year-old daughter, Lexi, but also by several of Jackson’s Elon teammates. Jackson’s former roommate, Harley Wilf, had traveled to be there for the final three games of the tour in St. Louis, Kansas City and Detroit.

To see that group seated together in Section 124 at Comerica, laughing and snacking on sundaes and soaking in the sun on a gorgeous afternoon in the Motor City, was a beautiful sight that represented so many of the things we learned about Jackson. How much he loved baseball. How much he loved ice cream. How much he was a connector of people.

Scott had Jackson with him on his journey. In his hat and in his heart. In the good he’s been able to do for the RBI program. In the way people embraced him at each stop and encouraged him to keep going ... not just on the tour, but in the daunting challenge of living with a broken heart.

In Jackson’s life, baseball strengthened the love between father and son. And in Jackson’s death, baseball has reminded Scott just how powerful that love is.