DETROIT — Donny Sands was 15 years old when his father died. It was New Year’s Day, 2012. Roger Sands, who served in special operations for the United States Army, was 50 and suddenly his heart stopped.
The man who taught Donny how to throw and catch and hit a baseball, the man who would put 5-year-old Donny through two-a-day workouts on sunbaked fields in Tucson, Arizona, and later in Albuquerque, New Mexico — “Baseball was like boot camp and I wanted more and more.” — the man who coached him in little league, the man who drove him to University of New Mexico baseball games where he was a bat boy along with Alex Bregman, the man he celebrated a regional championship with at age 10, the man to whom he vowed he’d be a professional baseball player one day was gone.
“Mom,” Donny said to his mother Alma the next day, “I’ve got to get to a ball field.”
