I can't help but think of 1999, the year Paul O'Neill, Luis Sojo, and Scott Brosius all lost their fathers.

[1] 1999 was the year my father died. The week he was holding on to his life in the hospital Wells was traded for Clemens. I remember hearing Wells say, "how much it hurt," and I thought, he has no idea.

That season, I turned so much attention to baseball to take my mind off of losing my Dad. Seemingly, at every turn Yankee players realities were breaking up my outlet for putting the loss of my Dad out of my mind.

Paul O'Neill's hurt the most, since it was the last game of the World Series when the Yanks clinched, and it was a real gut shot to me. Also I was and am a huge Paulie O fan. Seeing him breaking down in tears in the arms of my surrogate father Joe Torre, made me lose it. Ironically, my father's name was Joe too.

The players will rally around Girardi, and I hope they can close it out, so he can turn his attention fully to his family and funeral arrangements.

So sad!

According to Jack Curry on Twitter: Although news of Jerry Girardi's passing became public today, Yanks said he died on Saturday at residential healthcare facility in Illinois.

Tonight's line up:

Derek Jeter DH
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Curtis Granderson CF
Jayson Nix SS

Still very sad.

Nice piece at Yankees.com with comments from Joe re: his Pop.

http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20121011&content_id=39713750&vkey=news_nyy&c_id=nyy

"I didn't really want to talk about it," Girardi said. "I didn't want to take away from what we were trying to do here, because I know my dad wouldn't. The one thing my parents always taught me was [to] finish the job at hand."

[7] Poor Joe..that can't be easy to have to focus on the playoffs now.

1999 was a really hard year for me; January I moved to the Bronx to attend college in Manhattan; it was the first time I lived permanently on my own after having lived and grown up in Dutchess County the previous twenty years. I was a year and a half removed from a terrible tragedy that completely changed my life forever, and I was two weeks past the final parting from beautiful young woman with a bright young toddler; a relationship that had played a fateful part in sparing my life from that tragedy, but was summarily crushed by the weight of it. I was a completely different person, alone and lost in time and grief.

Baseball was among several positive aspects of my being that helped subside the pain in a lot of ways. But the loss of Brosius and Sojo's fathers was not lost on me, and Paulie's father passing and his subsequent tearful breakdown resonated with me even to this day.

When you're close to someone, there's no real way you can forget that person when he or she is gone. I dream about all of it. But you can take what you want and build your life on what they gave you, and all I can hope is that there is a place to hang my hat when it's all said and done. Joe Girardi at least has this much to be proud of.

I am not one to project my own opinions or experiences onto other people, and my condolences g out t the Girardis...but the papers say his father had suffered from Alzheimer's for 10 years.

It's a fucking shitty disease, ruthless in how slowly it takes someone away, with the double whammy of losing much of ones sense of self and dignity long before death arrives.

The sheer amount of mental depletion suffered by the afflicted's loved ones can be unbelievable and anyone can be forgiven for feeling some sense of relief at the end.

I hope Joe has found some peace now that his father has found his.