(Content warning: This story addresses suicide and mental health issues and may be difficult to read. If you are in crisis, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.)
Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2023. View the full list.
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The sequence is unmistakable to Garrett Olin, as if pitcher and hitter rendezvoused every evening in their backyard until the sun disappeared. He’s stitched together this fantasy with second-hand details and with the instincts only he could conjure.
Garrett’s stance is open, his left foot a step behind his right, his metal spikes planted in the dirt, his blood-red DeMarini bat resting on his shoulder. He’s awaiting some 86 mph junk with heavy sink from a funky release point, a pitch he’s meant to pummel into the infield grass. The scouting report is embedded in his DNA.
Garrett Olin never knew his dad, Steve. But he can anticipate his every move.
Unimposing but undaunted, Steve flicks the bill of his cap. Beneath the brim, scribbled in Sharpie, is the No. 31, the second digit extending into an arrow pointing toward home plate, a reminder of his most elementary instruction: Throw the ball straight. Steve tilts his head forward and raises his hands toward the clouds, hunches over and extends his right arm behind him. As he whips his body around, his right knee scrapes the dirt and he flings the baseball from his hip to conceal it long enough to muddle the hitter’s swing decision.
A first-pitch slider, designed to prey on Garrett’s foolhardy fixation with swinging for the fences. And then, the fastball, the pitch Garrett prayed he would throw all along.
“I would probably smash a homer,” he says.
Garrett wears Steve’s white No. 31 Cleveland Indians jersey, with navy and red stripes lining the sides, to five or six Hillsboro Hops games each summer in northwest Oregon. Once in a while, a fan stops him.
Why do I know that name?
Olin? I used to watch him pitch. How do you know him?
Garrett shoves a few of his dad’s baseball cards in his pocket before he treks to the A-ball team’s stadium. When he meets someone who recognizes the moniker or recalls his dad’s unorthodox delivery or offers compassion for the tragic boating accident that claimed Steve’s life on March 22, 1993, he’ll hand them a card, his bid to keep his dad’s story breathing.
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Garrett is 30, recently divorced, honorably discharged from the Army, and after surviving his darkest hours, he’s nearly three years sober and staring at life’s blank canvas. As he fashions his own future, he figures he might as well preserve the legacy of the man he considers his guardian angel.
Little Lake Nellie today bears little resemblance to the site of the accident on Cleveland’s only spring-training off day 30 years ago, when pitcher Tim Crews’ 18-foot bass boat slammed into a central Florida dock, ending two lives and ravaging many others.
The ballpark Steve called home during his four-year major-league career no longer exists. Two weeks after the tragedy, Cleveland hosted its final Opening Day at Municipal Stadium. Patti Olin and Laurie Crews accepted their late husbands’ jerseys during a somber pregame ceremony that spurred sobbing from Wade Boggs and other New York Yankees in the visitors dugout who had never met the two relievers.
Steve left behind three children — Alexa, Garrett and Kaylee. They cling to their keepsakes, to the photos and baseballs and framed jerseys and bomber jackets and Cleveland caps and cowboy hats. They embrace story time during monthly Grandma’s Grill lunch sessions.
And Garrett sustains his connection to the man who isn’t there, the man he never knew, the man he knows so well.
Mementos of Steve Olin’s baseball career (Courtesy of the Olin family)Garrett slathers oil onto one of Steve’s old gloves. He has two tan ones and a black one. They still display his handwritten nickname, Oly, and still hold their shape, since Garrett stuffs a baseball into each pocket. He used one during the final game of his high school career in Oregon, a state title bout in which he didn’t pitch, a coaching decision that still gnaws at him more than a decade later.
His competitive baseball days are in the rearview mirror, replaced by 10-minute catch sessions with his half-brother, Sam, in the street or in an open field. And when they toss that magical little sphere back and forth…
“The whole world shuts off,” he says.
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It’s a reason to think about Dad. It’s a momentary cure for any ailment.
“It’s freedom. It’s peace.”
Steve’s grandfather, Jack Carstens, was a lefty pitcher whom the Dodgers signed just before he joined the Navy ahead of World War II. After the war, he worked as a conductor and brakeman and, ultimately, he negotiated contracts as general chairman for the railroad union. He harbored regrets about not pursuing a career with Brooklyn.
He wound up playing in a semipro league in Bend, Oregon, and once participated in a July 4th showcase that featured Ty Cobb as an umpire. Admission cost 35 cents and, as Grandpa Jack would tell it, Cobb “was half-gassed and everybody knew it.”
“We’re just a baseball family,” says Steve’s mom, Shirley.
The first major leaguer Steve ever faced was Jim Rice, an eventual Hall of Famer, who tapped a weak grounder back to the mound. Scouts were unconvinced a 16th-rounder from Portland State with mid-80s velocity would amount to much, but Steve survived with expert command and an ability to convert the hitter’s eagerness into his undoing. His sinkers faded at the final instant, like a speaker backing away from a microphone before reaching the end of a sentence. Grandpa Jack implored Steve to aim every pitch no higher than the knees; hitters couldn’t lift his sinkers into the outfield seats if the pitches flirted with the bottom of the strike zone. Sure enough, Steve surrendered only 14 homers in four big-league seasons.
Steve’s knees wobbled and knocked together during his debut on that late-July afternoon in 1989, but he fielded the ball and tossed to first to retire Rice. His parents breathed a sigh of relief from the living room of a neighbor who owned a satellite dish. They watched him from the stands for the first time two weeks later, in Oakland, where he struck out Rickey Henderson and Jose Canseco on three pitches apiece.
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By the summer of 1991, Cleveland manager Mike Hargrove had tasked Steve with the ninth inning. In the spring of 1993, Steve was penciled in as the club’s closer, months after he recorded a career-best 2.34 ERA and 29 saves, a performance that landed him a two-year contract and afforded the Olins a new house in the Cleveland suburb of Westlake.
Then, he was gone, the tragedy rattling every member of Cleveland’s organization and spawning an endless supply of what-ifs.
The Indians, training in Winter Haven, Florida, after nearly a half-century in Tucson, Arizona, opted not to make up a rainout against the Dodgers that day, with Hargrove fearing a player rebellion. For the rest of his tenure, Hargrove would never again allow another empty spring training day. Crews’ blood alcohol content was ultimately measured at .14, exceeding Florida’s legal limit of .10. A haphazard game of rock, paper, scissors settled that strength and conditioning coach Fernando Montes would abandon his seat on the boat and retreat to the house to pick up Crews’ friend. Hurricane Andrew had wrecked the team’s original facility in Homestead the prior summer; without that, the Crews ranch wouldn’t have served as a sensible destination for a day of cooking out and riding horses and caving to the urge to go night fishing. To Steve, Crews and Bobby Ojeda were one step above strangers, but a baseball season has a way of bonding even the most transient players, and boarding Crews’ Skeeter for a bass hunt was a first stride toward fraternization.
In 1993, an ever-pitiful team was ready for a renaissance. A submarining closer was ready for the prime of his career, and, with his wife, 3-year-old daughter and 7-month-old twins along for the ride, Steve was prepared for the prime of his life.
Fifteen years later, Patti couldn’t shake the haunting notion that she was watching her late husband on the mound anytime Garrett bent over to emulate Steve’s throwing motion. She wasn’t alone; Garrett’s mannerisms cause his grandparents to refer to him as Steve on a regular basis.
To start every high school appearance, Garrett stood at the back of the mound, exhaled and muttered to himself, “Here we go, Dad. Let’s go.” Prior to any critical pitch, he gazed down at the 31 he had printed on his left forearm to center himself. When he turned 18, he adapted it into a tattoo.
Garrett eventually switched to a conventional motion to boost his command and protect against injury, and before long, he was firing one fastball after another past overmatched teens. He’ll never forget the day the radar gun flashed 97 mph.
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Garrett preferred, however, to wield his authority at the plate, to pose the threat that forces a pitcher to remind himself of the consequence of missing his location: He might launch the tattered baseball deep into the Oregon woods. He once clobbered a go-ahead, two-run homer in a playoff game in Monmouth. The ball cratered to the earth about 30 feet to the left of his grandparents, who were sitting far beyond the center field fence. Garrett’s high school coach would say he was going to hit the ball a mile or strike out trying.
“I lived by that: swinging out of my ass,” he says.
The Diamondbacks conveyed interest in Garrett as a high schooler, but he was unfamiliar with the rigamarole. Was he supposed to hire an agent? Should he approach a scout? Could he lean on Hargrove as a reference? Did he need to consult a doctor about his cranky shoulder?
The person most equipped to steer him toward the answers never had the chance to watch his son send pitches into the stratosphere.
“No doubt in my mind,” Garrett says, “if he was around, I’d still be playing.”
Instead, Garrett finished high school and plowed into a dead end. Now what? What would his dad have advised? No, forget that, what did Garrett want to do? Why was that so perplexing? He never felt obligated to pursue a baseball future, but the idea of resurrecting the career his dad had been shortchanged, and what that might mean to his family, stalked him. He still wonders if he made the right choice.
“I always felt like I was under the shadow of my father,” he says.
Garrett boarded a flight one morning in January 2013, bound for a reception and holding unit at the home of the 30th adjutant general battalion in Fort Benning, Georgia. It was his first stop on the way to three years of active duty in Germany, the Baltic states and Afghanistan.
While watching a movie, Garrett plays Johnny Cash’s deliberate baritone or a YouTube video in the background. While cruising along Interstate-5 in his Chevy Silverado 2500, he makes sure country music or metal – Bullet For My Valentine and Five Finger Death Punch are staples – bursts through the speakers.
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“Quiet is scary,” he says.
He’s still solving how to shift from infantry soldier to sales associate for a lumber company. His 8-year-old boxer, Ruger, whom he described as his “lifeline” and his “second set of eyes,” aided him when trips to a crowded grocery store seemed paralyzing.
“What I got was a 30-minute video of how to reintegrate into society,” he says. “It was, Your time’s done. Thank you for your service. Go back to your family.”
The transition has guided him down some lonesome paths. And on the final day of April 2020, when personal, professional and financial stress reached a crescendo and when Murphy’s Law seemed irreversible – the quiet roared.
He blitzed through a 12-pack of beer from the gas station. And then another. After that, the memories are hazy, with pivotal puzzle pieces absent.
He remembers smelling sand. He remembers friends begging him to come outside his apartment. He remembers yelling at this person, then that person. He remembers pulling the trigger of his gun.
The ear-rattling crack of the aimless shot, which did not hit anyone, shook him from his stupor.
“I had drank my last drop, ending with me in jail, on the verge of suicide,” he says.
He had been on the phone for 45 minutes with a sheriff, who was standing outside his apartment complex. He convinced Garrett to exit the building. Officers placed him in handcuffs and then on suicide watch. He was convicted of misdemeanor reckless endangerment, a charge he hopes to have expunged this summer. He joined the Veterans Treatment Court, initiated a rehabilitation program and says he hasn’t touched alcohol since.
When he was arrested, he couldn’t escape his dad’s old number. All throughout the paperwork, flashing on the clock, surfacing in his head.
“I know my dad is my guardian angel, and let me tell you,” he says, laughing, “I’ve definitely put him into overtime on that job.”
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There’s one setting in which Garrett embraces the calm: the peaceful woods of Oregon, especially at Browns Camp, an area of the Tillamook State Forest that hosts an array of off-highway vehicle trails, where Garrett and his friends ride jeeps, build bonfires and camp.
Steve returned to Oregon every offseason, and when he wasn’t assisting with the Beaverton baseball team or chasing his children, he was spending every minute outdoors. He passed on that adoration to his kids. Garrett’s older sister, Alexa, cherishes summer days at her grandparents’ lake house, where she can swim or paddle board or kayak. She, like her father, once worked as a camp counselor.
“My grandma would say to me all the time,” Alexa says, “‘Oh, you’re just like your dad. All you want to do is be outside.’”
Following his Army tenure, Garrett studied auto and diesel mechanics at Universal Technical Institute in Avondale, Arizona. Friends and relatives rely on him when they’re alarmed about a clunking noise emanating from the left side of their car, or when they want to install a suspension kit on their truck.
Garrett played with Legos as a kid. He constructs 3-D puzzles. He favors hands-on work, a preference realized in high school when he helped his friend, Kenny, swap out the engine on his 1979 GMC. Garrett covets anything loud and fast. He holds a ’71 Plymouth Barracuda with a blown 440 engine in the highest regard. He would rebuild old muscle cars for the rest of his life if it paid the bills.
What he didn’t know, until his mechanical passion became prevalent, was that his dad shared the same interest.
“I had heard he liked going out and wheeling and whatnot,” Garrett says, “but a couple stories with Grandpa Gary about dad and, well, turns out I am my father.”
Garrett Olin owns the baseball from Steve’s only major-league start, in 1990. (Courtesy of the Olin family)Garrett eventually migrated back home to Oregon, which seems to have a gravitational pull on the Olin family. The three kids, their mom and their grandparents all live within a 500-foot homer of each other outside of Portland.
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“I don’t know,” Shirley says, “maybe that’s providence, or a sign from God that he’s keeping Steve close to us.”
Alexa treasures her dad’s framed jersey, his blue and red Indians jacket and his game-worn hat, in which the once-white inner ring, a repository for sweat and dirt, has turned a sandy brown. Shirley decorated Gary’s office with Steve’s memorabilia, a team pennant and his 1989 minor-league Reliever of the Year award.
Garrett collected signed baseballs and framed photos from those early-’90s Cleveland teams. When a local Applebee’s shuttered, the owner handed over a shadowbox of Steve’s mementos that once rested on a wall in the restaurant. The ink on the baseball from Steve’s only major-league start on Sept. 17, 1990 – a last-minute assignment after the club traded Bud Black – has faded, but is still legible.
FIRST ML START
BREWERS
OLIN WIN
4-2
There’s also a mysterious photo from Alexa’s wedding day. Patti’s friend first noticed the obscured face at the top of the stained-glass window on the second story of the building in the background of the shot of the Olin family. There’s no way anyone could have been looking out the window, Alexa contends, based on the building’s configuration. Everyone zoomed in.
Steve.
“Maybe that’s wishful thinking,” Alexa says.
“We know he’s there,” Garrett says. “We know he’s watching.”
Garrett occasionally laughs at his photo of his dad, a boulder of bubblegum tucked inside Steve’s lips and cheeks, his jaws begging for mercy. Until the middle innings, life in the bullpen fosters creativity, tests attention spans and welcomes zaniness. For Steve Olin and Kevin Wickander, who passed time with mindless competitions, the record was 71 sticks of Bazooka, each piece unwrapped and shoved into every nook of the relievers’ mouths. Garrett knows he would have participated in similar hijinks.

“There are times in the day,” Garrett says, “where, out of the blue, I’ll do something stupid and I’ll be like, ‘Well, my dad probably would have called me an idiot for that.’”
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Garrett wandered this winding trail to end up mulling the same question he confronted after high school: What’s next? Only, this time, he can visualize the future, with a wife, a couple of rambunctious kids, a modest house with a spacious yard — all the cornerstones of life his dad had waiting for him, but never had the opportunity to relish.
“I’m Steve reincarnated,” he says, “trying to do his own thing.”
Garrett recently watched a video that featured a father surprising his son with a bright green bat. As the boy teared up, the father assured him he would hit a home run with his new stick. He did — and his dad caught the ball.
That spurred for Garrett thoughts of throwing batting practice to his own kids one day, telling them about how he wished he could have stepped into the box against their granddad and relaying to them all the mental warfare that would have ensued. Steve and Garrett both talking trash. Garrett aiming for the fences. Steve throwing slop.
Yeah, Garrett might have smashed a home run. But he knows it wouldn’t have been the simple task he makes it out to be.
“He’s throwing something in the dirt that’ll send me out of my boots,” Garrett says. “And then he’s laughing his ass off as I’m lying on the ground.”
(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: David Liam Kyle / Getty Images; Steve Olin with Alexa, and in the dugout, courtesy of the Olin family)
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