Tyler Tumminia remembers those nights when her dad would come home after being away on business for two weeks.
“I’d be sleeping,” she said, “and my father would wake me up at 10 o’clock. It’d be pitch black outside. We used to live in a house with this huge field, and he’d wake me up, ‘Ty, Ty . . .’ ‘What’s going on, Daddy?’ ‘C’mon, get your glove.’ And we’d go outside. He’d always tell me, if you can’t catch a baseball in the dark, you’ll never be a good player. And sure enough, we’d have catches in the dark. But it wasn’t so much baseball. It was that moment I had with my dad.”
Much like the ingredients of canned cheese or the continuing popularity of Dr. Phil, the father-daughter bond can be one of life’s mysteries. But with John and Tyler Tumminia, it’s not difficult to see and understand their connection. It’s baseball.
“It’s a wonderful relationship,” said White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf. “It wouldn’t be strange or unusual if it were a father and a son. But it’s really great to see a father and a daughter have a relationship that is basically based on what he does for a living. . . . And it’s really refreshing to see the two of them together, because they really enjoy each other’s company.”
Tyler is now 27 and director of communications for the Goldklang Group, which owns six minor-league baseball teams. She went into public relations after college, but baseball kept calling her. So she left a Boston PR firm to work for one of the Goldklang Group’s teams. Last year they created a position that has her handling all six Goldklang teams.
Her father, John, 52, has been a major-league baseball scout for 20 years, the last 19 with the White Sox. That’s a long time on the road and a lot of missed birthdays, parties, holidays and events with his family, which consists of his wife, Susan, and daughters Tyler and Brooke.
John’s and Tyler’s jobs keep them apart and on the road much of the time, but they’re in constant communication. And occasionally they’re able to juggle their schedules so they can get together for a day. Often at a baseball game, of course. Just as they did 20 years ago.
“I’d go with him when I was 6 years old, to the ballpark,” Tyler said. “At 8 he’d have me clocking someone running down to first with a stopwatch. After the game he’d show me how to fill out a scouting report. . . . It’d be us two behind the plate. He’d have to go and make a conference call with some 18-year-old in Revere, Mass., and I’d be in charge of the radar gun. I got pretty good at it.
“My greatest memories are with my father at a ballpark.”
Sports was always important in the Tumminias’ Newburgh, N.Y., home. It’s older sister Brooke, as in Brooks Robinson. And it’s Tyler, as in Ty Cobb.
“She was always into baseball. Softball, baseball,” Susan Tumminia said. “They would drive me nuts. He would work with her on her techniques, and they would have an argument, then they’d be back together. I imagine if we’d had a son that’s what it would have been like. They’re two baseball fanatics.”
Tyler excelled in softball and track, so when Dad was home he’d have her run sprints in the driveway or work out in a batting cage he rigged up in their basement. And when he was on the road, he’d invite fellow scouts to drop in on her softball games, check on her performance, then report back to him.
“He would call me up from Friggin, N.C., `What do you think you can do better? I know you went 2 for 4, but is there something you can improve on?'”
She laughs when she tells the story. She’s always laughing when she tells stories about her dad, more evidence of their close relationship. They even have nicknames for each other. She’s Mule, as in stubborn. He’s Nag, as in . . . well . . . a dad giving advice.
A momentous meeting
But as good as their relationship is now, the father-daughter thing didn’t get sorted out for John until Tyler was in the 3rd grade, when one of her teachers called him aside.
“I never really had a clue what Tyler thought about me in reference to baseball or as a father,” John said. “The teacher said, `You know, she really thinks of you as a hero.’ And I went, What? She goes, `All she does is talk about how you work in baseball for the Chicago White Sox, how you take her to games, how Ozzie Guillen gave her a picture of himself and an autograph.’ I was taken aback by that. I just didn’t know what Tyler was thinking in reference to our relationship.”
John said the teacher’s remark caused him to re-evaluate that relationship with his daughter and look at her in a different light.
“I think in the beginning fathers have a tendency to treat their daughters who play sports like father and son, even though they’re girls,” he said. “It made me look at her as a female athlete and not just the athlete. There’s a certain identification associated with being a male or a female athlete. And I started to treat her like a female student, athlete and daughter that she is. It was a real wakeup call for me. . . . Where we grew as a father-daughter was when I started getting away from looking at her as a softball player or a volleyball player.”
He said that to become closer to Tyler and Brooke, he needed to develop other interests. So the Tumminias did other things together; camping, hiking, bicycling and gardening were all family affairs.
“Mostly hikes,” John said. “We took a lot of hikes as a family and individually and just talked. And listened. Listen and talk, listen and talk. And I got to know about a lot of things that were inside her head. Some of her interests, some of her concerns. Things that worried her. Her goals. I know it sounds pretty idealistic, but it’s true. And it just didn’t happen overnight, obviously.”
Tyler agrees that although their lives were immersed in baseball, it was those other things that paid dividends.
“My mother works at a public library. We did a lot of reading,” she said. “And my parents really tried for my sister and me to rely on curiosity and creativity. I wasn’t sitting in front of a TV. When I got home from school I did my homework, and I had chores. Then they’d say, `Go find something to do.’ Bike riding, being outdoors, we had a huge garden growing up. Those were all different ways our family spent time together doing different things outside baseball.”
`They were pretty hard’
John said the bond was strengthened in other ways, methods that are foreign to many parents today. He and Susan were strict, he said. They made sure that Tyler and Brooke were taught the importance of doing good deeds for others (a tradition John continues with a baseball clinic he runs every year for underprivileged kids). There was no TV in the home until Tyler was a junior in high school.
“They were pretty hard,” Tyler said of her parents. “My father and my mother, they’re both from the city, so they have that mentality that, you know, they’re just straight shooters. Which was great for me in the long run. There was no fluff. . . . I’d get an answer from both of them, whether it was a good one or bad one.”
Asked to summarize what her father taught her about life, Tyler said she learned the importance of being yourself and not worrying about what others think. Also, don’t have a fear of being curious, and keep challenging yourself.
“And to eat dirt, of course,” she said. “He keeps reminding me of that.”
Do what?
“Eat dirt. He and my mother, when I complain, are constantly, like, `Oh, get over it. Just eat dirt. Be tough.’ Especially my mom. I’ll call her, `Ma, I had a bad day.’ And she’ll say, `You know, Tyler, that’s life. Eat dirt.’ And I’ll say, `OK.'”
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bhageman@tribune.com
