“I used to go to my dad at times like this…[there] isn’t a day that goes that I don’t think of him.” Longtime New York Mets relief pitcher John Franco (pictured) racked up 424 saves and had a 2.89 ERA in his 21 year career. Franco was exceptionally close to his father, James Franco, a New York City sanitation worker. In 1993, in the middle of a string of excellent years, Franco struggled, finishing with an ERA over 5. From the New York Times’ “Franco Looks for A Missing Ingredient “(9/24/93):
The outfield fences have moved in on John Franco. Few saves have been simple. Few ground balls have failed to have eyes. When he kicks the rosin bag, cranes his neck and seems to be searching for something in the sky, he is: his father. James Franco is his pitching coach upstairs. In this dour Mets season, John Franco has gone running to the Shea Stadium speed gun for affirmation, has rocked himself to sleep watching old game footage and has heard unsolicited advice on every other New York street corner. But it is no use. No one could ever cure his earned run average like James Franco, who would backhand his son in the ribs and say, “Heck with ’em. You can pitch.” “I used to go to my dad at times like this,” John Franco said the other day during the Mets-Pirates series “but can’t any more. He’s deceased”… James Franco…always had John’s ear. He talked his son out of quitting St. John’s, talked him out of a minor league pitching slump 10 years ago and would have tried talking him out of this current lamentable one… James Franco died of a heart attack in October 1987, while sitting in a parked New York City garbage truck, and John Franco is not close to being over it. The T-shirt he wears every night underneath his game jersey says, “Department of Sanitation, New York City.” It belonged to guess who. And in the black travel kit that he takes on each trip, Franco packs a pebble from his dad’s grave site. “I keep it in like a medicine bottle, for good luck,” said Franco, who at home also polishes his father’s sanitation department badge. “Isn’t a day that goes that I don’t think of him.”