Why Curtis Granderson was meant to win the Roberto Clemente Award

Mets outfielder Curtis Granderson smiles during a press conference being awarded the Roberto Clemente Award before game three of the 2016 World Series at Wrigley Field.

Mary Granderson lives here. She was a schoolteacher here. She raised children here. On Friday night, she carved through the lower concourse of Wrigley Field. Her husband, Curtis Sr., was delayed by the forest of people carrying full beer cups, overloaded hot dogs and a century’s worth of memories, some their own. Mary waited at a small door for him to arrive. Her son, Curtis, had gone ahead.

“I am so very proud of Curtis,” he said. “But, you know, I always taught him, treat people the way you want to be treated.”

She nodded, as if that were that, except she surely knew otherwise. There’s a city out there that sometimes doesn’t agree with her, doesn’t play by those rules. Years ago she’d sent her son out into that city with a warning to stay off the Green Line, because nothing good ever happens on that Green Line, and he’d call to tell her he’d arrived safely on the Blue or the Red, wherever it was, whenever it was.

“As a parent,” she said, “you have to walk the walk and talk the talk, and he grew up watching us give back to the community.”

So the clothes Curtis Granderson outgrew were cleaned, mended, folded and given to the neighbors, given to classmates, given to teammates. Same went for Curtis’ sister, Monica. What was theirs, became everyone’s, including their time. Curtis Sr. was a schoolteacher as well, and so the Grandersons, as all schoolteachers do, helped in the raising of a community, this one desperate for people who would stay and care and lead and teach.

“They had been doing it my whole life,” Curtis said of his parents. “I got a chance to witness it and experience it early on in my lifetime. And as I continue to get older, they’re still doing it.

“Thirty-five years old, and they’re constantly trying their best to take care of those in the community, including myself. I had just finished battling food poisoning and my mom was there taking care of me all last night. They just don’t stop, even though they’re supposed to be retired.”

He smiled.

“That’s what my mom and dad have been doing,” he said, “and hopefully I’ll just try to be a little fraction of what they’ve been in helping out those that they can, and those that I’ll be able to help out in the future.”

The foundation is called Grand Kids. The challenge is everything that’s out there, here and everywhere, in his backyard and beyond. The challenge is the children. Some are poor. Too many are hungry. They live in neighborhoods where flickering streetlights mean it is time to go home, not only because of dinner, but as one little boy told a friend of Granderson’s, “That’s when they start shooting on my block.”

The challenge is to offer the chance of a future that looks a little less like the present, to offer hope and a path to it. He started with a plan to improve educational opportunities in inner cities from Chicago to Detroit to New York, he sprinkled in some baseball, and on Saturday he will guide commissioner Rob Manfred on a tour of the two-year-old indoor-outdoor youth baseball academy at his alma mater – the University of Illinois at Chicago – that bears his name, just as the 2016 Roberto Clemente Award does.

Children play baseball 12 months a year there. They alternate batting practice sessions with the school’s team, coach Mike Dee’s team. In the winter, they pass by major leaguers such as Granderson and Jason Kipnis and George Kontos and others. Twice a year they attend clinics run by Granderson, in a gleaming facility that rose up in part through Granderson’s $5 million donation, that functions in part because of Granderson’s care.

Curtis Granderson accepts the Roberto Clemente Award alongside his parents, Mary and Curtis Sr. (Getty Images)

Dee has coached at UIC for 19 years. Among his early players was a kid from nearby who arrived asking to play basketball as well, who gave up basketball because it encroached on his library time, who became a good ballplayer as a junior, who was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in the third round 14 years ago. Dee walked the facilities Friday afternoon. Leaves covered the grounds. A warm wind brushed the campus. Baseball fields spread before him, beyond the brick and chained link of Curtis Granderson Stadium.

“I recall an early conversation with Curtis where we asked, ‘How can we impact these kids from an educational standpoint?’” Dee said. “We have a school. We have baseball.”

It began there.

It’s not the bricks or the turf or the base lines, but it may be helping a boy who lives just a mile or two away decide on which hand he should put the baseball glove. It’s probably not the baseball field as much as it is the buildings that surround the baseball field, those being apartments for the college students, and the buildings across the street, those being for science and engineering classes and labs. It’s not to make any of them big leaguers, but it could be about the little girl sitting in the outfield with a free lunch in her lap who was heard to say, “I can’t wait to go home and tell my mom I ate at Curtis Granderson’s restaurant.”

Last year, 12,000 kids came through the academy. This year, 15,000. North Siders have met South Siders and found they, like them, just wanna play some ball. Little boys and girls from the neighborhood who might have wondered what all those big buildings where for, they learned this is a college and it is open to them.

Near the start of Game 3 of the World Series, Granderson sat at the front of the room beside commissioner Manfred and Roberto Clemente’s widow, Vera. His name was on a trophy that says he has given back, much as he could, that he has tried, that he has cared, that he has walked the walk, talked the talk.

In the first row, Mary Granderson held up her phone and recorded the whole thing.