Dee Gordon of the Miami Marlins celebrates in the dugout with Ichiro Suzuki in a game earlier this season against the Rockies. Gordon entered Saturday's game with the second leading batting average in the Major Leagues.
Dee Gordon of the Miami Marlins celebrates in the dugout with Ichiro Suzuki in a game earlier this season against the Rockies. Gordon entered Saturday's game with the second leading batting average in the Major Leagues. (Doug Pensinger / Getty Images)

It's Father's Day, and Marlins second baseman Dee Gordon has a famous baseball father, one who loved, cherished and strong-armed his son into a major-league career, as you'll soon see.

But know this, too: Even on Father's Day, it's Mother's Day for Gordon. Devona Strange's initials are stitched on his glove. Her name is written on his cap, in his shoes …


"Her name's everywhere around me,'' he says.

The final, motivating image Gordon views at his locker before each game is of a photo that serves as his phone's screensaver. He's laughing. His mother is smiling. Their heads are bumping. It's the last photo they took together.

He was 6.

"I never want to forget her,'' he said. "I was her only child. That was the love in my life."

His mother met his father, Tom "Flash" Gordon, at their central Florida high school in Avon Park. They didn't marry. Tom began the developmental steps toward what became a 21-year major-league career.

Strange took their son to live in St. Petersburg. It was there, as a first-grader, Dee Gordon got off the school bus one day at his gated apartment complex to find police around it. Someone had died or there was a robbery, bystanders said.

Two friends of his mother pulled him aside. It turned out his mother, 25, was shot and killed. The story was that she and her boyfriend, who would serve five years in prison for manslaughter, were playing with a gun when it went off.

His mother's friends didn't mention all that upon taking him from the apartment complex that day to McDonald's. They just said his mother was gone. To which the 6-year-old boy had one question: "Is she coming back?"

"I remember everything that day,'' Gordon says now.

How did that not embitter him? How is it that Gordon, at 27 now older than his mother ever became, plays second base like a kid out on recess, the regular smile on his face revealing the joy in his game?

"The saying is it takes a village to raise a kid, and I had a village that raised me,'' he said. "I had so many people that cared for me. It was a little like everybody took care of me. There are too many to name who helped me."

He initially went to live with his maternal grandmother in the central Florida city of Avon Park. Then both grandmothers helped, as did his uncles, and he went to live with his father for summers when school was out.

Those summers began his up-close education in major-league baseball. Tom Gordon began his career as a starting pitcher with Kansas City, became an All-Star closer in Boston and played for eight teams in his long career.

His fathers' teammates like Derek Jeter and Jimmy Rollins became friends. Dee Gordon watched his father win a World Series. Tom Gordon, as a closer, brought a focused fire the son couldn't use in an every-inning job. Other traits transferred, though.


"My mental toughness, my desire to be as good as possible — I think they came from him,'' he says.

Most of all, his father provided a not-so-gentle-nudge to baseball. The son loved basketball more. He wanted to play basketball in college. On his high school graduation night, he was pulled aside by his father and uncles.

"Your uncles and I decided you're going to play baseball,'' Tom Gordon said.

"You've got to be kidding,'' Dee Gordon said.

The son remembers, "The way they broke it down was you can play basketball for four years in college and then go find a job, or you can make a career in baseball."

Still, the son practiced with the basketball team at Seminole Community College until his father caught wind of that and ordered it to stop. Soon enough, baseball became his passion.

He's having a season the Marlins dreamed of when trading for him last winter. He's second in baseball with a .355 batting average entering Saturday's game and leads the league with 100 hits. He plays elite defense. He leads National League second basemen in All-Star voting.

He'll bring his open joy again on Sunday as the Marlins play in Cincinnati. It's Father's Day, and he knows what his father has meant to his career. But it's Mother's Day for him, too, and so he'll look at his screensaver before taking the field with the same idea as always.

"Be grateful for life,'' he says. "My mom was 25. I'm grateful to be out here, playing."