ARLINGTON – As part of the Mother’s Day regimen, most of the Rangers donned pink accessories to honor their mothers and to raise breast cancer awareness.
For Rangers manager Skip Schumaker, who wore pink high socks and a neon pink sweatband, it allowed him to pay tribute to his mother, Marlene, his wife, Lindsey, and to share a funny story from his formative years.
First, the tribute: “There’s all kinds of emotions on Mother’s Day for a lot of baseball players. Luckily, my mom’s still here and she’s healthy. She was always my biggest fan, my biggest supporter and the one I called when things weren’t going well. She was always in my corner during the toughest times getting to the major leagues and she still, to this day, cries when somebody makes their debut. She watches it and she bawls her eyes out because she knows how hard it was to get here.
“So, yeah, it means a lot to me. Wearing this, knowing how much sacrifice that my mom made to help me get here, and then also all the sacrifices that my wife is currently making for me to continue chasing dreams.”
And now for the funny story. For his 16th birthday, Schumaker (given name: Jared) said his father bought him an old Dodge Duster for $900 and pledged to work with him on it to make the car usable and to educate his son on autos. When the project was finally completed, he had a maroon muscle car, to which his mother affixed a vanity plate she’d had made for the occasion. It read: “Skippy.”
“I’ve forgiven her; I’m a Christian,” Schumaker said with a laugh. “But that – that was a tough one.”