Canzano: Baseball wrapped its arms around a little girl

Nova Newcomer -- and the Seattle Mariners -- are in the MLB playoffs.

Nova Newcomer remembers sitting alone as a little girl in her mother’s car. They’d pull into the parking lot of a church or an apartment building in Portland.

“I know now,” Nova said, “that’s where my mom was picking up drugs.”

Her parents split when she was young. Newcomer’s dad had a job at a hospital. On weekends, Michael Newcomer chased his dream of being a stand-up comedian. He traveled, working a circuit of bars, telling jokes to patrons on an open mic.

Nova remembers getting postcards from dad. One came from Canada. She lived with her mother and two half-siblings, until one day, child-protective services showed up and removed them. Her older half-sister had petitioned the court.

“I was nine when I saw my first baseball game,” Nova said.

I’ll think about Nova Newcomer today when the Mariners open their American League Division Series in Houston against the Astros. The team is on a magical playoff run. And Newcomer is a 45-year-old front-office rookie, working for Seattle’s Major League Baseball organization.

Did baseball save her?

Decide for yourself. But I challenge anyone to hear Newcomer’s story and not walk away with a deeper love and appreciation for the game.

It’s been with her, all along.

Michael Newcomer liked to go to Portland Beavers’ minor-league games with his daughter. He’d pick her up sometimes on a free weekend and they’d go to Civic Stadium.

“We’d go downtown, find a parking spot that seemed like it was miles and miles away,” she said. “My dad had three rules: We didn’t come to buy anything, we don’t get up during an at-bat, and we don’t leave early.”

She loved baseball games. It was structured and her life was not. Three outs to a half-inning. Nine innings in a game. The bases, always 90 feet apart, no matter the chaos around her. That old ballpark, site of some unforgettable Pacific Coast League games in the late 1950s, was special for Newcomer.

“It was a place I felt at home,” she said. “I felt alive and loved the buzz of the ballpark.”

Her dad took custody of her a couple of years after she was removed from her mother’s home. But in doing so, he ripped Nova away from her two half-siblings. At age 12, she found herself going to a new school, and living in a new neighborhood in Parkrose.

“I knew nobody,” she said. “I had sports, though. Get your kids signed up for sports, and they will meet other kids. When I started school, at least I had some people I knew. My first year wasn’t great, but I keep thinking, ‘What if I wasn’t involved in sports?’”

Newcomer likes to see the whole field. When her coach asked if she wanted to put on the catcher’s gear and get behind home plate, she figured he was giving her a leadership role. She knows now, it’s probably because nobody else wanted to do it.

Nova played softball all four years of high school. Volleyball, too. Also, Newcomer became sports editor of the Parkrose High School newspaper — The Equestrian — and the athletic director noted her interest in sports and asked, “Would you like to be the public-address announcer for football and basketball games?”

“Oh-my-gosh-yes-I-do,” she said.

Her sophomore year, Newcomer heard the Triple-A Beavers were hiring for the upcoming minor-league baseball season. Nova, 15, prepared a resume and sent it to the organization, requesting a position at the souvenir stand.

Team executives later told her it was the only resume they’d ever received for such a job. She was hired on the spot. And this is how the kid who never got to buy anything at the stadium ended up behind the register, selling hats, pennants and shirts to those who did.

Newcomer’s dream of working in sports had all sorts of interesting twists and turns. She reached out once to Mike Rice, the former Trail Blazers’ television broadcaster, and asked if she might interview him for a story in the high-school paper.

Rice was shooting a commercial at an Olive Garden restaurant in Beaverton. He invited Newcomer to watch. She rode the bus from Parkrose, switching at multiple stops, making her way to the suburbs. Once there, she observed the scene, then interviewed Rice. He asked her a question, too.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

She shot back: “Bob Costas.”

Rice told her to go to Syracuse University, Costas’ alma mater. Newcomer had the grades, but she didn’t have the money. Still, she applied to only one college — Syracuse. She was accepted, approved for financial aid, enrolled, but soon realized it wasn’t financially sustainable.

“Honestly it got too expensive for me. It was tough,” she said.

After completing her freshman year at Syracuse, Newcomer transferred home to Portland State. She now calls it one of her best life decisions. She went to school and got a part-time job in the Vikings’ athletic department, working in the sports information department. As she went to and from classes, that old baseball stadium was still there, just a few blocks away.

PSU associate athletic director, Mike Lund hired Newcomer all those years ago. Lund knew about Newcomer’s tough upbringing and quickly recognized how intelligent, hard-working and self-aware she was.

Said Lund, “Whatever she undertook, she put maximum effort into it.”

Time to step back. I had tears in my eyes by the time I finished talking with Newcomer for this column. Her story is simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking. Her mother was in and out of incarceration. Her father faded into a spiral of drug addiction himself. Both her parents succumbed to substance-use disorder.

What did Nova Newcomer cling to for stability?

Those half-siblings, minor-league baseball games, and Little League. She added up the cost of her entire Little League softball career once.

Total investment: $750.

“That gets me,” she said. “It’s not anything. It’s not a lot of money and it was everything.”

Baseball in downtown Portland became a regular habit for Newcomer.

Maybe it’s not surprising that Nova Newcomer graduated from Portland State and dove into a career in public service. She joined the board of a non-profit, called Friends of Baseball. After all, the game had been such a good a friend to her.

Newcomer had two children of her own from a first marriage, and made a life in Portland, volunteering for that baseball-fueled organization. She later became its first full-time employee, directing the 501c3. Those who know her weren’t surprised to find her running a non-profit that gifted scholarships to kids who needed baseball and softball in their lives.

She dated again, too, eventually.

Her online dating profile included a passage: “Message me if… you love baseball.”

A Liberty Mutual analyst named Matt Walker saw it. He was a University of Oregon graduate with two children of his own. He loved baseball. He’d coached Little League and umpired, and even worked for the Angels for a spell after college. They began corresponding and he soon asked her if she’d like to watch the National League Wildcard series, featuring the Chicago Cubs.

“That’s just not first-date material,” she said. “I told him I already had plans to watch that game, but we could do the American League Wildcard series.”

Their first date was at a sports bar. Their first argument? Over Barry Bonds, of course. They sat, talked college football, and watched that wildcard baseball game.

Newcomer told me, “People who don’t understand baseball, won’t get this, but baseball is joy. It’s where I get joy. It’s where I feel happy.”

Walker and Newcomer were married five years ago. It will surprise exactly no one that they performed the ceremony in front of that old downtown-Portland baseball stadium — the one Newcomer still calls “Civic Stadium.”

A friend was the officiant. The children served as witnesses. Newcomer’s dress had red, baseball stitches in it. And if this story ended right here, it would be a great one. But it does not. Because baseball wasn’t done with that kid.

Nova Newcomer and Matt Walker on their wedding day with their children.

The Mariners spent last November looking for a Director of Community Relations. Newcomer saw the opening, and applied. She moved through the process, interviewing.

She’s perfect for the job, isn’t she?

The Mariners saw it, too. Newcomer was hired in April and now works a hybrid schedule, splitting her work week between home in Portland and the team offices in Seattle.

She’s doing what she loves. The commute has challenges. When her teenaged son played a football game this season, for example, Newcomer drove down one afternoon from Seattle to see it, then turned around and drove back at 6 a.m. the following morning. But she’s dealt with bigger obstacles than a few hours of highway in her life.

The Mariners launched a program called “Hometown Nine.” It aims to help kids get access to youth sports, just like Newcomer did. She’s heavily involved with that and other community-based baseball efforts.

The journey of Nova Newcomer has come full circle.

Seattle’s baseball team was mired in a 21-year postseason drought before this season. Newcomer said she feels like an “interloper” in the Mariners current run. The team swept the Blue Jays in the AL Wildcard series last weekend. On Saturday, the franchise will host a home playoff game — the first baseball playoff game played in Seattle in more than two decades.

“It’s a beautiful team with unbelievable chemistry,” Newcomer said. “They’re the real deal.”

Nova Newcomer told me that she noticed something interesting over the years. When she watched playoff baseball games on television, she noted the aerial-camera view at the beginning of the broadcast. You know the shot. The traditional overhead, fly-in that starts high above a packed stadium, setting the scene.

“The idea of being one of the little dots in that aerial view gets me choked up,” she said.

She’ll be there in person on Saturday for Game 3.

So will her husband.

So will their four children.

“Six little dots,” she said.

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