Avery’s Angel: Skyview baseball star playing for his late mom (video)

Avery Schmidt shows off his favorite photograph, describing a detail that many might not notice upon first glance.

“If you look closely, you see she is starting to lose her hair,” Avery said.

It is a reminder of his mother’s fight.

The rest of the picture, though, is pure joy.

Avery Schmidt and the Skyview High School baseball team had just won the Class 4A state championship in the spring of 2013. His mother, Farahnaz Tamimi-Schmidt, was there to share the experience. She had already fought breast cancer. By this time, tumors were found in her liver. She was starting the fight again. Still, there was no way she was going to miss an important game.

Of course, for the Schmidt family, every baseball game is an important game.

Avery’s father, Troy Schmidt, played baseball at Linfield College, where he met the woman who would be his wife. Together, they had two children, Avery and Ashton — two baseball players from the time they could walk.

Farahnaz Tamimi-Schmidt was their biggest fan.

She died on July 20, 2014 after tumors spread to her brain.

“I barely remember a time when she didn’t have some type of the disease,” Avery said.

There was the initial diagnosis. The treatment. The ups. The downs. The everything-in-between. Great news. Oh no, bad news. In all, a little more than seven years of this form of torture.

It also meant eight more baseball seasons. Eight seasons worth of games — youth, high school, club, any team that would have the Schmidt brothers, really. Eight seasons of having a couple hours every day to feel normal.

Avery Schmidt was a freshman starter on the state championship team in 2013. Now, he is a senior hoping to lead Skyview to the state playoffs again, playing for his biggest fan.

“I live every day how she’d want me to live it,” Avery said. “Be respectful. Work as hard as possible. Just be a fighter. I wake up and know those are the things I need to focus on. That’s what keeps me going.”

His favorite sport aids him in this quest. The game demands an everyday focus.

“Baseball is a religion. Baseball is my religion,” Avery said.

Troy Schmidt said baseball helped the whole family. There were road trips to Seattle, Central Oregon, and California during the summers. They were together. And they all had something to cheer for every day, not dwell on the negative.

“There was no time to think about a whole lot because we were constantly on the move,” Troy said.

“It kept my mind off of it,” Ashton, now an eighth-grader, said of his mother’s illness. “Every day, I’d go and play baseball and it would take my mind off it. If I was having a bad day, I’d just take a bucket (of balls) and start hitting, or play catch with my brother.”

Avery called baseball his escape.

More importantly, playing baseball (or any other sport) was what his mother wanted him to do.

“She’d say, ‘Just keep going. Keep doing what you’re doing,’ ” Avery said.

He will never forget the time, early in her initial treatment for breast cancer, when he and his team were in Central Oregon. Farahnaz was there, too.

“I remember my dad saying, ‘Just stay home.’ And she’d say, ‘No, I’m going. I have to go. I have to go. I have to go.’ That story always stuck out to me,” Avery said. “It made me realize how dedicated she was to our family, in being there, in being supportive. It was ginormous.”

For most of the next seven years, until she physically could not be there, Farahnaz was at a game.

“She was tired. She slept a lot. But when game time hit, she had her chair, she had her blanket, and she was there like always,” Avery said.

It was a special time, that Saturday night in Pasco in late May 2013. The Storm had made an improbable run to the state championship game. Avery Schmidt, one could say, made an improbable run to a starting role.

He was a swing guy to start the season, getting innings on junior varsity on days he didn’t dress for varsity. An injury, though, led to his “call-up,” if you will, and he became the starting third baseman.

“I just tried to make the most of it,” he said.

A couple weeks later, just as the team was about to begin its state playoff run, another player was dismissed from the team, leaving a hole at one of the most demanding positions in the game. Avery Schmidt — the freshman — took over at shortstop.

“I was nervous all the time, 100 percent of the time,” Schmidt said. “I kind of channelled that nervous energy to make it look like I knew what I was doing. I kept a cool demeanor … and tried to help the team get as far as we could.”

He drove in a run in the semifinal, then had a two-run single to tie the game in the second inning of the championship — an eventual 8-5 win for the Storm over South Kitsap.

“Everybody had been so clutch, all through the playoffs,” Schmidt said. “I just needed to do my part to stay clutch.”

The celebration started soon after the final out.

“I couldn’t stop smiling. “Just hugs. Like Jim Valvano,” Avery said, referring to the former North Carolina State basketball coach after winning the NCAA championship. “I didn’t care who it was, I just wanted to hug someone.”

He found his mom in the stands.

A few minutes later, that perfect photograph was taken.

“I had no idea that it would become my favorite picture ever,” he said.

“You can see the joy and thrill she had.”

The next school year, Farahnaz saw Avery make the varsity basketball team as a sophomore. But later that winter, she was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. Avery said he and Ashton did not think much of it at the time — there were several setbacks through the years — but in hindsight, that was the first time they realized that she might not hold off the cancer forever.

In the coming months, though, Farahnaz still found the right words. Every time.

“Her one thing was, ‘Your mom is going to be OK.’ I remember her saying that multiple times,” Avery said. “Whenever I’d hug her and said I love you, she’d say, ‘I love you, too, and your mom is going to be OK.’ It was so simple, to the point. It showed Ashton and (me) the true meaning of never giving up, never losing hope.”

Avery the baseball player had a rough start to his sophomore season. But after a trip to the eye doctor and some corrective eye wear, he doubled his batting average after spring break.

Still, there was something wrong. Farahnaz was not there. It had become a habit for Avery to nod to his mother before every at-bat.

“She would be at every single one of my games. Then I’d look up and Mom’s not there,” Avery said. “She’s at home, in bed. That was really tough.”

Heading into summer ball, Avery could not concentrate. His mother spent most of June in the hospital before coming home for hospice care. For the first time since he started playing organized baseball in T-ball, Avery took an in-season break from the game.

“Just to be home, to see all the family and relatives who were bombarding our home. Bombarding in a good way — all love and support,” Avery said. “I stopped because I just couldn’t focus. I was playing the game, but my mind was, God knows, it was somewhere else.”

Farahnaz died on July 20. Hundreds attended her service. Avery and his brother appreciated all who paid their respects, all who supported them.

Michael Copeland, now a senior on the Skyview baseball team who has known Avery and the Schmidt family since Little League days, said the entire baseball program attended the memorial.

He remembers playing against Avery in a Little League game when Avery threw a perfect game and hit for the cycle.

“His mother was yelling and cheering the entire time,” Copeland said. “You could hear her from anywhere on the field.”

Later, when Copeland and Avery were on the same team for all-stars, Copeland recalled that Avery’s mom had everyone organized. If someone needed a ride to a game or practice, she made it happen.

At the service, Copeland said, his teammates supported Avery but at the same time Avery supported them.

“I was just really impressed with how strong Avery always was,” Copeland said. “He kept positive, wanting to do things to better himself for his mom.

“And I think the whole program being there for him helped him go through that.”

These days, Copeland said Avery is a team leader, and not just because of his tremendous talent on the field. It was the strength and grace Avery showed throughout his family’s ordeal.

That does not mean Avery bounced back right away. By the time school was back in session for his junior year, Avery was trying to get back to a routine. The day-to-day grind was difficult. By the winter, he played basketball, but he said he felt bad for his coach because he was not 100 percent just yet.

Baseball would save him again.

“Once baseball hit, that’s when I started to feel like Avery again,” he said.

A fresh start. Avery said he had “good chats about life” with Skyview baseball coach Seth Johnson.

The Storm would go on another postseason run, this time surprising teams in the district tournament to reach state again. Avery Schmidt was voted to The Columbian’s All-Region team.

After graduation this June, Avery plans on continuing with baseball at Mount Hood Community College in Oregon.

It is fitting, of course, that baseball continues to help the Schmidt family in its healing.

Troy Schmidt was a baseball player. His sons are baseball players. And Farahnaz was a baseball mom.

Today, Avery Schmidt wears bracelets as reminders. One has the date of her death. Another is for breast cancer awareness. A third is for all those affected by cancer. “No one fights alone” it reads.

Avery Schmidt’s biggest fan is no longer outside the fence line, in her chair, cheering.

But he knows she is there.

Farahnaz did not fight cancer alone.

And Avery does not play baseball alone.

That picture is always there, on his phone, in his mind.

It shows him and his mom, at a baseball stadium, a place of refuge during a trying time — a place to celebrate life’s victories.