Ramsay’s life not measured by stats

Rob Ramsay’s Baseball Reference page lists the 43 appearances he made over two seasons with the Mariners in 1999 and 2000, the handful of starts and the middling ERA. It can tell you he was a Vancouver, Wash., native who matriculated at Washington State University before being taken as a seventh-round Draft pick by the Red Sox and later dealt to Seattle for Butch Huskey.

Really, if all you knew about Rob came from a perusal of this page, you would assume he was one of the thousands of players who get their cup of coffee in the big leagues, and either because of injury or inconsistency or inability to make adjustments, don’t pan out.

But those who know Rob know there was so much more to his story — a story that came to a sudden and heartbreaking end last Thursday, when the doting husband and father of two young boys suffered the seizure that would claim him at age 42.

“He was a special guy,” said Steve Canter, Ramsay’s former agent. “There was a light around him.”

That light shone for his wife Samantha and his sons Ryan, 11, and Reid, 8. But the baseball community barely got to know Ramsay, a pitcher who might have had a long and lucrative career as a result of his hard-working nature and, yes, his left-handedness.

Ramsay was just beginning to find his way at the big league level when the headaches and the uncharacteristic lethargy set in and his performance went backward. It was during the 2001-02 offseason when an MRI revealed the racquetball-sized mass that had taken root in his head, an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma …

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