Darkest of destinies

 The last time I talked to Dan Serafini it was raining.

It was early September and 1993 and he was wandering around the Fort Wayne Wizards clubhouse in shorts and a B.U.M. T-shirt -- remember B.U.M.? -- waiting to see if he would play that day. It was the last day of his second professional season, and his bags were packed. He was ready to head home to California, where his family and his new pup were waiting for him.

"She's a Rottweiler," he said. "She's like nine months old and, like, 85 pounds now."

Dan Serafini was 19 years old.

Now he's 52 and headed to prison for the rest of his natural life.

He was convicted last year of killing his father-in-law and seriously wounding his mother-in-law, and yesterday he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for it. Of all the destinies any of us might have seen for him that dreary, dripping day 33 years ago, few could have been darker or less forseeable.

At 19, see, Serafini was a lefty pitcher who could throw baseballs past batters on the regular, or at least on the regular enough. He'd made 27 starts with a 10-8 record and 3.65 ERA in the Wizards' inaugural season as the Minnesota Twins low-A affiliate, and it seemed the Twins might have some plans for him.

For awhile, they did. And then they didn't.

They dutifully kept bumping him up the minor-league ladder until June 25, 1996, when he made his first major-league start against the New York Yankees. The Yanks tattooed him for five runs and seven hits in 4 1/3 innings, and Serafini hit one batter and gave up a home run to Bernie Williams. The Yankees won 6-2.

After that ...

Well. After that, it never got much better.

After a couple of seasons the Twins traded Serafini to the Cubs, and after that, across the next decade, he bounced around from the Bear Cubs to the Padres to the Pirates to the minor league stints with the Giants, Mets, Brewers and Cardinals. His last MLB gig was with the Colorado Rockies in 2007, where he pitched three games and posted a 54.00 ERA.

No, that's not a misprint. His ERA really was 54.00.

In any event, that was end for him. He finished with a 15-16 lifetime record in MLB to go with a 6.04 ERA and 127 strikeouts. Five years after his last start, he was still pitching in the Mexican League, chasing a dead dream or clinging to his vanished youth or who the hell knows.

Dan Serafini was 38 years old by then.

Nine years later, he walked into his in-laws' home, shot and killed his father-in-law and shot and almost killed his mother-in-law. Then he burgled the place.

All of that was in the news story I read this morning, the one that said Dan Serafini was going behind bars forever. And suddenly it was a rainy day in September again, and Serafini was just a teenager in shorts and a B.U.M. T-shirt, talking happily about his dog the jobs he had lined up for the offseason.

"I'll be working six, eight hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "I work Monday through Thursday at a pet store, and at a garbage company I work Friday through Sunday. I'll be driving a truck and collecting garbage and stuff like that."

At the time I wrote that made Dan Serafini the perfect symbol for Labor Day, which had just passed.

Now I'm compelled to write he's the perfect symbol for something much sadder, and infinitely darker:

The wreckage of a ruined life.