“I just felt like I had to pick myself up and my mom up,” he said. “It was a very tough time for her. I felt like I was trying to take control of my life and not rely on other people to do things for me.”

Yet there were other people, so many, he said, that he felt as if he had “10 brothers and sisters and all the aunts and uncles in the world.” He still played baseball and hockey and basketball. He was smart enough to be admitted to Brown and to have a good chance at Harvard, too.

And when his other grandfather, who lived nearby, would throw out the first pitch before the start of the World Series, in 2004 and 2007, Mike would get to go, even if Carl did not stay very long.

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The name — that jumble of letters so famous that spell-check programs now recognize it — was not a burden to a young boy playing baseball in New England. It is all Mike Yastrzemski ever knew. But it always drew attention.

“I remember clearly, in Little League, being around people who didn’t really know who I was,” Anne-Marie Yastrzemski said. “They’d be saying silly stuff — ‘The only reason you’re on the team is your name; you’re not like your grandfather’ — and I wanted to turn around and punch them in the face. But you just have to keep your mouth shut and smile.”

When Mike was young, she said, coaches seemed afraid to offer much advice to a Yastrzemski. Her son wanted to be his own man — he turned down a chance to wear his grandfather’s No. 8 this season — and while he was proud of the name, he was naturally much closer to his mother.