Last updated October 2026
The ballplayers who traded the pitcher’s mound for wine ground — and what they found out there, which turns out not to be so different from the game they left.
There’s a famous photograph of Tom Seaver in his vineyard. No Mets jersey, no windup. Just a sun-faded cap, a pair of clippers in his back pocket, and his Labrador retrievers by his side.
By the time that photo was taken, Seaver had already won 311 games, three Cy Young Awards, and a World Series ring. He’d struck out 3,640 batters. He was the greatest pitcher the Mets had ever known — arguably the greatest right-hander of the twentieth century.
But the vineyard was what he’d been waiting for.
Tom Terrific Goes to Ground
Seaver grew up in Fresno, California, where his father worked in the raisin business. Grapes were in the family long before baseball was. “My father was in the raisin business,” he told Wine Spectator, “so I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Asked once what he’d do when the baseball was over, he gave his brother-in-law an answer that must have sounded like a joke at the time: “I’m going back to California to raise grapes.”
He wasn’t kidding.
Seaver threw his last pitch in 1986, in a Red Sox uniform, and made it official the following spring. He became a serious collector, and a fixture at the Hall of Famers’ dinner in Cooperstown, where he’d sit with Bob Gibson, Don Sutton, Sandy Koufax, Steve Carlton and Rollie Fingers — all wine people. “Everybody enjoyed wine,” Seaver told Wine Spectator in 2005, “so I said, ‘OK boys, let’s start having great wines at this dinner.’”
By 1997 the itch had become unbearable. He and his wife Nancy began looking in earnest, driving the backroads of Napa until they found 116 acres on Diamond Mountain in Calistoga — a wild, overgrown parcel nobody had thought to develop. Seaver climbed a tree on the property to get a look at the valley floor below. “I got out of the car and I followed my intuition,” he said later, “and ended up with this.”
They moved from Connecticut in 1999, rented in St. Helena for two years while the house went up, and planted in 2001. Under three acres of vines — 2.6, by the winery’s own count. Nancy had told him to go pick his own piece of the land, so he took a compass out and found the slope he wanted, facing south and southeast. Three Cabernet Sauvignon clones went in that first year; a fourth followed in a small upper block in 2008.
Seaver actually wanted Zinfandel. It was his favorite grape, and his first instinct was to plant the whole thing to it. His vineyard manager, Jim Barbour, pointed out that Diamond Mountain was far better suited to Cabernet. Cabernet it was. Barbour also told him what he’d stumbled into — that his parcel was among the most sought-after land in that corner of Napa. Seaver called it “really a stroke of luck.”
The first commercial release, the 2005, came out under the label GTS — his initials, George Thomas Seaver. He didn’t want his name on the bottle. It should stand on its own, he said. The winemaker was Thomas Rivers Brown, who has made every vintage since. The foil carried baseball-style stitching, a nod so subtle you’d miss it if you weren’t looking.
And the wine? The 2008 GTS scored 97 points from Wine Spectator.
You’re a caretaker for the land. I’m a gardener.
But Seaver wasn’t interested in scores. He worked the vineyard seven days a week, clippers always within reach, the two-minute walk from the house his only luxury. “In a sense,” he said of the place, “that’s my gym.” And the line Nancy heard most often was the simplest one he had: “It’s all about the journey.” Seaver Vineyards still tells its story under that word.
Production has sat somewhere between 400 and 600 cases a year, mailing list only, with a waiting list behind it. A second wine originally called Nancy’s Fancy was rechristened NLS — Nancy Lynn Seaver — from the 2011 vintage. If you want either one, you get in line. It is the same allocation logic that governs most of the small Napa labels worth chasing, and the reason a good wine club is sometimes the only door in.
Seaver died at home in Calistoga on August 31, 2020, at seventy-five — complications of Lewy body dementia and COVID-19. The Hall of Fame announced it two days later. That same autumn the Glass Fire came through and took about a fifth of the vineyard; block 1A was replanted the following spring. 2020 was the last vintage he worked.
Nancy carries it on, with Seaver’s niece Karen, who joined in 2009, and a viticulturist who has run the farming since 2022. The vineyard is still there on Diamond Mountain. The vines he planted are still producing. The south-facing slope he picked out with a compass still catches the afternoon sun.
The Stolen Base That Led to Stolen Weekends in Napa
If you’re a baseball fan, you know Dave Roberts for one thing: the stolen base. Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. Bottom of the ninth, Red Sox down three games to none against the Yankees and a run down on the scoreboard. Roberts pinch-runs, steals second off Mariano Rivera, and scores the tying run on a Bill Mueller single. David Ortiz ends it in the twelfth. Boston wins eight straight from there — four to take the pennant, four more to sweep the Series — and the Curse of the Bambino is finally broken.
What you might not know is that Roberts is a co-owner of a real wine label — Red Stitch Wine, a Napa Cabernet plus a set of Santa Lucia Highlands bottlings — and that his path there started with a very different kind of introduction.
It was Barry Bonds who got him started. At spring training, Bonds introduced Roberts to Rolando Herrera, the Mexican-born winemaker behind Mi Sueño — “My Dream” — one of Napa’s most respected small producers. Roberts was hooked.
When Roberts joined the San Francisco Giants in 2007, he found himself in a clubhouse with Rich Aurilia, the longtime Giants shortstop, and the two of them turned the team plane into a competition: who could bring the best bottle on board. Roberts won it in 2007 with a Mi Sueño Cabernet.
The same year, both couples fell in with a San Francisco blind-tasting group that had been working its way through Malbec — also Herrera’s speciality. One of its members was John Micek, a former hedge fund manager. More tastings followed. Then a trip to Tuscany, with a Rhône leg built around a twenty-year Beaucastel vertical. Then, inevitably, a business plan.
Red Stitch launched with the 2007 vintage: 150 cases of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon at around $75, made by Herrera from fruit Wine Spectator identified as coming from his Frog Tree Manor vineyard in Coombsville. Wine Spectator’s Harvey Steiman, who admitted up front to being sceptical about athlete wine brands, gave it a hard look and came away impressed. James Laube, tasting it blind, called it “smooth, rich, generous and well-proportioned.”
The name is the red seams on a baseball, if you want the obvious read. The winery’s own telling leans on the gentler version — things stitched together.
Roberts’ wife Tricia finished sommelier school in 2010 and holds the Certified Specialist of Wine credential. The two grew up in San Diego, were high school sweethearts, married in 1997, and made their first Napa trip during the 2002 harvest. Roberts was still years from the dugout he’s known for now — in 2010 he was a special assistant in the Padres’ front office; the Dodgers didn’t hire him to manage until November 2015.
Red Stitch’s range includes two vineyard-designate Pinot Noirs from the Santa Lucia Highlands (a region that grows most of the grapes for producers in Carmel and Santa Cruz Mountains), Soberanes and Rosella’s, a Sierra Mar Chardonnay, and the Napa Cabernet. The last published volume was just over a thousand cases, in 2017. Herrera made the wines from 2007 through 2023; Erich Bradley, of Sojourn and Repris, took over in 2024. Aurilia has spent well over a decade as a Giants analyst on NBC Sports Bay Area and splits his time between Healdsburg and Phoenix.
The rivalry that once played out on the diamond now plays out at the blending table, where the rule is unanimity. “We don’t bottle anything,” as Micek put it, “until we all agree on the final cuvée.”
The No-Hitter That Changed Everything
Chris Iannetta’s wine origin story starts with a wrist injury.
On May 2, 2012, Iannetta — a catcher for the Los Angeles Angels — caught Jered Weaver’s no-hitter against Minnesota, a 9–0 game and the only one of Weaver’s career. Iannetta came out of it hurt, though not behind the plate: he took a pitch on the right wrist while batting, and a week later had surgery to remove a small bone. Three weeks after that, his teammate Vernon Wells tore ligaments in his thumb sliding into second against the Padres and went under the knife too.
“We both got injured,” Iannetta said later, “and spent three months on the disabled list.”
Downtime in baseball usually means golf, fishing, or going stir-crazy. Iannetta and Wells started talking about wine instead.
For Iannetta it ran deep. He grew up in an Italian-American family in Rhode Island where wine came with every meal, and both sets of grandparents made it at home. His grandfather picked out bushels of Ruby Cabernet at the Providence farmers market and pressed and fermented them in the garage. The family called it garage wine. When his grandfather died of cancer in 2007 — Iannetta had debuted late the previous summer, and this was his first full season as the Rockies’ catcher — a glass of wine became a way of staying connected.
In 2008, the pitcher Glendon Rusch signed with Colorado and introduced him to the fine wine world properly, bringing Cabernets and Pinots onto team flights and walking him through what he was tasting. The garage-wine kid from Rhode Island started paying attention.
By the time the two of them were rehabbing together in 2012, the plan was clear: a small Napa winery to build after baseball. Wells bought roughly thirty acres on Atlas Peak, above two thousand feet, twelve of them planted to Merlot that they set about converting to Cabernet. They called the label JACK, after the first initials of their four children: Jayce, Ashlyn, Christian and Kylie.
The 2013 Howell Mountain Cabernet scored 88 points from Wine Spectator at $100. The 2013 Sauvignon Blanc got 90 at $50. For two men who were still technically baseball players, that isn’t bad.
What happened next is harder to pin down. The Atlas Peak estate has since been sold. The founding winemaker, Grant Long, who made the wines from 2012 through 2020, is no longer there, and no successor has been announced. The Napa Wine Project, which tracks these things more closely than anyone, carried a note on JACK’s page, as of late 2026, saying the label may no longer be actively producing — even as trade directories went on listing it. Whether there is wine in barrel under that name, we can’t say.
The Rust Belt Burgundy Lover
And then there was Rusty Staub — the anomaly.
Staub played 23 seasons in the majors, racked up 2,716 hits, and was beloved in every city he played in. In Montreal they called him Le Grand Orange for his red hair. But his real passion — the one that outlasted his career — was Burgundy.
Staub became a prolific collector — Wine Spectator’s obituary records that he loved great wine, “especially Burgundy” — and he turned that cellar outward. He set up the Rusty Staub Foundation in the mid-1980s, and in 1991 it held the first of what became an annual wine auction and dinner, one of New York’s most serious wine events for twenty-five years running. Wine Spectator ranked it ninth among all U.S. charity wine auctions.
No celebrity-label vanity bottles here. The lots were the real thing. Eighteen magnums of 2014 Armand Rousseau — six each of Chambertin, Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, and Gevrey-Chambertin Clos St.-Jacques — went for $62,000 in 2016. Four methuselahs of 2014 Domaine Dujac, one each of Bonnes Mares, Clos de la Roche, Clos St.-Denis and Echézeaux, brought $50,000. The evening kicked off at Maloney & Porcelli in Manhattan with grand cru whites: Chevalier-Montrachet, Corton-Charlemagne. In a corner of the wine world that has more than its share of invented provenance, these were lots whose paperwork nobody had to squint at.
Over the years the foundation gave almost $20 million to children around New York City, through an emergency food pantry in his name and a long list of local charities. Staub died in West Palm Beach on March 29, 2018, three days short of his seventy-fourth birthday.
He never made a wine of his own. He didn’t need to. Unlike the others here, Staub was a collector rather than a producer, and his legacy in wine was about what you do with a cellar once you have one — about getting Burgundy’s best bottles into a room full of people who cared about something bigger than themselves.
The Common Thread
What connects these men isn’t fame or money — plenty of athletes have both and never touch a vine. It’s something more specific: a willingness to start over, to learn slowly, to invest years in something that doesn’t care about your batting average.
Asked why he chose farming over the broadcasting and endorsement money available to a living legend, Seaver put it in the plainest terms he had: “you’re a caretaker for the land. I’m a gardener.”
That’s not a line you’d hear at a press conference. It’s the kind of thing you say when the cameras are off and the clippers are in your back pocket and the dogs are following you down the row.
Every October, somebody is playing for a ring. And every October, on Diamond Mountain, the vines Tom Seaver planted give up the last of their fruit and go dormant for the winter, the vintage safely in barrel. The red stitches on a baseball and the red juice from a crush pad aren’t that different, when you think about it. Both start with something raw, both are around plenty of dirt, both require patience, and both — when everything goes right — turn into something people remember.
Have a favorite wine from a baseball player? We’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line at hello@thewinescribes.com.
