SAN DIEGO -- Theo Epstein remembered when he first met Kevin Towers, as a 21-year-old intern working in the San Diego Padres' public relations department. Towers was the new general manager.
"I was just out of college," said Epstein, the Chicago Cubs' president of baseball operations. "I was just a nobody, a faceless kid trying to be invisible and not get in the way. But there was never such a thing as a nobody to Kevin Towers -- he just wasn't wired that way."
Baseball executives and managers left spring training to gather at San Diego's Petco Park on Sunday and celebrate the life of Towers, who died from complications of a rare form of thyroid cancer on Jan.