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a light
h dk
led by players such as
, baseball is taking the
lead in pro sports in
addressing depression, anxiety and other ment
al health problems
d
it,
he thought.
Just do it already, and be at peace
. As theclock struck midnight on April 30, 2009, Ian Snell, the one-time ace of the Pirates, was still brooding in the shower of his apartment outside Pittsburgh. Hours had passed sincehe’d arrived home from an afternoon game in Milwaukee,an agonizing 1–0 loss in which he’d thrown 131 pitches inseven innings, a career high, but yielded the game-winninghome run to opposing starter Yovani Gallardo. Now, standing beneath the spray of hot water—his body exhausted but his pulse racing—the 27-year-old Snell wantedto end his life.
Kill yoursel
, he thought.
Get it over with, and you won’t have to deal with this anymore
.
This
, of course, had been building for far longer than one afternoon. For monthsSnell had been reliving the anger he’d struggled with since his senior year at Cae-sar Rodney High just outside of Dover, Del., when he was always “ready to ip atlittle, stupid things,” he says, “ready to ght whoever said something” about him;the frustration of making dumb mistakes in the majors as he tried to compensatefor missing out on the college social experience by partying at bars (a couple of times the married Snell had wound up on sports blogs, photographed posing withgirls); and the stress of difculties in his relationship with his wife, Angelica.“I was not respecting other people,” Snell admits. “My family, friends, parents.” Worst of all, Snell could not forget what he kept hearing and reading in Pittsburgh:
B Bo . o
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June 21, 2010
Photograph by
mo Bu
open to life
A year after havingsuicidal thoughts asa Pirates pitcher, acalmer Snell is copingbetter with the ups anddowns of professionalbaseball in Seattle.
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June 21, 2010
the boos from the stands and the cruel insultsonline going back to the previous season, whenhe went 7–12 with a 5.42 ERA. Once the Pirates’minor league pitcher of the year, Snell wasnow a gure of ridicule.
You can fnd out where these guys live
, he would think in afury,
even i they just have some secret nameon the Internet
.The loss to the Brewers was a matchickering near all this tinder. Snell feltunbearably alone.
Should I just do it?
hethought again.“It was a juggling back and forth, likethe angel versus the demon,” Snell says. “Ifelt like I was going to have a heart attack.”So he turned the shower dial from hot tocold, trying to cool off, trying to dousea million burning questions:
I a player messes up, why does everyone automatically think he’s a bad person? Do parents even want me to say hi to their kids and give them high fves? Why am I always being singled out?
And:
Is the world better without me?
Snell had no answers, but he did havestrength enough to drag himself out of the bathroom and nd distractions: Heicked on the TV, paged through a stack of magazines, opened the Bible. Havinggrown up without his biological father, whose surname he stopped using as aminor leaguer, Snell thought about what it would mean to leave behind his ve-year-old son, Ethan. Finally hereached for his phone. “I had to explain to my family, my friends,‘This is what I was going to do.’ ”One of his rst calls was to a Marine named Mike Crump, Snell’slifelong best friend, back in Delaware. Crump, all too familiar withthe military’s struggle with mental health issues, “knew whereI was coming from,” Snell says. “I told him I was having theseanxiety attacks and depressed moments, that nobody was therefor me.” Crump told him, “Your family loves you and is alwayshere for you. If you need me there, I’ll be there.” And he remindedSnell of an essential truth: “Baseball is just a job.”
sintensely persnal
as Snell’s anguish was, he wasnot, as he feared, alone. Not even at work. Major league baseball, the country’s oldest professional team sportand a longtime fortress against psychiatry, has recently taken giant steps to openly acknowledge players with emotionalproblems and give them the time and resources to deal with thoseissues. The NFL, NBA and NHL each have had notable cases—from the social anxiety of Dolphins tailback Ricky Williams to theclinical depression of Cavaliers guard Delonte West and formerCanadiens winger Stéphane Richer—but baseball has led the way in supporting a growing number of players who have been braveenough to seek assistance for such problems and speak out aboutthem. “Baseball’s older generations like to say, ‘Guys these days just aren’t as tough,’ ” says Ray Karesky, a licensed psychologist who has directed the Oakland A’s Employee Assistance Program(EAP) since 1984. “But what’s different is justthat guys have come out and actually admit-ted their problems.”Such men vary in star power, fromSnell, who now pitches for the Mariners;to reigning American League Cy Young winner Zack Greinke of the Royals, whohas admitted to suffering from socialanxiety disorder and clinical depres-sion; to Mariners outfielder MiltonBradley, who asked Seattle managerDon Wakamatsu and general man-ager Jack Zduriencik for help with hisemotional problems on May 5. The day before, Bradley had abruptly left SafecoField during a game against the Raysafter he had an emotional are-up fol-lowing a strikeout and was benched by Wakamatsu. “He’s going throughsome very personal and very emotionalthings in his life right now,” Zduriencik told reporters. “But the fact that he hasstood up and asked for us to help him isan extremely important step for him.”Bradley, who subsequently spent two weeks on the restricted list as he under- went counseling for what he has called“stressors, unpleasant thoughts and feel-ings I’ve been having,” was following aprecedent set last year, when ve majorleaguers were placed on the disabled listfor emotional disorders—the rst “mental DLs” since Greinke missedmost of the ’06 season. It was the largest total for any single season in baseball history and one more than the number for all other seasonsin this decade combined. The players were then Tigers pitcher Don-trelle Willis (anxiety disorder); Oakland starter Justin Duchscherer(clinical depression); then Cardinals shortstop Khalil Greene (socialanxiety disorder); then Diamondbacks reliever Scott Schoeneweis(clinical depression); and Reds rst baseman Joey Votto (“stress-related issues” later revealed to be severe depression and anxiety attacks, which twice led to hospitalization last summer). “I really hadn’t acknowledged how important it is to express the things I’d been dealing with on the inside,” Votto said last June. “[The Reds]surprised me with how supportive they are.”This number isn’t anywhere close to those reported for the generalpopulation—the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that26.2% of Americans ages 18 and older suffer from a diagnosablemental disorder in any given year—but for baseball it represents asea change: Between 1972 and ’91 the grand total of mental DLs inthe major leagues was zero. “The simple fact is, the macho worldof professional baseball refused to recognize emotional weak-ness,” Marvin Miller, the former executive director of the players’association, wrote in his 1991 autobiography,
A Whole Dierent Ball Game
. “Not only were baseball executives prejudiced againstplayers with emotional problems, they pretended this didn’t exist.” And it wasn’t only players with obvious emotional problems—such as Red Sox outelder Jimmy Piersall, whose battle with bipolardisorder was immortalized in the 1957 lm
Fear Strikes Out
—who
e z r a s h a w/ g e t t y i ma g e s
mental health in baseball
after leavingthe park duringa game, he askedfor help withwhat he wouldcall “unpleasantthoughts andfeelings i’ve beenhaving.”
milton bradley
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were obliged to suffer in silence. “If [any] guy had a mental issue before, you’d just say, ‘Gethim out of here, the guy’s nuts,’ ” says Stan Conte,the Dodgers’ head trainer and director of medical services. “Now we try to look atit more objectively. We don’t just throwhim away.” A new protocol had been afrmed on April 1, 2009, three days after Willis gavereporters a rambling disquisition on hisanxiety-disorder diagnosis. (“This isnot depression, this is something totally different. . . . I’m not crazy, though my teammates might think that I’m crazy.”)Daniel R. Halem, baseball’s senior VP andgeneral counsel for labor, sent a conden-tial memo to each of the 30 teams spellingout disabled-list regulations. The letter,a copy of which has been obtained by SI,stated that for players to be put on the DLfor emotional disorders, they “must beevaluated and diagnosed by a qualiedmental health professional as sufferingfrom a mental disability that prevents aplayer from rendering services.”Detroit again placed Willis on the DL with an anxiety disorder that June, andevery other mental DL in 2009 occurredafter the rules were reinforced by Halem, which further suggests a cultural shiftin the nation’s pastime. “After the whole Willis situation I’d gured that players would be pretty fearfulabout coming out, and that there wouldn’t be so many publicizeddiagnoses,” says one team ofcial who had seen the memo in April. “But there were.”Perhaps the ofcial shouldn’t have been surprised. Baseball,after all, might be the team sport that puts the most mentalstress on players. As Brewers pitching coach Rick Peterson putsit, “How many apples had to fall off the tree before someonesaid, ‘That’s gravity’?”
e apple
rst landed on Mark Shapiro about 15 yearsago. While working in Cleveland’s player-developmentsystem in the mid-’90s, Shapiro, now the executive vicepresident and general manager of the Indians, sawsomething curious: Outside the elite of the elite, 90% to 95% of players at the Double A level had comparable physical skills. The better players’ competitive advantage came mostly from somethingintangible. “At least in baseball,” Shapiro says, “the mental sideis what allows you to bridge the gap between potential and per-formance.” It turns out that Yogi Berra, who once calculated that“90 percent of the game is half mental,” had something of a point. While every human being reacts differently to mental and emo-tional obstacles—and every profession brings its own difculties—apotent bundle of stressors threaten a major leaguer’s mind:•
Rate o ailure.
Start with the sheer difculty of trying to connect with a spheroid less than three inches in diameter that’s mov-ing at 95 mph. Now add tens of thousands of people watching.“The greatest pure athletes on the face of theearth are in basketball and soccer, but thesingle most difcult skill in sports is hittinga baseball,” says Tom House, a Ph.D. inpsychology who coaches pitchers at USCand once did the same for the Rangers, Astros and Padres. The game is less aboutexertion than precision, and a great suc-cess rate for a hitter involves failing athis job seven times out of ten. Similarly,the difference between a mediocre and agreat pitcher is a matter of mere inches,as became painfully clear when formerPirates All-Star Steve Blass inexplicably lost his ability to throw strikes.
Blass hada 9.85 ERA in the 1973 season, one yearafter he nished second in the Cy Youngrace, without a trace of injury or fatigue
.•
Time to think.
Pitchers and hitters alikehave an enormous amount of time to sitand stew in their mistakes. For many—such as Snell—the stretches of idlenesscan be torturous. “God wanted to givemales something to do to keep them oc-cupied and make them crazy, other than war, [and] he came up with baseball,”says Karesky, who has counseled Viet-nam vets and remen, is EAP director forthe Blue Jays and the Padres, and works with the Diamondbacks. “So much timeto think is likely to produce problems,especially if you’re a perfectionist.” Indeed, studies by Univer-sity of Chicago psychology professor Sian L. Beilock suggest acorrelation between increased conscious thought and chokingunder pressure—something that has long been obvious to majorleaguers. (As Giants pitcher Barry Zito sums it up, “Sometimesit’s better just to go out there and be ignorant.”)•
Solitude.
Baseball players have 81 away games in a season;travel-weary NBA players have 82 games, period. Thus baseballplayers’ personal support structures—whether friends or rela-tives or a church group—aren’t nearby for at least half of themost stressful time of year. “Most people get stability from thefamilies they go home to every night,” says Karesky. “That’snot the world of baseball.” Because teams are away so much,a player on injury rehab, a fertile time for depression in any occupation, is isolated even from his teammates. Duchscherer, whom Karesky treated, felt his depression surge while recover-ing from arthroscopic surgery on his elbow. “[Players are] cutoff from the team, worrying about their careers, scared of losingtheir positions,” says professor Ronald Smith, director of theUniversity of Washington’s clinical psychology training programand a former counselor for the Astros and the Mariners.But the specic provenance of a disorder, whether it’s on the eld(a drawn-out slump, say) or off it (an unexpected death, like that of Votto’s father, Joe, in 2008), may not even matter. Emotions tend tospill over into every area of a player’s life. “It’s one tank,” says DavidR. McDuff, professor of psychiatry at Maryland’s medical school andteam psychiatrist for the Orioles and the Ravens. “We can articially
a l b e h r ma n / a p
mental health in baseball
“i really hadn’tacknowledgedhow important itis to express thethings i’d beendealing with,”he said of hisdepression andanxiety attacks.
joey votto
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