MICHAEL AND CLIF LORENZEN
As most little boys do, Michael Lorenzen wanted to be just like his dad.
Clif Lorenzen loved baseball and hoped that Michael would love it just as much — maybe even more. So he exposed his son to the game at an early age with gentle encouragement as opposed to overbearing and stifling ‘coptering’ and well, it happened.
Same thing with music, particularly the sounds of The Who.
But there was a darker side to Clif which stretched a mile wide.
He was also the dad who habitually lied and stole, an alcoholic and substance abuser whose booze-fueled battles with Michael’s mother Cheryl, also addled by drink and drug, were the rule and not the exception in their Anaheim, California home.
He was the dad who ran out on his family when Michael was 12 to skirt arrest on grand theft and forgery charges. Warrants were issued for his arrest three times in the early 2000s and he was convicted of theft in 2002. Michael remembers his dad spending three months in the can at one point in his childhood.
And it was in 2004, when his dad was charged with the two misdemeanors, that he skipped town.
To add a little salt to the open wound as Michael lamentably recalls, it was Christmas Eve. Tough to take.
More difficult to stomach? Clif Lorenzen — unbeknownst to Michael at the time — was gone for good.
Friday night August 19, 2016. Twenty-four-year-old Cincinnati Reds reliever Michael Lorenzen, activated from the bereavement list following the death of his father, was summoned to pitch by manager Bryan Price, asked to protect a 6–1 Reds lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
He had taken a three-day leave on the previous Tuesday and returned to California to be with his family. There was one out in the seventh inning and two men on when Lorenzen trotted to the mound from the bullpen to his new entrance music, “Who Are You?” by The Who.
The 28,184 fans at Great American Ball Park looked on expectantly. Somehow — most surely by the grace of God if you asked Michael — he was able to retire the final two batters in the top of the seventh.
Needed to pitch the next inning, Lorenzen was allowed to hit for himself in the home half of the seventh with two men on base and two out. His emotions were understandably all over the place.
“Even after the third out of my first inning I threw, I had to go back into the bathroom because I broke down,” Lorenzen said. “There were some teammates back there that were able to help me out. I was able to go out and hit.”
Dodgers reliever Pedro Baez, an imposing fireballer aptly nicknamed La Mula, was on the hill. For only the fourth time all season Lorenzen stepped into the right-handed batter’s box, barely able to hold the lumber.
On the first pitch he saw in this fateful at-bat — a 97 mph fastball with hair — he launched a 3-run opposite-field missile capping the Reds 9–2 victory over the Dodgers, the first home run of Lorenzen’s big league career.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
“I think it was emotional for all of us, none more certainly than Michael after what he’s been through here recently,” Price remarked. “I never thought I would see something like that, this majestic and poetic and emotional as that moment. For him to first come in and put out a rally and then face Baez, who is a big, hard-throwing guy and hit a home run off a 97–98 mph fastball, it seems unlikely. It seemed like divine intervention, for sure.”
Lorenzen agreed heartily. “Definitely, everything happens for a reason,” he said. “It was something that I look and just praise God for. It was something special, not only for me, but for my family. Everyone that has been supporting us, I just want to say thank you for the prayers and just the support. It’s really helped out a lot, just people reaching out. It’s humbled me, this whole situation. Everything that happened tonight, I don’t think I will ever feel that way again.”
Losing his biggest baseball cheerleader while still a boy could have portended disaster for Michael Lorenzen, as he gained an independence that threatened his devotion to the game and the opportunity to better himself.
Addition by subtraction guaranteed a more quiet home life but also the freedom to make questionable choices. In order to make rent every month, his mom took a job working nights in a restaurant at the Disneyland Resort. Twelve-year-old Michael figured out that he had to be in the house by the time his mother’s shift was over and just before her 1:00 AM return.
Teenage rebellion was knocking on Michael’s door — hard. He spent a lot of time skateboarding with friends, drinking and smoking plenty of weed. Unlike one of his older brothers Jonathan, a bona fide big-league prospect, Michael never ran into legal trouble of his own growing up but the more he drank, smoked and shirked responsibility a very real and not-so-pretty-ending was coming into sharper focus for him.
It took a chance meeting with a stranger on a pier at Huntington Beach while with his buddies, to provide the revelatory moment. Espousing the virtues of God in a gentle manner and unfazed by the teenage ridicule he was enduring in response, the stranger made a lasting impression on Michael — a sentiment he wisely kept to himself.
He continued that evening’s debauchery but it wasn’t long before he recognized that if his baseball talent was a God-given gift, then it was his duty as a Christian to maximize it so as to glorify God. Over time, out went the alcohol and drugs, in came the Bible and the rest, as they say, is history.
Michael Lorenzen earned a baseball scholarship to Cal. State Fullerton, a D-1 baseball powerhouse, as a two-way player; the boy could always hit. He played center field when he wasn’t pitching and was adept enough at both to be selected by the Reds with the 38th. overall pick in the 2013 draft, making his major league debut on the mound two years later.
Lorenzen’s career totals look like this: 14–13 W-L; 4.49 ERA; 122 G; 21 GS; 236.2 IP; 242 H; 203 Ks; 100 BB; 11 IBB; 1.45 WHIP; 1 Save; 7 SVO. He was a superstar in college and may yet achieve that exalted status as a major leaguer. He’s only 25.
But no matter how you slice it — divine intervention or otherwise — Michael Lorenzen, no small thanks to Clif, has already won.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in September 2017.]
