RYAN WESTMORELAND
Accepting failure is really not a recommended course. In fact to embrace that kind of thinking is generally repudiated, as it should be. After all, what good can come of it?
It runs counter to all that rings in our ears, those time-worn cliches and sayings dripping with encouragement allowing one to fight the fight, persevere, think positively and ultimately to triumph.
“Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th.”
— Julie Andrews
“When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on for so long in the first place.”
— Unknown
“If you believe it will work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you believe it won’t, you will see obstacles.”
— Wayne Dyer
“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
— Thomas A. Edison
“Winners never quit, and quitters never win.”
— Vince Lombardi
Nobody is perfect.
The world is clearly imperfect.
And baseball is a game of failure.
Three indisputable facts if there ever were any.
Perspective and attitude help to balance the scales somewhat. While to accept failure in life is generally frowned upon, recognizing it for what it is in baseball is applauded. The best hitters are retired 7 of 10 times. The most accomplished pitchers lose games or blow saves. The slickest fielders known for flashing the leather make errors.
Accepting failure to some degree in baseball is to understand the game. But there is no crying in baseball. And you never ever give up. In baseball. Or in anything else.
Major League Baseball as a microcosm of life featured plenty of players throughout its rich history with the odds heavily stacked against them.
Ask (or research) Jim Abbott. Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown. Curtis Pride. Jackie Robinson. Josh Hamilton. Jim Eisenreich. Jim Mecir. Freddy Sanchez. Chad Bentz. Antonio Alfonseca. Hack Wilson. Rube Waddell. Ryne Duren. Pete Gray. William (‘Dummy’) Hoy. Sam Fuld. Bob Wickman. Monty Stratton. Bill Gullickson. Ron Santo. Tony Campana. Ed Dundon. Bert Shepard. Louis Sockalexis. Hugh Daily. Tom Sunkel. Larry Doby. Lou Brissie. Charlie Faust. Al Kaline. Jason Johnson.
All dealt with adversity and overcame it in their own ways. The raw deals and stark realities of life didn’t stop them.
Abbott was born with one working hand and a stump as the other. Brown made the Hall of Fame after losing two fingers (most of one and part of another) in a farm accident when he was a kid. Pride was born deaf. Robinson was born black. Hamilton became addicted to drugs and alcohol. Eisenreich battled Tourette syndrome. Mecir was born with clubfoot as was Sanchez.
Bentz was born with a deformed right hand, only the thumb intact. Alfonseca was born with Polydactyly syndrome, an extra digit on each hand and foot. Wilson presented what appeared to be symptoms of Fetal Alcohol syndrome: large head, small feet, short arms and poor impulse control; his 191 RBI in 1930 remains a record.
Waddell had ADD and was perhaps on the autism spectrum. Ryne Duren could barely see even with those tinted coke-bottle glasses for which he was famous. With 20/200 vision in his left eye and 20/70 in his right he was legally blind, often drunk and threw a 100 mph fastball which sometimes didn’t know where it was headed.
Pete Gray had one working arm. Hoy lost his hearing at 3, after a bout of meningitis. Fuld was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at age 10; Gullickson and Santo bore the same burden. Wickman lost part of a finger on his right hand (index?) in a farming accident. Stratton after a short major league career aborted by a hunting accident pitched in the minors with a prosthetic leg.
Campana was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a child. Ed Dundon was the first deaf player in MLB history and became an umpire after retiring, using hand signals to make his calls. Shepard, thanks to Clark Griffith allowed one run in 5.1 innings of the only game he pitched — with an artificial leg.
Sockalexis was a punching bag due to his Native American (Penobscot) heritage. Hugh Daily struck out 483 in 500 innings with one hand — in one season, 1884 when he finished 28–28 with a 2.43 ERA. Tom Sunkel played legally blind.
Larry Doby was the first African-American in the AL. Lou Brissie pitched in the bigs (Philadelphia Athletics and Cleveland Indians from 1947-’53) after 23 surgeries on a completely shattered left leg courtesy of WWII.
Faust was mentally ill.
Kaline had osteomyelitis as a kid resulting in the removal of a bone in his foot. Jason Johnson was the first major leaguer granted permission to wear an insulin pump on the field.
WHEW!!!
And then there was Ryan Westmoreland.
“…I couldn’t feel anything…My right ear was 100 percent deaf. My left eye was 100 percent blind. At that point , I said, ‘You know what? I can’t do this anymore. I have to retire.’ I retired from pro baseball at 22 years old…The next few weeks after that were without question the most challenging of my life. I would curl up on the couch and constantly ask myself, ‘Why me? Why did this happen to a 21-year-old kid? This many surgeries, this young, why me?’ I thought about suicide. I really did, multiple times. I would think to myself in bed, this is just a huge nightmare. Every day is just the worst day ever. Part of me just wanted it all to end, just to call it quits.”
Two separate brain stem surgeries — first in 2010 and then again in 2012 — to remove cavernous malformations (raspberry-shaped tangles of blood vessels in the brain) and the devastation of learning that surgery #2 would end his playing career were proving to be too much for one young man to take. The malformation had bled into his brain and took with it his motor functions, vision and hearing.
Retirement from baseball at age 22 was unthinkable, unfathomable and never part of the plan.
Ryan Westmoreland, proud son of Portsmouth, R.I., was selected in the fifth round of the 2008 major league draft and signed with the Boston Red Sox for a cool $2 million bonus, a sum befitting of a youngster universally considered one of the most talented prospects to enter the Sox farm system in decades.
In his lone professional season spent with the Lowell Spinners in 2009, he hit .296 with an .885 OBPS, seven HRs and 35 RBI in 60 games. He stole 19 bases without being caught. The future was bright. “I had exceeded all expectations,” Westmoreland fondly recalled.
Until that night.
That night came in early 2010. Westmoreland woke up throughout the overnight unable to see, hear, balance or sit up straight. Cavernous malformation #1 twice bleeding into his brain had taken grip. Life-threatening emergency surgery, recovery and tedious, painful rehab including speech therapy followed.
With herculean will he reached a point where he could play in a competitive game. In his first at-bat (second pitch) in the Red Sox’ Dominican instructional league in December 2011 he was hit in the back of the neck.
No big deal thank God and he soldiered on. “That was incredible,” he conceded with mild amusement. “I said, ‘If I can do this, I can get back to the Red Sox and eventually play at Fenway Park.’”
And he probably could have were it not for another cavernous malformation which had bled in July of 2012.
That was it for his lifelong dream.
In addition to the two brain stem surgeries Westmoreland underwent 16 related procedures.
“I had two options: 1.) End my life, take care of it right then; or 2.) Do everything that I could to raise awareness and ensure that maybe one day, no one has to go through what I did,” he remarked. “It’s a battle. I survived through a combination of my fight, my willpower to live, and this giant support system I’ve had throughout the world, like the Angioma Alliance. [The Angioma Alliance is dedicated to improving the lives of those afflicted with cavernous malformations while trying to promote viable non-surgical solutions to the condition]. It’s helped me feel like I’m not alone and it’s going to get better. It can get better.”
Today Westmoreland works as a personal trainer, coaches high school baseball and takes classes along with acting as a spokesperson for the Angioma Alliance.
“I know this is a really sad story, but on the bright side, I’m alive, I’m standing up on my own, without any help. For the first time in a while, I’m truly happy. I really am.”
Accepting failure in the game of baseball is one thing. The realization that failures in life and the accompanying loss of hope are temporal in nature is another. We are tested every day, every hour, every minute and every second we draw breath. Sign up for this or not, it’s just the way it is.
Simply put, it’s not what happens to you but how you choose to deal with it.
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”
— Mary Anne Radmacher, American author and artist
“We will either find a way or make one.”
— Hannibal (247–182 BC), Carthaginian General
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
— George Herman “Babe” Ruth (1895–1948), Baseball legend
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in January 2019.]
