Eisenreich’s Obstacles in Life, Not Baseball

In the game of baseball, “playing hurt” usually means taking the field with a sore ankle or a pulled muscle, maybe a swollen gland or even a hangover.

But there have been players in the grand old game who give new meaning to the catch phrase.

In the wake of the Cal Ripken Jr. dramatics of recent vintage, there was this TV segment about his streak’s predecessor, Lou Gehrig.

It made the point that Lou Gehrig’s disease--amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--was a progressive degenerative disorder that usually took as many as a dozen years to kill its victims.

Gehrig’s case was diagnosed in June of 1939. He was dead in June of 1941.

The presumption the segment made was that baseball’s “Iron Horse,” a man described by a doctor as having an “unreal” threshold of pain, might have been suffering from his fatal disease for years before it could bench him. Gehrig might have been in a lineup when he should have been in intensive care.

They didn’t realize he was sick till his average dropped to .286 and his homer production to 29.

Grover Cleveland Alexander was one of baseball’s greatest pitchers. The apocryphal story about him is that someone asked him to hit a squirrel in the eye with a baseball once and Alexander said, “Which eye?”

He won 373 games, 90 of them shutouts. He had a deserved reputation for heavy drinking, but evidence shows that much of his behavior ascribed to alcoholism was often caused by epilepsy. Teammates had to hold him down in the dugout during seizures. Their “cure” was pouring brandy down his throat, which may have given Alex the idea in the first place.

Ron Santo was a homer-hitting third baseman for the Cubs--he hit 342 of them--who played for 15 years with diabetes without disclosing it to anybody. He had three .300 seasons, drove in more than 100 runs four times while maintaining a nice balance in his body between insulin and sugar. Not easy for a guy in a desk chair, never mind 90 feet from hot smashes off the bat.

And the other night at Dodger Stadium, the usual happened. The Dodgers got beat by a player named Jim Eisenreich.

Jim Eisenreich would make the Hall of Fame if he played the Dodgers every night. He’d make the world forget Ty Cobb. He was batting .425 against the Dodgers at the start of business this year. And so far this year, he is batting .400 against them with three doubles, a triple and three home runs.

So, no one should have been surprised the other night when, in a game that was scoreless, Eisenreich began the eighth inning with a single, took second on a single by Andy Van Slyke, reached third on a sacrifice bunt, then scored the only run on a sacrifice fly to left, giving the Phillies a 1-0 victory.

Of course, Eisenreich hits everybody pretty well--he’s batting .315 against the league as a whole and has hit .300 every year for the Phillies.

What makes the story remarkable is that Jim Eisenreich hits the ball at all. He is one of the relatively few people in the world afflicted with a disorder known as Tourette’s syndrome. It is an affliction not unlike epilepsy, a neurological disorder marked by involuntary spasms, tics, even self-harmful behavior. Children stricken with it have been known to have to wear football helmets to keep from bashing their heads against concrete walls and to have to be tranquilized to keep from biting their lips off.

It produces in the victim involuntary movements, an attention-span deficit, even a stream of repetitive curse words and invective over which the spewer has no control. It’s almost as if the individual became Mr. Hyde. Persons with Tourette’s who have never used four-letter words suddenly can sound like ferry boat captains whose craft have just run aground, or a truck driver in traffic.

It is tricky. It can masquerade as other disorders, hyperactivity in children, Parkinsonism. In medieval times, it was often mistaken for insanity, which it can also mimic, and relatives with Tourette’s would frequently find themselves locked in the attic in the family mansions, hidden away from the neighbors’ curiosity.

It is an unpretty, unwelcome addition to your life, debilitating and humiliating.

“I was embarrassed and shy,” Eisenreich was recalling at the ballpark the other night. “I avoided girls and social situations. I wouldn’t even drive the main roads downtown. I wanted to hide.”

The last thing you think you would want to do with Tourette’s is try to hit the major league curveball. Or even the minor league version.

Jim Eisenreich was a gifted baseball player growing up in Minnesota. He could cope with split-finger fastballs, line drives in the gap and the hit-and-run. He couldn’t cope with his own strange impulses. He sometimes acted like a man haunted. The game thought he was one of those guys who couldn’t handle crowds. But it was a crowd of one--Jim Eisenreich--that he couldn’t overcome.

He made his way quickly out of the minor leagues and onto the Minnesota Twins’ roster when the disease, which is believed to be triggered by a shortage of the brain-triggered chemical dopamine, manifested itself. He had no trouble with baseball. He had great trouble with one player, Jim Eisenreich, who was giving him fits. When well-meaning friends assured him “It’s all in your head,” they were too right.

He quit baseball. For three years. Then, a doctor diagnosed the malady. He prescribed not a cure but a control. Jim Eisenreich could be Dr. Jekyll again.

He returned to the game, first at Kansas City and now with the Phillies.

Jim Eisenreich joins that hardy company of big leaguers who make playing merely “hurt” seem sissy. These are men who defy impairments that would institutionalize less doughty mortals.

He also joins the late Roberto Clemente as an all-time Dodger destroyer.

Clemente was so Dodger destructive that, when told he had just gotten his 3,000th hit, Dodger Manager Walt Alston said:

“Lord! Did he get them all off us?” Jim Eisenreich began the weekend with 896 hits, and not all of them off the Dodgers, only 47 of them. But six of them were home runs, 28 of them drove in runs and many of them were game winners.

But the foe he conquered does not come in Dodger blue. It comes in disguise, doesn’t play by the rules and mocks and throws at your head.

For Eisenreich, after beating Tourette’s, the Dodgers are a box of candy.