Irvine’s Etheridge writes new script on his career
UC Irvine pitcher Wes Etheridge can’t remember why he veered off track, only that he never felt comfortable in a classroom and was easily bored. By the time he reached middle school he routinely concocted ways to escape and meet up with friends to smoke pot.
“I learned how to forge my mom’s signature,” he said. “I’d write a note in terrible handwriting and do the signature and turn it in, like for dentist and doctor’s appointments. They wouldn’t know. I’d just go to the beach and hang out all day.”
He bounced from Huntington Beach High to Marina High to Cypress College. He saw friends fall prey to drug addiction. Some got locked up. Or worse.
“I watched a lot of people throw their lives down the drain,” he said. “Of my best friends, I’d say about three or four kids, one OD’d on heroin and one was a meth addict.”
Baseball was one of the constants in his life. He started playing when he was 4 years old and had a strong arm, but he never made the game a priority. Little besides partying was important to him until he was 20 and was given a Bible by a family friend, Mark Ward, setting him on a path he follows day by challenging day.
Before Ward intervened, Etheridge had been plagued by injuries and an eating disorder that whittled his 6-foot-1 frame from 195 pounds to 140. When he got the Bible, Etheridge said, snapping his fingers, “I could eat healthy food again.”
It also inspired a dream in which he saw a white, glowing figure he’s sure was God.
“I can’t convince anyone else, but I know. It scared me straight,” he said. “I haven’t touched anything since then, and I won’t. There’s no more peer pressure.
“I got my second chance. If I start doing it again, I’m done.”
Etheridge, 22, says he has been clean for more than two years. Academically a junior but in his first year at Irvine, he is 10-4 with a 3.09 earned-run average and 88 strikeouts in 99 innings for the 12th-ranked Anteaters.
Etheridge said he was never “a druggie,” but he ran with what he called “the wrong crowd” and defied his parents’ attempts to set him straight. “They did everything they could, but once they turned their back I was doing whatever I could get into, pretty much,” he said.
“I remember being a little kid and my dad talking about there being a fork in the road and he was always like, ‘You’re going farther and farther the wrong way.’ It was supposed to scare me. It really didn’t. I had to figure it out myself. Without him being there and my mom, it could have been ugly.”
His mother, Wendi, knew her son was ditching school and “dabbling in questionable areas.” However, she had faith that he would turn himself around.
“The main difference between Wesley now versus his younger days, in my opinion, is his humbleness and his ability to channel his energy,” she said.
“Material things are irrelevant to him and his mind and body balance is something most people seek throughout their lives.”
Ward knew Etheridge from the time Wes was 6, but they had lost touch. Ward was aware of Etheridge’s misdeeds but interpreted them as a cry for help from a boy he remembered as bright and inquisitive.
“He was searching, and sometimes in life when you search you find bad things,” said Ward, who coached at Marina High for eight years before joining the Junior Olympics baseball program.
“He might have been lost, but he was just searching for his way. He was a very coachable kid in life.”
Finding a better way to live was his first step, but the path hasn’t been smooth.
“You put your faith in God to put you where he wants you to be, but at the same time, in the transition period, this is weird,” Etheridge said.
“I have my friends from my past, which I can’t hang out with now because of what they’re doing, and then I have new friends who I can’t relate to in certain aspects of life because we grew up different. I feel like I’m stuck in the middle.”
Baseball has helped him fit in, during twice-a-week Bible study sessions with teammates and on the field. After years of taking his talent for granted, Etheridge has a new appreciation for the game, and he’s eager to see how far he can go.
He’s eligible to be drafted this year, and Ward has touted him to major league scouts as a pitcher who’s not overpowering but will persist and give his team a chance to win.
“I’ve coached kids with a lot more talent than him but not better as a pitcher,” Ward said. “He has a way of pitching that’s unique. He’s a finesse pitcher who strategizes. He can match wits with the best of them and he’s not going to give in to your strengths.
“The guys that make it are the ones with a brain, who stay true to form. He’s going to get a shot, and when he does, he’s going to go a long way.”
Etheridge has already come a long way in finding redemption. He’s intent on continuing along that path.
“I was lucky,” he said, “finding God that put me in the right place and let me get on with my life the right way.”
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