Shoulder surgery has affected countless baseball players. The shoulder is one of the most complex joints in the body and complications can arise from over use. For me, it ended my career.
I have played baseball my entire life. From the moment I started playing, I fell in love.
Growing up in a baseball lifestyle I was accustom to long practices, over using my arm and countless miles of traveling to games.
As I grew older, baseball became more than a sport to me. It was everything I had. I was playing year round baseball by the time I was 11 years old. Playing baseball year round took a toll on me mentally and physically but I loved every second of the agony.
I started having shoulder problems when I was a sophomore in high school. At that point I had already seen some of my team suffer from arm injuries and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried.
I went to the doctor but there was no damage to my shoulder when I had a magnetic resonance imaging test, an MRI. Unfortunately, my shoulder was still in pain but I played through the pain for the rest of my high school baseball career.
After graduation I was fortunate enough to have the privilege of playing collegiate baseball.
My arm problems continued and I took my freshman season as a rebuilding year at Cal State University Monterey Bay.
I found myself resenting my choice of going to CSUMB because I was unable to play baseball. Baseball was my primary reason for choosing CSUMB.
A series of events led me to transfer from CSUMB and I found myself at Pacific University.
Summer baseball was a tough road before I packed up and made the move to Pacific.
My shoulder became more and more painful, so I went in for another MRI. The MRI showed two tears in my rotator cuff and a tear in my labrum. The combination the three tears put me on the operating table.
I had surgery late last June and am still recovering. I am unable to play the sport I was so deeply devoted to. The baseball community knows the quote, “there’s no crying in baseball,” from “A League of Their Own.” When I had to clear out my locker in the clubhouse however, there was crying in baseball.
A culmination of emotions overcame me and I knew I was losing one of the biggest parts of my life.
I was lucky to have the baseball career I did and I was expecting a vacant space that I would never be able to fill.
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