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Rocco Comes Home

In 2003, Rocco Baldelli was a talented kid from Woonsocket, a major-league rookie compared to Joe DiMaggio. Now he’s made it to his dream team, but this player touched by greatness faces an uncertain future.

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“It was last year. We were in his condo in Florida. I asked him, ‘If you were a free agent right now — and we still assumed he’d be a Tampa Bay Ray — if you had to pick one team to play for right now, who would it be?’ And he didn’t answer me. Didn’t say anything for five minutes. Then he says, ‘I know who I’d play for.’ I go, ‘Who?’ He says, ‘Boston.’ I go, ‘Really. Why is that? You always told me it’s not that you didn’t like Boston, but you know there would be a lot of ticket requests, just the whole process of being a hometown kid.’ And he paused and he looked at me. And he goes, ‘Do you know how many lives that would affect by my choosing Boston?’ He goes ‘Do you know how many people would be happy that I’m playing for the Red Sox? Do you know how many smiles from family and friends that I would make?’ ”—Minh Pham, Rocco Baldelli’s best friend from childhood

It had been a summer when it seemed all that people could talk about was the rain that 
returned every day like a bad dream, but on this Saturday in July, just before the All-Star break, the warm afternoon sun spills onto Fenway Park. The game against the Kansas City Royals is still more than three hours away, but the field is already stirring with the casual rituals of pre-game warm-ups: the jogging across the 
outfield grass, the tall young players in red jerseys playing catch, the balls cracking into their mitts. Down the right field line a clump of players gather in a circle and stretch. A Red Sox scout stands by the dugout steps chatting about his upcoming scouting trip to the Dominican Republic, and then to the Gulf Coast league where the newest crop of youngsters are fighting to be noticed. A batting practice coach tugs a baseball-loaded basket on wheels up the dugout steps, steering it towards the batting cage. The early fans sprinkle about the stands; those who know somebody who could get them on the field crowd along the first base line, many clutching programs and baseballs, hoping a player will pause after batting practice to sign.

At 4:30 the last Red Sox player finally emerges from the cool, dark clubhouse and makes his way slowly up the steps and then into the sun to take his swings with the first group of reserves. The number on his jersey is 5. Rocco Baldelli. With all that has happened to him, the nearly three full seasons lost to injuries, the two years of excruciating frustration and fear as a mysterious illness robbed him of strength, caused his legs so much pain at times he was unable to even dig his spikes in at home plate — despite all that — his tall lanky frame still holds the eye, the way film directors say a camera loves certain 
actors. Here, your eyes know, is a ballplayer.

A young woman, her brown hair spilling to her shoulders beneath her baseball cap, BALDELLI emblazoned on the back of her red jersey, calls “Rocco” as he walks to the batting cage. Someone else shouts “Great throw last night.” The night before Rocco had been thrust suddenly and unexpectedly into the game in the fifth inning when centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury had been ejected for arguing with the umpire. Two 
innings later, Rocco had caught a fly ball by the centerfield wall and fired a strike to second base to catch a runner trying to advance. In a one-to-zero victory it proved a game saving throw. This is his job now, to create moments, bursts of excellence, maybe a pinch hit to win a game; or a homerun against the Phillies that went from his bat to the grandstands so fast David Ortiz told him simply, “That was impressive.” Moments to help his team, moments that let the baseball world know 
he still has the gifts; moments that come like shooting stars, vanishing before we are sure what we’ve seen.

He takes his bat into the cage. Six pitches, six ground balls to the right side. “I always take the first round and try to hit the other way,” he will say a few minutes later while he rests back in the dugout.

A few other players take their cuts, then he steps back in. Now he swings away. Two balls fly into the outfield bleachers. Three more in the third round, and the crowd stirs and claps its appreciation. Six rounds and then, unless the unexpected happens again, his day is over. Maybe thirty-five swings. He will not run, nor warm up with everyone else. At Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick he’d be so wired with energy before games he’d sprint down the hallways. Now he measures carefully how much he will ask of his body, still learning 
almost daily what his muscles can do, or cannot.

Because he is polite he will answer a question about his 
little-known illness, but he has grown to hate those questions as if they are burrs he cannot shake. It would have been easier if he’d only had the injuries that come to so many athletes — the ripping of muscles, the torn ligaments, the broken bones — he’d had those too, but at least then we’d understand. But this. First its name was mitochrondial myopathy, which last December was rediagnosed, the illness now named channelopathy, all having to do with cells and ions and electrical impulses that don’t work the way they should. Most fans don’t want to know any of it, not what it is, or about the cocktail of supplements and medicines that help him fight back. Maybe because it’s too frightening. After all, if Rocco Baldelli, an athlete this extraordinary, can wake up one day and not be able to run or jump, if he can be stopped almost in his tracks with no warning by misfiring cells, then what chance do the rest of us have? 

Only six years ago Rocco Baldelli’s future stardom burned so bright it blinded nearly everyone to the fragility of an athlete’s life. Everybody loved Rocco. He was only twenty-one then in the spring of 2003 and already the chatter was this gangly kid from Woonsocket and Cumberland would be baseball’s next superstar. Scouts and baseball experts fell over themselves praising his rare blend of speed, power and baseball savvy, all wrapped inside uncommon humility and courtesy. People said he was so calm, so mature, it was as if he were an old soul, as if he had been here before. It didn’t matter that he never wanted the hoopla. His life was playing baseball, not listening to praise. After all, his father had taught him from as long as he could remember: “There are 
no guarantees. Nothing is for certain.”
Dan “Rocky” Baldelli had once been a fireman. He’d seen proud homes burned to ashes. He’d seen Rocco, for all his precocious gifts, suffer a leg broken so severely he’d been wheelchair bound; Rocco had endured so many illnesses and injuries — Lyme Disease, viral meningitis, a pulled abdominal muscle that cost him much of a senior baseball season — it was as though he was punished by a strange fate for being too perfect. You just had to walk into the father’s check-cashing business and pawnshop in Woonsocket to see proof that life gives no guarantees, certainly not on dreams, all that gold and silver, so much of it once precious to someone, lining the shelves. But still. Even in the cold what-have-you-done-for-me-lately baseball world, it seemed so sudden, to go from the hottest of prospects to a damaged spare part, a bargain priced off-season pickup for the Boston Red Sox, someone to pinch hit against lefties, and play the outfield once or twice a week tops, when a lefty would pitch, and when his body would let him.