HIS CAREER ENDED, BUT HE SURVIVED
Former ballplayer faced down flesh-eating disease and won, writes Rob Longley.
If he was being honest to himself on one of those achingly long bus rides across the American heartland, Chris Emanuele might have seen the signs that his baseball dream was reaching life support stage.
At age 25 and in his fourth season in the lowest levels of the Toronto Blue Jays minor league system, the Mississauga native was still anxiously awaiting his big break.
Once a top five outfield prospect in the Jays system, his window of making it to the show was inching toward closure.
Big league dreams die in different forms in baseball stadiums big and small all across America. Some perish because a can’t-miss kid is unable to hit big-league pitching. Some become victims of a numbers game.
It wasn’t a plunging batting average that doomed Emanuele back in the late summer of 2009, nor was it diminished fielding skills. Instead, a life-threatening bout of flesh-eating disease took him for a wild and near death ride and ultimately signalled the end of his heady days on a baseball diamond.
“I’m lucky to be alive and I’m just happy to be walking with both legs,” a no-regrets Emanuele said in a recent interview near his Niagara Falls home. “Just waking up every morning and putting two feet on the ground — I live my life so much differently now.”
With a wife and a daughter and a career in the insurance business now, baseball is still a passion of Emanuele’s, but nowhere near the all-consuming vocation it once was. From working out at the same practice facility as superstar Joey Votto when he was a youngster to a stellar NCAA career at Northeastern University, to the opportunity to shoot for the stars as part of the Jays organization, he was living the dream.
“I was moving up every year,” Emanuele said, the memories of his pro career almost a decade removed but still vivid. “Even when I got sick, I was thinking ‘next year.’ I figured that if I got to Double-A anything can happen. Anything good there, put up some good numbers there and anything can happen. I just never got there.”
As a 26th round pick by the Jays in the 2006 June amateur draft, not making it wasn’t necessarily a shock. For Emanuele, however, the ending sure was.
It is formally known as Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a far more clinical title than the horrific-sounding flesheating disease. And it nearly cost Emanuele his life.
To this day, he doesn’t know exactly how the bacteria-driven disease took root. What he does know is that it entered his body through an ingrown hair on his upper leg. Doctors told him it could have been from dirty clubhouse towels, hotel beds, buses or any of the other day-today accoutrements of life in the minor leagues.
The harrowing experience began at the end of a mundane road trip no different from hundreds of others he’d taken in his career.
It was toward the end of the 2009 season where Emanuele and his Lansing Lugnuts were facing Dayton and he started feeling more than the normal aches that dog most ball players at that time of year.
Emanuele felt a pain in his groin area, but thought little of it. In fact, he went out and played, even hitting a home run in what would be the last pro game of his career. The last thing a player clinging to hopes for that one big shot wanted to do was come across as weak.
“I played the game and I was running all over the place like nothing was wrong,” Emanuele recalls. “My pain tolerance is pretty high so I probably should have said something to the trainer earlier, but I wanted to play, I wanted to get through the games.”
So he played and then boarded a bus for the 360-kilometre ride from Dayton, Ohio, to South Bend, Ind., and crashed hard. When the team pulled into its hotel in the wee hours of the morning, everything was about to change. “I was in pain and when I woke up I had a fever and I was pretty sure something was wrong,” Emanuele said. “I stood up and I couldn’t even move.”
The team trainer recommended an immediate trip to a local walk-in clinic, a move that ultimately saved his leg and likely his life. Things moved quickly from there with a lengthy surgery to stem the spread of the infection.
“I was this close to having them amputate my leg because (the fluid from the bacteria) came all the way down my leg,” Emanuele said. “They said a couple of more days I probably would have died.”
As it was, Emanuele spent almost a month in hospital, with his mother and father at his side for much of it.
While not necessarily destined for greatness, Emanuele was certainly well positioned on the road to success alongside some accomplished young Canadian baseball players. And he kept some big-time company along the way as he pursued his goal of playing the game he loved at the highest level.
There was the occasional association with Votto, who even as a kid was turning heads in the Toronto area long before going onto stardom with the Cincinnati Reds. Once immersed in the Baseball Canada program, at various points Emanuele would find himself in a lineup with eventual Jays Russell Martin and John Axford and other future major-leaguers such as Adam Loewen.
“Chris played at the highest levels provincially and national junior program for two years and experience collegiate baseball at a high level as well and was successful at all those avenues,” says Greg Hamilton, Canada’s national team coach. “Then he got the opportunity to experience professional baseball and take a shot at it.”
As the talented youngster continued to develop, he played for the Canadian junior national squad and eventually earned a full scholarship to Northeastern University in Boston. From there he was drafted by Toronto, for whom he played parts of four seasons though never graduating behind what is known as high A ball with the Dunedin Blue Jays.
“I felt pretty comfortable in the sport,” Emanuele said. “I worked really hard at it. I wasn’t one of these kids who was God given. I had some ability but I definitely worked at it. I spent a lot of nights in my back yard all by myself. In high school, I wasn’t a big party guy. I just wanted to focus more on my baseball career.”
Even after the health scare that altered the course of his life, Emanuele wasn’t done with baseball. The flesh-eating disease stripped him of more than 25 pounds, but it didn’t crush the dream.
By the next spring, he was back here in Dunedin to pursue what he hoped would be a season of redemption.
It didn’t happen.
“I put weight back on and had a great spring training but it just didn’t work out numbers wise,” Emanuele said. “My age was probably an issue and where I fit in. And with a week left in camp they let me go.”
Given all that he had been through in the previous 12 months, it was a tough blow to Emanuele — one that at the time was difficult to digest.
“I’ll be honest with you, I was,” Emanuele said when asked if he was sour about being cut so soon after his brush with death. “After I got released I was upset. My whole life I did this sport and put everything into it. I didn’t think I’d be wearing a suit to work every day. I thought I’d be wearing a suit to work and putting on a uniform.”
To this day, Emanuele believes that if he’d had a shot at Double-A ball with the Jays, the opportunity may have changed the course of his baseball life. If there is a regret with his life in baseball, it’s that it didn’t happen. He’ll never forget the day he was drafted by the Jays — even if it was way down in the 26th round and he still has the signing bonus check that he never cashed framed and mounted at his parent’s Mississauga home.
“It was a great experience, something I can’t even put into words how amazing it was,” Emanuele said. “You don’t appreciate it as much when you are doing it.”
Dealing with the highs and the lows — and most of all the prohibitive odds against making it all the way to the stage upon which current Jays stars such as Josh Donaldson and Martin find themselves — eventually was an eye-opener.
And by living and loving it, Emanuele believes he can help others prepare for life in what players still colloquially refer to as The Show.
“Now that I know, it’s just so hard,” Emanuele said. “Of all the sports, if you make it to the big leagues it’s almost a miracle. You have to do everything right unless you are a one-in-a-million stud.
“You’ve got to get breaks. You’ve got to stay healthy. You’ve got to be liked and you’ve got to get played. You’ve even got to hope that guys in front of you get injured. It’s a brutal business.”
Because he still loves the game, Emanuele hopes that he can still help others embrace it but to do so with eyes wide and open.
“You never know down the road where my experiences might lead me,” he said. “Whether it be coaching or talking to kids about how important getting your education is as opposed to trying to make it in baseball right out of high school or whatever I can help them with.
“When a kid is deciding ‘Do I want to go to school or do I want to play ball’ I want to be that person who can say here’s why maybe you should go to school and lead them along that path.”
He is content now, with a young family and a career, one at least partly enabled by the business degree he got at Northeastern. He still dreams about coaching one day and even scouting or possibly pursuing a job on the business side ...
“I didn’t get there, but I don’t regret anything,” Emanuele said. “I’m happy to be alive.”
I’m lucky to be alive and I’m just happy to be walking with both legs