Tragic story of a Blue Jays prospect
JAKE ELIOPOULOS DEFEATED PLENTY OF FOES, BUT COULDN’T BEAT DEPRESSION
Jim Eliopoulos is sitting in his dead son’s bedroom watching a home movie he shot at an orphanage in Lviv, Ukraine, almost 25 years ago. There is a room crowded with cribs onscreen, crammed with tots making a tremendous racket while eyeing the group of strangers who had come to see them, including Jim and his former wife, Lea.
The Toronto couple tried for years to get pregnant. They went through fertility treatments. Nothing worked. So they looked to adopt, filling out a raft of paperwork and, finally, in 1993, boarding a Ukraine-bound flight, which is where they met “Jake.”
He was impossibly skinny, with a tousle of blond hair and brandishing two plastic alligators. Jim and Lea loved him instantly. He was 22 months old.
“Jake’s birth name was Sergei,” Jim says, chuckling. “He was the one Sergei who never, ever, caught on to skating.”
They named him Jake Thomas James Eliopoulos, and he grew into a fun-loving, infectiously goofy, 6-foot-3, left-handed-throwing teenage baseball star, with buckets of friends, nurturing parents and a 90mph fastball.
By age 16, Jake was playing with the Canadian junior national baseball team. By age 17, big league baseball scouts were buzzing about the new prospect from the Toronto suburbs. Jake was selected 68th overall by his hometown Blue Jays in the June 2009 draft, just two weeks after his 18th birthday.
He was a kid on the cusp at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, wearing a Blue Jays jersey with his last name and his lucky number 15 on the back.
Now his father is in his old bedroom in a Toronto bungalow, half-wrecked by grief, watching home movies and talking about his boy’s life and the mental illness that robbed him of it. Jake Eliopoulos died on April 29, 2013, after a fifth suicide attempt accomplished what the previous four could not.
He was 21 years old.
“We are people in a club that nobody wants to be a part of,” Jim says. “But once you are in it the question becomes, what are you going to do about it?”
Jim has never spoken to the media about his son’s death. He only agreed to do so now because enough time has passed and because while talking about Jake won’t bring him back, it could help some other family with a Jake of their own.
Between 10 and 20 per cent of Canadian youth will be afflicted by some form of mental illness. Suicide is second only to accidents as a leading cause of death among Canadians age 15-24, claiming about 500 lives annually, the majority of them male.
“I am going to fight the thing that did this to my son,” Jim says.
Another home movie: The kid with the tousle of blond hair is at preschool near his parents’ place on Bastedo Avenue in Toronto. His father arrives, telling him there is a surprise at home: a baby brother, Derek. Little Jake wheels about the class, saying goodbye and repeating in a singsong voice: “Derek is home, Derek is home, Derek is home.”
A baby sister, Zoe, followed a few years later.
“Jake made us a family,” Jim says. “He brought us the luck to have Zoe and Derek. He loved his siblings.”
Colin Lang met Jake in Grade 6 at St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic School in Newmarket, after the family moved to the suburb north of Toronto. The schoolyard was their stadium, where they imagined themselves as World Series heroes, slugging home runs, striking out batters and celebrating with slushies at the gas station after.
“Jake was always the pitcher,” Colin says.
The friends listed “professional baseball player” as their future occupations in their Grade 8 yearbooks. But Jake’s passion for the game wasn’t entirely self-derived. Jim was a catcher with the 1984 Canadian Olympic team and later worked in the Blue Jays bullpen, warming up pitchers. He gave Jake his first bat at age four and put a batting tee in their backyard — with a ball attached to a string.
“He’d be out back when I left for work and out back when I got home,” Jim says. “Jake didn’t need to be pushed. He truly loved baseball.”
He crackled with energy and was later diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and Tourette’s Syndrome. His parents opted not to medicate him. His teachers would send him to the hallway to do a few laps whenever he lost focus in class. The strategy worked. Jake was an average student and, according to his father, not an exceptional baseball player — until he grew and got stronger (by lifting a soup can) and blossomed around age 14. Two years later, the young lefty was pitching for the Canadian juniors, touring the United States and the Caribbean.
He went from nowhere to major growth spurt to major league prospect to Blue Jays draft pick in 2009. There were no bumps on his fairy tale road, not in the beginning.
But Jake did not sign a contract with the Jays, despite the club’s reported $530,000 offer. Many draftees elect not to sign, and instead pursue a scholarship to an American university or junior college, in the hopes they will mature physically and mentally and be better prepared for the grind of professional sport when it comes.
(The other hope is that they improve their draft position in a subsequent year and get rewarded with a bigger signing bonus. Canadian Josh Naylor, picked 12th overall by the San Diego Padres, signed for $2.25-million in 2015.)
Greg Hamilton coached Jake with the juniors. He remembers him as a lefty, in the truest sense.
“They always say lefthanders and goaltenders are a little different, and Jake had a little of the lefthander in him — in a positive way,” Greg says, laughing. “He made people laugh. He wasn’t someone to worry about. He was a real fun kid to be around.”
The emphasis with the Canadian baseball program was on developing talent, not necessarily winning. Jake was a raw pitcher with a promising gift, but could be wildly inconsistent. He might strike out six batters and then walk the next six. In an environment where teaching was the focus, that was not a problem. But at Chipola College, the baseball power in Marianna, Fla., where Jake landed in the summer of 2009, it was. Success there was measured by results, not potential.
Jake won and lost at Chipola, but mostly he struggled, on the mound and in the classroom and in his personal life. He pulled away from his parents, whose marriage split apart in the months after his departure.
For the first time, Jake confronted the question even supremely gifted athletes face: what if he wasn’t good enough? Who was Jake Eliopoulos, if he wasn’t Jake Eliopoulos the ballplayer?
“A lot of times people become depressed because they have experienced a big trauma, and the trauma here is his identity is questioned,” says Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor and Canada Research Chair in Children’s Mental Health and Violence Prevention at the University of Ottawa. “If all your eggs are in one basket, you are especially vulnerable.”
Studies show a link between ADHD and Tourette’s sufferers and depression, and a link between early childhood trauma and depression. All that Jim and Lea knew about Jake when they adopted him was that his mother gave him up at five days old.
Vaillancourt says Jake’s profile posited several possible “pathways to depression.” Plus, he was at an age when young males are most at risk of suicide, simply because of where they are in terms of brain development. She describes Jake’s situation as the “perfect storm.”
Jake left Chipola in April 2010 and didn’t return.
“He came home with this alarming black cloud over him,” Jim says. “We started offering alternatives — ‘It doesn’t have to be about baseball, Jake, you can be whatever you like.’ ”
Jake was put on ADHD medication for the first time. He saw a therapist. The cloud seemed to lift. And baseball hadn’t forgotten about him. The Los Angeles Dodgers drafted Jake in the 15th round in 2010. Toronto picked him for a second time, a year later, in the 43rd round. But by then the tendons in his magical left arm were frayed. He had surgery to repair them, then pulled away from baseball altogether, telling his family and friends what he truly wanted was a “simple” life: to become a carpenter and build a cabin away from the rush of the city, to sell the things he made, and to chase sunrises with his dog, Max.
“I know Jake loved baseball,” Zoe says. “But at a certain point he fell out of love, once it started getting too professional, because I think it was too much pressure. He was mentally and physically exhausted by it, and he didn’t know how to tell us.”
Jake would sit in his room, listening to country music, looking at images on his computer of a “normal brain” alongside an “ADHD brain.”
Jim would coax him to play catch at a nearby park. No scouts. No expectations, just a father and son, tossing around the ball.
“He would come home smiling,” Jim says. “But the smiles became harder and harder to find.”
The summer of 2012 was the first since age five that Jake didn’t play organized baseball. His Twitter feed from that time hints at his deepening struggles.
“How do you live such a happy life?” reads one tweet. “Just because you’re breathing doesn’t mean you’re alive.” “Another sleepless night #insomnia.” “So tempted.”
Grant Grzywniak, another close friend, would visit Jake at his mother’s house during the final months of his life to play cards — Crazy Eights and Go Fish. He worried over how quiet his friend had grown, and could not help but notice how much weight he had lost.
“You could tell Jake wasn’t looking after himself,” Grant says.
He tried to end his life for the first time after a weekend away at a family cottage. Jim remembers him lying on a gurney at Southlake hospital in Newmarket, weeping.
“I know he was sad, I know he had been sad for a number of months, maybe a year, but this was not so much of a wake-up call so much as: here it is, this is what it was leading to, and we are experiencing it for the first time,” Jim says.
Jake told his parents he wasn’t afraid to die. He expressed to Lea that he felt like a failure. Jim urged Jake to see his life in its totality: Here he was, a Ukrainian orphan, who had successfully managed Tourette’s and ADHD and had seen more of the world by age 17 than most people do in a lifetime.
He had even pitched at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
“You are a young human being who has overcome incredible odds,” Jim wrote in an email to Jake in November 2012, pleading with him to feed off his successes, to work with his doctor, to lean on his family and to become whoever it is he wanted to be.
He attended outpatient programs at Southlake. He met regularly with his psychiatrist in Toronto. Doctors tinkered with his medication, but the cloud wouldn’t lift. Jake promised Grant he would be at his birthday party on Saturday, April 27, 2013. A group of old buddies gathered in Grant’s basement, watching hockey, drinking beers and joking around.
“Jake was upbeat and smiling and laughing and talking to everyone,” Grant says. “I was so happy for him, because I thought I was finally seeing him turn a corner.”
Jake met his father for Sunday dinner at a sandwich shop. He told him about his Saturday with the boys, and how he was looking forward to starting carpentry courses at a community college. It had been a long time since Jim had heard Jake talk about the future.
“He had his old effervescence back,” he says.
He hugged his son goodbye and told him he loved him.
Zoe woke up in a funk Monday morning and left her mom’s house without saying goodbye to Jake, a ritual somehow overlooked on that day. Jake was six years older. He called Zoe, “Tuna.” She has no idea why, but that was Jake: goofy. She could tell him anything.
“Jake was my angel,” she says.
He was dead by the time she got home from school.
“It is not that he wanted to die, it is that he didn’t want to live,” Jim says.
Jake Thomas James Eliopoulos is buried in a cemetery in Toronto’s east end. His family meets there on his birthday and the anniversary of his death, sending helium balloons skyward with handwritten messages inside.
“I believe Jake is watching over us,” says Zoe, who is studying to be a social worker. “His life made me who I am.”
Jake’s friends formed “Team Jake” after his death, and participate in an annual charity bike ride for the Canadian Mental Health Association. They have raised more than $50,000 in his name.
Jim thinks of his son as a shooting star, a light that burned bright but wasn’t destined to burn for long.
“It is OK, you can talk to me about Jake,” he says. “It is a gift, because by talking about him you are remembering that Jake lived, rather than reminding me that he died.”
He slips another tape into the video player, and there is Jake. He is eight years old and kicking at the dirt, holding a ball in his left hand and wearing a jersey several sizes too big. He is two years younger than most of the other kids, including the giant at home plate holding the bat.
Jake twitches, rears back and lets fly. Strike three. Then he runs toward the dugout, a little boy, with his chin tucked to his chest, a little boy, smiling and carefree.
THE SMILES BECAME HARDER AND HARDER TO FIND.