Diekman sees colon disease as part of life
Pitcher hasn’t let his colitis stop baseball career
CHICAGO — When Jake Diekman was in the minor leagues, there were times his ulcerative colitis flared up so much, he’d spend the night in an icefilled bathtub.
The condition didn’t keep him from pitching, however. The lefthander was always ready. “That’s just how you are in the bullpen,” the new A’s reliever said. “Once they call down there, that’s all you’re thinking about.”
Diekman, who is from tiny Wymore, Neb., was diagnosed when he was 10 after a family trip to California; at first, the thought was he’d picked up a bug, but doctors in Omaha, Neb., ran some tests and discovered the form of inflammatory bowel disease.
For a long time, things were manageable. But that changed once Diekman was drafted.
“I had it under control for the most part but once I got into pro ball, the stresses and all the travel, the fluctuations of when you eat and don’t eat really triggered it,” he said on The Chronicle’s “A’s Plus” podcast this week. “After 2016, that offseason, is when it flared up worst.”
With only one real option remaining and Rangers spring training a few months away, Diekman had surgery to remove his colon, four days after he turned 30. “The second I woke up, I felt 100 times better,” he said.
Ten weeks later, his small intestine was used to reconstruct a new colon, and for more than five months, he had a colostomy bag. But in July 2017, he was reconnected and everything worked perfectly. The next Monday, he was throwing a baseball again.
“I remember when he called that winter and said the doctors had recommended the surgery, he told me didn’t want to be away from the team,” Texas general manager Jon Daniels said. “I said, ‘Jake, what are you talking about, what did they tell you?’ And he said the longer you wait, the greater risk you are for colorectal cancer. I said, ‘That’s on a different level. That’s not a sprained ankle to deal with.’ ”
Diekman’s path to the big leagues wasn’t easy, coming from a town so small, just more than 1,100 residents when he lived there, “We didn’t have a stoplight through town — it was one blinking light, just to warn you to slow down,” he said.
There was no high school baseball team, so during the summer, Diekman played American Legion ball, in which he was “a skinny, scrawny thing,” according to one of his former coaches, Allan Henrichs. Henrichs’ late brother, Carey, coached Diekman through much of his amateur career.
Although Diekman says he didn’t fully grow into his body until he was in junior college, Allan Henrichs said people still talk in Wymore about Diekman’s 17strikeout performance in the state tournament — in just seven innings — and he remains the pride of the area.
“The whole county knows who he is,” Henrichs said. “He’s a hometown kid. He always will be.”
Diekman describes himself as a typically “very weird” lefty, and Henrichs remembers him coming out to “Wild Thing” playing on the publicaddress system — once while wearing black glasses, a la Charlie Sheen’s Ricky Vaughn in “Major League.” Henrichs also recalls one time when all the players decided to bleach their hair — and Diekman’s reddish hair came out blue.
“His mom, Billie, was furious,” Henrichs said.
Billie Diekman, an actress who worked in community theater and who appeared in “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” and “Citizen Ruth,” died of a heart attack at 57, when Diekman was in junior college. He got the news from his coach while on the field.
“Luckily, I had a teammate who drove me three hours home because I was in no shape to drive,” Diekman said. “I just completely had to block everything out — thank God for baseball, because it really took my mind off everything. But it was hard.”
Diekman has had therapy to deal with the loss of his mother and he still talks to her, especially during the national anthem. He’s very close to his dad, Paul, who has come on some road trips with him.
Diekman worked with his dad one summer during high school, at a lawnmower factory in nearby Beatrice, Neb., but he did not get the sweet job one of his teammates landed. “I was putting small parts in boxes and then stacking them in bigger boxes and doing that all day,” Diekman said. “And my dad worked there, probably supervising everyone. All I wanted to do was push the industrialsize trash can around, and one of my buddies had that job. I was like, ‘Dad, you work here!’ ”
After graduating, Diekman attended a small NAIA school, Doane College, for one year before moving to Cloud County Community College in Concordia, Kan. There, he caught scouts’ attention, and Nebraska offered him a scholarship — a big deal for anyone from that state. But when the Phillies drafted him that June, Diekman turned down the Cornhuskers. “There were a lot of people who were not happy about that,” Diekman said with a laugh.
The Phillies eventually changed Diekman’s arm angle — he was “moveyourheadoutofthe way overthetop” — and had him drop down to more of a sidearm style. It was that or get released, Diekman said, and luckily, the move suited him. He took to it in less than three weeks, and he turned into a reliable bigleague reliever, with eight seasons now under his belt. The A’s, needing a good leftonleft specialist, acquired him from Kansas City last month.
“When you get thrown in to a wildcard race, a playoff race, it’s rejuvenating. It gives you that energy and playing against these guys for three years, you know how good they are,” Diekman said. “Magic happens in that stadium. I can’t explain any of it, but it’s energizing as a player.”
Away from the field, Diekman dotes on his 9monthold daughter, Palmer, and he and his wife, Amanda, are dedicated to helping those with inflammatory bowel diseases. They started the Gut It Out Foundation to provide resources to hospitals and give patients a place for information and to communicate. Once a month on the road and more often when at home, he’ll talk to children or groups about his experiences and ways to find help.
“There are 2 million people with Crohn’s disease or colitis,” Diekman said. “If we can make the invisible disease visible, that’s the goal.”
“The thing that stood out to me was that some people might find having a colostomy bag embarrassing,” Daniels, the Texas GM, said. “Jake was the opposite. He had a sleeve on it, it looked like he had an iPhone attached to his abdomen, and he’d walk around without a shirt on. He wasn’t ashamed of it.
“And he started to get contacted by parents of kids who with similar issues who were getting teased at school, so one day, he went to school with one of those kids — and all the other kids see is here is a professional baseball player dealing with the same thing. Jake turned it around so this kid was the cool kid.
“He’s just so upfront about it. I know how much he’s really helped people.” Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sslusser@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susanslusser