CC Sabathia Hall of Fame, wearing a Yankees hat on plaque
CC Sabathia was inducted into the Hall of Fame this July and will tell USA Today Sports why his plaque is wearing a Yankees cap.
Seriously sports
Washington Nationals infielder Paul DeJohn watched the video dozens of times, but never dared to do so with sound.
Maybe someday.
But not now.
DeJong, lying in a hospital bed on Monday, recovered from two and a half hours of sinus, track plate and nose surgery and is not ready to watch a baseball game again.
It happened on April 15th. DeJong was battling flu symptoms and taking antibiotics due to a respiratory infection, but he wasn’t sure if he could play even on a cool, wet 46-degree night. He probably would have taken the game on another night, but this was Jackie Robinson’s day, and he was playing for Roberto Clemente’s Pittsburgh. He wasn’t going to let this sit. It was too important for him to wear number 42.
The Nationals followed 1-0 with one base runner at the top of PNC Park’s six innings as DeJong stepped into the plate. The count reached 2 and 1 when Pirates starter Mitch Keller threw a 93-mile fastball. It sailed directly towards DeJohn’s head. He had no chance to get out of the way.
The ball washed him down his face and quickly broke his nose and left gouache under his left eye.
DeJohn fell to the ground, his face began to bleed heavily, and Nationals manager Davy Martinez and trainer Paul Lessard rushed out of the dugout.
Keller fell to her knees, tormenting her face, unable to even see it.
“The only reason I saw the videotape told USA Today Sports: “I was to make sure I wasn’t leaning against the plate.
“there is nothing.”
DeJong, 31, was rushed to the emergency room, where he closed the bleeding with his cheeks, nose and eyes. His left eye was filled with blood. He could barely breathe. It was hard to even talk when he called his mother Andrea and agent Burton Locks.
He was terrified, wondering if his career was over.
“Amazingly, I wasn’t in much pain,” DeJohn said. “It was so strange. It was the most unpleasant feeling that was painless. I couldn’t breathe through my nose. My eyes were swollen. I was ringing in my ears. But there was no pain.
“I was lucky. If I had been hit straight into my chin, eyes, or mouth, I might have had a real problem.”
He was maintained overnight for observation and undergoes a series of examinations with doctors and ophthalmologists. Nationals executives, trainers, coaches, teammates and former teammates called and texted. Keller reached out twice to let him know that it was an accident and saw how he was doing.
DeJong was released early in the afternoon. He returned to the team hotel and the next morning he returned home for four hours in a private car arranged by the Nationals.
“I’m grateful that I wasn’t playing in LA or the west,” DeJohn said. “I don’t know I went home because I couldn’t get on the plane.”
DeJohn arrived at his home at Falls Church, Virginia, and was waiting for the door by his grandfather, Steve Whipple, 79, who made his first flight from Orlando. The two are always closed, hunting and fishing together in Wisconsin, and Whipple, a retired information technology specialist at Dow Chemical, has not missed watching his grandson’s games on television.
“We always thought Paul would become a growing basketball player,” Whipple said. “When he received his degree in biochemistry (from Illinois), we thought he was going to medical school. We didn’t know about his secret passion for baseball.”
“What is the damage?”
Whipple and his wife, Sharon, were in Orlando with DeJohn’s mother, watching the game together. Andrea had just been released from the hospital two weeks before intestinal surgery, and her parents were there in her Orlando home to help. They looked in fear when DeJong was his, and prayed as he saw him get up, slowly left the field and walked with a towel to cover his blood.
Dejong went to the plate 3,349 times in his career and hit 58 times, but was injured after being injured twice. He broke his left hand when he hit a slider on the Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Lewis Garcia in 2018, and suffered from a broken rib that hit Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Freddie Peralta in 2021.
However, DeJong had personally witnessed some horrifying incidents. He was there when Phillies All-Star Bryce Harper hit a face on Cardinals Reliever Genesis Cabrera in 2021. He was on the field in 2017 when Memphis teammate Daniel Poncedeleon was hit in the head on a line drive and undergoes emergency brain surgery. Still, he didn’t expect anything dramatic to happen to him. Several times over the years he was asked if he wanted to protect his face using a C-FLAP protector on his helmet, but he always declined.
“I think there are many other things to worry about hitting the ball,” DeJohn said.
In the aftermath of the collision, blood flowed from his nose and unable to see, DeJong feared that his vision could be permanently damaged.
“I was pretty worried about what was going wrong,” he said. “I asked the doctor, ‘How bad is it? What is the damage?” But I had some calm about it due to my lack of control about it.
“But the next morning, after the doctors reassured me that there was no real damage to my eyeballs, I felt better, and that was my greater concern.
DeJong spent the next 10 days at the church home where he fell with his grandfather. He couldn’t drive, so his grandfather was suddenly in charge of driving his Fordrapter truck, buying groceries, filling in prescriptions, and running errands.
“I’m used to driving this little Tesla and Paul drives big trucks,” Whipple said. “And there’s all this traffic. I remember on the first day I saw a merge sign on the highway. Then there was no merge area right below it.”
Once they solved the driving element, DeJohn was to cook skirt steak, caramelized onions, Parmesan fries and broccoli for his speciality. Grandpa cooks and cleans up. And they choose and take turns watching movies each day.
Both are huge Clint Eastwood fans, so they quickly passed through a trilogy-free guy named “A Dollar Fist,” “A few more dollars,” and “Good, Bad, Ugh.” My granddad saw “Good Fellas” for the first time. And they sat down and said “munching on a cheeseburger” on a Sunday night in the middle of the “casino.”
“We were always very close,” said DeJohn, who spends time with his grandfather on Wisconsin hunting and ice fishing in the winter. “We were able to relax and enjoy our time together. He really helped us with the things around the house. Honestly, I feel pretty close.”
DeJong and his grandfather were in the hospital at 5:30am, while DeJong was moving into the operating room at 7:30am, while Rox and his 91-year-old father were awake at 3am in New York City. They took the car to Penn station and boarded Amtrak Acera at 6:27am, then arrived at Union Station in Washington, DC at 9:28am, and headed straight to the hospital where DeJohn was waiting with Whipple during surgery.
The surgery was a little more extensive than repairing his nose, repairing his sinuses and inserting a titanium orbital plate. DeJong woke up with a sprint on his nose, a band-aid above his left eye, and a swelling in his left eye. As he opened his right eye, he saw Burton and Lawrence shaking in his grandfather and his room. He greeted them warmly, called the nurse and took group photos.
“I don’t think there’s a risk of coming back.”
Dejong will only be able to play for at least two months. But for now, he’s simply looking forward to working out again. Once he does it, he’s ready to sit down and watch the entire game. Ah, he sometimes pees on his phone with the score, but it was too difficult to watch the game, reminding him that he wasn’t getting close to playing.
DeJong believes the biggest challenge is simply going back to the batter’s box and face live pitching again. He remembers Giancarlo Stanton, Jason Hayward, Kevin Pillar and Harper attacked the faces and knows he wasn’t the first to endure something like this. He will likely reach out to Pillar, his former teammate with the Chicago White Sox, who was hit in the face with a 94 mph fastball in 2021, but certainly open to all the advice.
“We’ll use our C-FLAP helmets now to provide protection,” Dejong said. “I (Yankees’ first baseman) Paul Goldschmidt wears almost all the protective gear so he doesn’t miss the game. I found it clever.
“But I think it’s okay. What makes me feel better is that I’m not leaning down or in a bad position on the plate. If so, I might be afraid of the inside pitch.
“I hope Keller does too. He reached out to me a few times so I hope he can go back to pitching like he used to. It was just weird.”
Dejong will return to Nationals Park and will begin seeing his teammates again when he starts his next homestand on May 5th. He appreciates hundreds of calls and text messages across the country. Nationals pitcher Trevor Williams closed the Orioles in five innings the following day after stopping by to take over DeJohn’s salary one day.
Training is about a month, DeJohn says, and his goal is to play again before the All-Star break.
“I don’t think there’s a risk of coming back,” DeJohn said. “But you don’t know until you do something like this. You don’t realize that struggle will go through just to get back to normal. Just lift your head and sleep. You try to breathe through your nose. You take a shower.
“But you know something, I miss it. I really do.
“I can’t wait to get back and it’s going to be special when I do.”
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