They came to be inspired by a man with precisely two Major League at bats.
The Oct. 6 crowd at Temple Ahavat Shalom (TAS) in Northridge resembled that of a Little League game, as 200 parents and children — many dressed in baseball uniforms — gathered to hear the story of perseverance behind Adam Greenberg, the Jewish professional baseball player who stepped into the batter’s box only twice, seven years apart.
Dressed casually but sharply in dark blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, Greenberg, a 32-year-old Connecticut native, sat down with the Jewish Journal at TAS prior to his speech about how persistence got him from his first Major League at bat in 2005 to his second one in 2012.
After excelling at baseball in high school and in college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Greenberg found himself sitting in his parents’ New Jersey home in early June 2002, waiting for a call to hear if he had been selected in that year’s Major League Baseball draft.
When he got the call, it was thrilling — and surprising — news. The Chicago Cubs selected him in the ninth round to play centerfield.
“It was a dream-come-true moment for me to get the call,” Greenberg said. “And then it shocked me because the Cubs were a specific team that my agent had said was not a good fit.”
For three years, he worked his way through the Cubs’ Minor League system — $20 a day for meals, $850 a month for salary, and lots of long bus rides and shoddy hotels. Then he and a teammate, Matt Murton, got a call one night from his manager that they would be meeting the Cubs in Miami.
That, Greenberg said, “was the coolest experience of my life.”
Two nights later, friends and relatives were in the stands as he prepared to play against the Florida Marlins. Greenberg, a left-handed batter, said he wasn’t nervous as he stepped into the batter’s box in the ninth inning, as a pinch hitter, to face lefty pitcher Valerio de los Santos.
As the now-viral video of the at bat shows, Greenberg prepared for the pitch by going through his regular motions in the batter’s box, bending his knees and shifting the bat and his hips until he settled into a comfortable stance. The boyish-looking, curly-haired Greenberg was ready.
As the catcher set up on the outside half of the plate, away from Greenberg, the rookie awaited his first ever Major League pitch. De los Santos began his delivery toward what was supposed to be a fastball away from Greenberg.
But there was one problem: De los Santos released the ball at the wrong point, sending a 92 mph fastball too high and inside. He stood there, frozen, as the ball found the one spot on the side of his head unprotected by his helmet, just under his right ear.
If it had hit him somewhere else, he said, pointing a few inches above the point of impact, the helmet would have protected his head and he would have been fine. Instead, the impact knocked off his helmet and Greenberg bent over, stumbled and fell backward, grabbing the back of his head with both hands as he hit the ground.
Greenberg still remembers: “As soon as it happened, all I kept saying was, ‘Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.’ ”
He didn’t lose consciousness or awareness, but he lost control of his eyes as they rolled into the back of his head.
Still, Greenberg wasn’t much worried about his budding professional baseball career. A three-day break in the schedule for the approaching All-Star Game had him thinking, “I’ll be back after the All-Star Break, and I’ll be good to go.”
But he wasn’t. In the Miami airport, he almost fell down and blacked out. If he lay down or moved his head in a certain way, his eyes would move uncontrollably. The headaches, he said, were “unbearable,” and he was diagnosed with positional vertigo, a disorder arising in the inner ear.
Even so, an optimistic Greenberg said he had “no hunch that baseball would be derailed.”
He was sent back to the minors and hopped from ball club to ball club — including the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim — for the next six years. Instead of despairing that “all the batting cages, all the games, all the travel hours” only led to one painfully quick plate appearance in Florida, Greenberg said he maintained the attitude, “I’m still going to get back there.”
And he did get back — seven years after his first at bat, thanks to filmmaker Matt Liston, a diehard Cubs fan and Los Angeles resident who followed Greenberg’s career from the time he was a Minor Leaguer. In a telephone interview with the Journal, Liston described how he helped Greenberg get that second chance.
“What if he doesn’t get back up?” he remembered thinking when the Cubs, in September 2005, didn’t recall Greenberg after they were eliminated from play-off contention. “He was always in the back of my head.”
In 2012, Liston lobbied Major League teams to give Greenberg one more shot. And in September of that year, he created a petition on Change.org for