New York Yankees: Brett Gardner wants ardent lady fan restrained legally
Gina Devasahayam, Ph.D., is a research doctor obsessed with making Brett Gardner hers. Gardner and the Yankees want a judge to make her stay away.
Eddie Waitkus, phone home, from wherever you are. What you probably wished you had done, Brett Gardner wants done. The New York Yankees outfielder has filed a request that a Bronx judge keep a particularly obsessed fan, whom Gardner says calls herself his future wife, away from himself and his family. The Yankees would also like her kept away from Yankee Stadium and all major league ballparks.
As Waitkus had his Ruth Ann Steinhagen, Brett Gardner seems to have his Gina Devasahayam, according to the New York Post. So far, the distinction is that Steinhagen punctuated her unrequited love with a rifle shell that barely missed Waitkus’s heart, while Devasahayam hasn’t punctuated hers with any kind of weapon other than social media tweets. Yet.
Steinhagen became infatuated with Waitkus as a Chicago Cub (being a Chicagoan she could see him every day at Wrigley Field) but obsessed with him after he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.
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In due course, of course, she checked into the Phillies’ Chicago hotel under an alias in 1949, left a note for him to see her on an urgent matter, then let him have it when he complied with the request.
Devashayam is obsessed with Gardner to the point where she was ejected from Yankee Stadium during last postseason and filed a court action demanding her restored access to the ballpark “in accordance with MLB fan policy and also in accordance with ‘Significant other’” of Gardner’s, according to the filing cited by NJ.com.
But she claims Gardner’s shown interest beyond player-fan appreciation in her. Among other things, her legal filing claimed the outfielder makes sad faces when she’s not at the Yankees’ home games and has gestured with his body “as though he is having sexual intercourse with me.”
When an NJ.com reporter interviewed her and pointed out that Gardner is a happily married man, Devasahayam replied, “That is not of importance.” Apparently. Upon filing her suit, she tweeted, “I have never seen you angry at me Gardy, I will claim you play the role of my husband, that is my first right, my second right is to allow me inside the Stadium.”
New York Yankees: Brett Gardner wants ardent lady fan restrained legally
Profiling An Obsessed Fan
Devasahayam is an attractive woman who has co-founded a biotechnology company, GenetikSignal. The company’s Website homepage describes it as “an anti-aging biotechnology company focusing on the mTOR signal transduction pathway “to produce new drug strategies against various cancers and other diseases. The site lists Devasahayam as the chief executive officer holding a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences, with a co-founding organic chemist and three highly-degreed medical professionals on its board.
Steinhagen, by contrast, was an attractive Chicago stenographer who underwent three years’ psychiatric treatment before slipping out of public sight entirely. She lived her final 42 years with her parents and sister on Chicago’s northwest side, according to an obituary in the Washington Post upon her death in a fall at home in 2012. The paper said her withdrawal was so complete her death might have gone unreported if not for a Chicago Tribune reporter searching death records for a completely different story.
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What might have transpired if Steinhagen’s obsession, stalking, and shooting of Waitkus had occurred in today’s social media world? A tweet pinned to the top of Devasahayam’s Twitter page, accompanied by a photograph of her posing by a boat pier in a form-fitting denim suit, says, “Heart & Hustle, Hot & Spicy, Lovers & Dreamers, for Yankee Gardy.”
Gardner has been married to Jessica Clendenin since 2007. They have two sons and live during the off-season in Gardner’s native Holly Hill, South Carolina. He’s about to begin his thirteenth season with the Yankees.
Waitkus was a promising first baseman and two-time All-Star when Steinhagen shot him. When he returned to the Phillies for 1950, he played all 154 games as the Phillies won the pennant on the final day, and eventually made an eleven-season major league career.
New York Yankees: Brett Gardner wants fan restrained legally
How Waitkus’ Shooting Was Portrayed in ‘The Natural’
Eddie Waitkus’ shooting partially informs the Roy Hobbs character in Bernard Malamud’s novel, The Natural, of course. The fictitious Hobbs was shot in the stomach in the hotel room of an ardent lady fan who’d witnessed him beat a Babe Ruth-like star on a carnival wager. She fired point blank range after he said “yes” to her question of whether he’d become the best there ever was. Not exactly an unrequited love.
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Hobbs survived and became a shattered wanderer until giving baseball a final try in (we presume) his thirties. Waitkus retired at 35, after dividing 1955 between the Baltimore Orioles (to whom the Phillies sold him in spring 1954) and the Phillies (who signed him after the Orioles released him in July 1955).
He had survived and come to ready terms with the action he saw in the Army in World War II, but the Steinhagen shooting was something else entirely. He suffered what would come to be known as post-traumatic stress syndrome. Once an outgoing man, his marriage collapsed in 1961, he suffered a subsequent nervous breakdown and became known to self-medicate with alcohol in the years to follow.
Waitkus died of previously undiagnosed cancer at 53 in 1972. His son eventually told the Society for American Baseball Research that the family believed the four surgeries he needed after the shooting might have left room for cancer to invade. He’s still the most famous case of a baseball player shot by an obsessed fan, but he’s not the first.
An earlier Cub, infielder Billy Jurges, was shot in July 1932 by Violet Valli, a showgirl with whom he’d ended a romance. She’d intended to kill herself but failed; her suicide note blamed another Cub, Hall of Fame outfielder Kiki Cuyler, for convincing Jurges to end the affair.
Jurges’s refusal to press charges led to Valli’s release. He eventually became a major league manager and scout; Valli, like Steinhagen, seems to have disappeared into obscurity. Gardner filing to restrain Devasahayam must seem an option Waitkus’s and Jurges’s families wish they’d have had.
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Steinhagen was reported widely to have told Waitkus she would kill him so he couldn’t “trouble” her anymore. Devasahayam hasn’t been known to say or tweet anything comparable, never mind take comparable action. Yet.