MLB: Retiring is hard enough; even harder, depression after retirement

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Former MLB pitcher Dan Haren admits to depression after his retirement. Not every baseball retiree suffering depression endures as he does.

A baseball retirement isn’t simple. Whether you’ve been a pennant-winning player or manager, an umpire, or just another guy who got to play the game at all, stepping away from it often requires its own kind of withdrawal.

Sometimes it’s simple. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes you’ve planned well for it, transitioned away from the game just as well, and had your well-laid plan explode out of nowhere. And sometimes, you get thrown into a soul-wrenching depression. Dan Haren can tell you. In fact, he did, late Monday morning.

Not ashamed to admit I called my therapist yesterday. After baseball I had a tough time adjusting, staying home a lot, self-worth, anxiety etc. if you’ve dealt with anxiety/depression in the past I encourage you to make arrangements now so you have someone to talk to.
— dan haren (@ithrow88) March 16, 2020

A reliable pitcher with good if not overpowering stuff (his Twitter handle is @ithrow88) but brains to make it work, Haren has already owned up to punishing enough self-doubt. Three years ago, he surprised the Twitterverse with a kind of running journal while pedaling his exercise bicycle.

I went into almost every start in the last few years thinking… How the hell am I gonna get these guys out . . . There’s was at least 3-4 times I thought the team plane was gonna crash . . . I would count out the days about a month in advance to see if I was gonna pitch in Coors field . . . I had to take Imodium most days I pitched to plug myself up…

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Former MLB Players Suffering From Depression

Some of it might have made you laugh in the moment, but some of it now might make you think. If Haren could be that self-questioning while he pitched, you could only imagine until now what he’s had to fight in retirement.

The same holds for former San Francisco Giants pitcher Noah Lowry. He didn’t get to enjoy half the career Haren did, thanks to four surgeries on his pitching arm forcing his retirement at 26 after a five-year career.

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“In a moment, my identity crumbled, who I thought I was, the man my wife thought she had married, fell apart,” he told USA Today two years ago. “The innocence of my childhood turned to shame as I grew older . . . Leaving the majors was the final crack in the dam that had been holding back years of pent-up anger, doubt, and fear.”

Lowry today owns an outdoors-activity store, is a member of his local Chamber of Commerce, and works with his three children and other Bay Area youth in varied ways. He credits a group called the Revenant Process with helping him redefine life and return from feeling “dead inside.”

Another former Giant, outfielder Aubrey Huff, may have alienated himself from the team and perhaps the game with (shall we say) his recent rash of testy tweetings, but he began suffering anxiety after the Giants’ 2010 World Series triumph and—following his retirement after the 2012 Series conquest—sank into full-blown depression. He even contemplated suicide.

“Everything stops,” he said while trying to mount a baseball comeback in 2015. “That sound of 40,000 people screaming every day, it just stops. “You have to get to a point in your life where you’re just pissed off. You’ve had enough, and you either continue to go down this road, or you look to change something in your mind.”

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When changing something in your mind doesn’t work, depression to any degree can become fatal. Especially if you can’t stop keeping it inward no matter how often you talk to people, either professionals, friends, or family.

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An ex-MLB Umpire’s Battle With Depression

MLB Umpire/raconteur Ron Luciano couldn’t. Sixteen years after retiring as a colorful umpire, Luciano committed suicide. A year earlier, he’d actually checked into a hospital for depression. He hadn’t exactly had things simple until then.

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After umpiring Luciano became a baseball commentator for NBC. He did that two years, then opened a sporting goods store in Binghamton, NY. Though two sisters helped him run the business, their employees were unscrupulous enough to force Luciano into bankruptcy that cost him his umpiring pension. He may also have been driven further into depression by his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Luciano could and did stare down such hyper-aggravating managers as Billy Martin and Earl Weaver, but he couldn’t stare down and defeat his own illness. Nor could he bear to let anyone else see or feel his pain. “He never wanted to burden anybody,” said his co-author on four books, David Fisher.

The New York Daily News reported Luciano climbed into his Cadillac in January 1995, after running a hose from the tailpipe to the inside of the car, then closed the windows and started the engine. The author of such bestsellers as The Umpire Strikes Back and The Fall of the Roman Umpire was a suicide at 57.

Catcher-turned-longtime baseball broadcaster Joe Garagiola believed Luciano missed baseball more than he let on and was hurting deeply because of that in part. “It doesn’t surprise me that Ronnie was very depressed,” he said after Luciano’s death. “There was a far more sensitive side of him that few people knew, and I know he was a lonely guy. Everybody thought every day was New Year’s Eve for him, but I can attest to the fact that he had a lot of August the twenty-thirds and October the fifths.”

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More people who suffer anxiety and depression have those August 23rds and October 5ths more often than the people who love them realize. On such days, even baseball isn’t a game for them.

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