Jeff Farish

Tonight Garrett Mitchell reached over the wall in center field and took a home run away from the San Diego Padres. He did it with an insulin pump in his back left pocket. He fell to the 14th round out of high school because of what is in that pocket. Start in the third grade. He told his mother he did not feel well. He was going to the bathroom about once an hour and his stomach hurt. Shannon Van Dyke had her son's blood sugar tested. A healthy number is around 80. The meter would not give her a number at all. It just read HIGH. The real figure was over 600. "I remember my heart dropping, being afraid, and not knowing what to do or what our future looked like." He got the pump at 10. She began setting an alarm for 2 or 3 in the morning to test him while he slept. She has said those years felt like having a newborn. He kept playing. He carried a bag everywhere with snacks, insulin and sugar in it. By his senior season at Orange Lutheran High School in California he was one of the best young outfielders in the country, and scouts had him going somewhere in the first three rounds. He went in the 14th. The Oakland Athletics took him. His coach at UCLA, John Savage, said the diabetes hurt his draft value. There were, in his words, lingering questions about it. His agent Scott Boras later put a number on what it cost. Without the condition, Boras said, Mitchell could have been a top 5 pick. So he turned the Athletics down and went to UCLA instead. In three seasons there he hit .327. He hit 15 triples, second most in the history of that program, and his 12 in 2019 set a UCLA record and led all of college baseball. In June of 2020 the Milwaukee Brewers took him 20th overall in the first round. He signed for $3,242,900. "My hands were shaking." Now here is the part that tells you what this actually costs him. On September 13 of this year, Milwaukee took him out of a game in the middle of the afternoon. He was not injured. "We took him out precautionary. He had high blood sugar." His manager Pat Murphy added that it happens a lot going from a night game to a day game, and that the team keeps working on it. That was three and a half weeks ago. Tonight he robbed a home run in a game San Diego had to win, and Milwaukee is going to the National League Championship Series. His mother once described the pump like this. "You will notice it in his back left pocket. It never leaves his body, even when he's playing."