Adam Greenberg found out late on Sunday. That's when Marlins general manager David Samson offered him the chance to play against the Mets Tuesday in Miami. That's when Greenberg knew he would get the one official at-bat that had eluded him since he was struck down by the first major league pitch he faced. Hit in the head that hot July night in 2005, this pitch from Samson would hit the kid from Guilford in the heart.
"I broke down in tears," Greenberg said Thursday after the one-day contract was announced on NBC's "Today Show."
At some point a baseball moment, indeed, a baseball career stops being a pitch, a hit or even a poetic tribute. At some point a baseball moment becomes a number in a great book of statistics for all the game's dedicated thinkers to consider. And for seven years and two months this is what that great book said under the name of Adam Daniel Greenberg, born Feb. 21, 1981:
AB 0.
That cruel number, the official zero, will be undone when he once again steps into a major league batter's box against the Mets. There's a good chance it will be against R.A. Dickey. "Fitting," Greenberg said. Fitting because Dickey is the game's premier knuckleballer and life has thrown Greenberg one hell of a knuckleball. Of course, that's after life and Valerio de los Santos threw a 92 mph fastball off his head.
Team Israel had just lost a crushing, 10-inning game to Spain in the decisive World Baseball Classic qualifier Sunday night when Matt Liston, a filmmaker, Cubs fan and catalyst for a romantic campaign to return Greenberg to the majors for one official at-bat, sent out his camera crew. Greenberg, who had joined Team Israel as an outfielder this summer, said, sorry, there wasn't anything that would make him happy.
He was wrong. Samson was on the phone and he had an offer.
"It's dream come true, Part II," Greenberg said.
As a member of the Bridgeport Bluefish, Greenberg would face de los Santos in 2011, two competitors scuffling with their own emotions, for their own return to the big time.
Back on the night of July 9, 2005 in Miami, however, there had been nothing but possibilities ahead for a 24-year-old left-handed hitter just called up to the Cubs from Double A ball.
Sent in by Dusty Baker to pinch hit in the top of a four-run ninth, Greenberg leaned in toward the plate. He saw de los Santos' pitch coming. He ordered himself to stay in, learned from the time he was a kid. He certainly didn't want to bail on the first pitch he faced in the big leagues.
The 92 mph fastball crashed off the back of his head.
"While I lost control of my eyes and thought my head was split open, I never lost consciousness," Greenberg said. "I vividly remember the ball leaving his hand, to me turning, to getting struck, knowing exactly what it felt like and being scared for my life.
"I just grabbed my head and kept saying, 'Stay alive!'"
Greenberg battled headaches. He battled vertigo. He had double vision. For weeks, he slept upright. For two years, he had lingering problems with post-concussion syndrome. Beyond the physical nausea, of course, there was that sickening feeling that he might never again play in the majors, might get nothing more than one unofficial at-bat. He never grew suicidal, but he said there were times when he just didn't care. He kept battling on after being released by the Cubs in 2006. He played in the Dodgers, Royals and Angels systems and tried out for the Reds. Eventually, he would play for the Bluefish for parts of 2008 and again in 2009 through 2011. He tore up his left shoulder, had surgery before the 2010 season and kept plowing.
In the eighth inning of the 2011 home opener, he came face to face with a certain Long Island Ducks pitcher.
"I hadn't seen or really heard from Valerio since the incident," Greenberg said. "He threw a first-pitch cutter on the inside part of the plate. Strike one. I stepped out of the box. He was good. So was I. It was game on."
On a two-strike pitch, Greenberg singled.
"It was a big-league at-bat, big-league setting for me, regardless if there was one person in the stands or 50,000. After the game, he said for him it was like the seventh game of the World Series. It affected his career and his life, equally to mine. It was a great moment for both of us."
At 31, and looking at $2,200 a month in minors, Greenberg also didn't play this season until he joined Team Israel for the WBC.
"[The dream] started to fade," he said. "Three years in independent baseball, it's a tough road. I couldn't be more blessed to have that campaign and what Matt Liston did. It showed the power of the human spirit and what people can do. It re-lit the fire. It forced me to get back in the cage and train."
There are just a few players in major league history who have appeared in games yet did not get official at-bats, none more famous than Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. Played by Burt Lancaster in "Field of Dreams," Graham, who would become a doctor in Chisholm, Minn., for 50 years, emerged as one of the more compelling and sympathetic characters in the history of sports theater.
Liston would be become Greenberg's biggest advocate. He started an online campaign. Through Change.org, he got more than 20,000 people to sign a petition. Hall of Famer George Brett endorsed it. So did pitcher Kerry Wood. The Cubs said no. So did every other team in baseball. Finally, the Marlins said yes.
"No organization owed anything to me," Greenberg said. "I'm so thankful to the Marlins and to Matt."
There are ironies everywhere. Granted, the Marlins have moved into a new park, but Greenberg will play in the city where he was hit. He will play for the team that was his opponent. A ninth-round draft pick by the Cubs, Greenberg played at North Carolina. So did Moonlight Graham, whose brother was school president at Chapel Hill. And when Liston, who met Greenberg personally in the past few weeks, asked him to play catch a la Field of Dreams, he was surprised that Greenberg threw right-handed.
"Matt had never seen me play the field," Greenberg said.
He doesn't know if he'll get one at-bat or if he'll play the field Tuesday. He says he feels great physically. He says he's more prepared emotionally then he ever has been. He hopes a team will bring him to spring training in 2013 so he can earn a spot "the normal way."
"My career is not done," Greenberg said.
Look, there is every bit of romance in Greenberg's at-bat. Yet we'd be lying if we didn't say that it does toe line of integrity. I've railed in the past against Nykesha Sales and Michael Strahan setting records under pre-arranged circumstance. To say Greenberg is major-league ready today is to not tell the truth. Yet to say he does not deserve this chance is to be entirely callous. This feels good. This feels right.
"It's a good question and I've had to battle that myself since the campaign started," Greenberg said. "This was never a gimmick. I worked through the ranks since I was a kid. I earned that spot seven years ago. It just happened first pitch I ever saw, I get hit in the back of the head. Tragedy for me. Part of the game. The fact that I never gave up and I have gotten support from current and former players, Hall of Famers, to me it makes it OK to be happy and accept it. It's not just bypassing the system.
"Life throws curveballs and fastballs at your head. I got hit by one of them. I went down. I could have stayed there. I could have said poor me and this is horrible. I chose to get back up and get in the box. That's the message for everyone. No matter what's going on in their lives, get back up. Good things do happen. Sometimes they take seven years."
Sometimes they take seven years, two months and 24 days.
