'You'll never pitch again' -- He did, and his story is changing lives

“It sounded like somebody shot a .22.”

Will Clark is an avid hunter, so he knows the distinct sound of a .22 caliber rifle.

“It was a definite ‘crack’,” said Clark. “Without a shadow of a doubt.”

What Clark, an All-Star first baseman for the Giants from 1986-92, was describing was one of the most traumatic moments in baseball history. It was the moment when his friend and teammate, left-handed pitcher Dave Dravecky, broke his arm while delivering a pitch at Olympic Stadium in Montreal on Aug. 15, 1989.

As the humerus bone in Dravecky’s left arm snapped, the baseball flew off to the left and ended up in the Expos’ dugout down the first base line. Before it got there, Dravecky was on his back, writhing in excruciating pain in front of the mound, trying to hold his left arm together with his right.

“You hear that sound,” Clark said, “and when you see Dave go down like that, you know this is real serious.”

Matt Williams was playing third base when he heard it, that piercing sound that is impossible to forget no matter how hard you try.

“It was as if a bat had hit a baseball,” Williams said. “But I was concentrating on the batter, and the ball never got to him.”

The sound could be heard all the way out in left field, where Kevin Mitchell was stationed.

“You don’t ever wanna hear a sound like that again,” he said.

The first person to reach Dravecky was Clark from first base. As he rushed over and knelt down onto the turf, Clark couldn’t help but have a flashback to when he suffered a serious left arm injury of his own not 100 feet from where he was attending to Dravecky.

As a rookie, Clark collided with Expos first baseman Andres Galarraga while running up the first base line on June 3, 1986. The result was a hyper-extended left elbow.

Like Dravecky now, Clark was lying on his back in tremendous pain. Clark remembered what it was like waiting for someone to get to him. Given the level of pain, it felt like an eternity.

“I was rolling around and there was nobody there,” Clark said. “It took a while for the medical staff to get out to me … I just wanted to be there for Dave.”

Clark, worried that Dravecky might go into shock, immediately tried to stabilize the left arm to mitigate the pain.

“How do I put this,” Clark said with a sigh that underscored how difficult it was to talk about the incident even all these years later. “I was just trying to prevent it from, for lack of a better term, flopping around. I hunt a lot, and I know what it feels like to pick up an animal that’s been shot and it feels like mush.

“That’s kind of what I was grabbing.”

Amid Dravecky’s screams, Clark tried to get him to breathe and assured him that the medical staff was coming.

As Williams, Mitchell, manager Roger Craig and others approached the scene, the concern in their minds was for more than a teammate. Because Dravecky was so much more than a baseball player to them.

And Dravecky’s journey just to be on the mound at all that night was more than improbable.

In order to gain a sense of what his teammates, manager, coaches and trainers were thinking and feeling in that moment -- of what Dravecky meant to them -- we need to rewind a bit.

The cab ride that saved a career

It was July 5, 1987. Mitchell, along with Dravecky and left-hander Craig Lefferts, had just been traded from the Padres to the Giants.

Mitchell was having none of it.

“I was ready to walk away from the game,” he said.

Dravecky had called a cab to pick up the traded trio from the hotel where the Padres were staying during their current series against the Expos in Montreal.

When the cab arrived, Dravecky and Lefferts got in, but Mitchell wasn’t budging.

“As a young kid, I didn’t know much about the game,” Mitchell said as he reflected on it nearly 40 years later. “I didn’t realize it’s part of the game, being traded. I had just gotten done moving back to my hometown, San Diego (after being traded by the Mets, with whom he won the 1986 World Series).”

Dravecky didn’t relent. He coaxed Mitchell into the cab and onto a plane bound for Chicago, where the three were to report with their new team -- the Giants were finishing up a series at Wrigley Field against the Cubs.

Earlier that morning, Dravecky wasn’t even sure Mitchell was going to come down to the lobby.

“It took so much for Lefty and I to convince Kevin to go with us that morning,” Dravecky said. “We had to make sure that he got his wakeup call and was getting ready to come down and meet us. And I’m so grateful he did.”

So is Mitchell. Had he not gotten into that cab, his life -- and baseball history -- would be different.

Two years later, Mitchell had a career season, smashing 47 home runs with a 1.023 OPS to win the National League MVP Award and help San Francisco reach the World Series for the first time since 1962.

Mitchell went on to play 10 more seasons in the Majors after that cab ride in the summer of ’87.

“All of that would’ve never happened if it wasn’t for that man right there,” Mitchell said of Dravecky. “I didn’t understand what was going on until he sat me down in that cab and explained it to me, what it’s all about. The man is a motivator.”

Mitchell and Dravecky became close friends. Whenever the Giants would play the Padres in San Diego, Dravecky knew where he’d be eating his meals.

It wasn’t a restaurant. It was far better.

“My grandmother loved Dave,” Mitchell said. “My granny is my heart. When we’d come into town, right away granny wanted Dave Dravecky at the house and she’d be cooking fried chicken, greens, mac and cheese and all that.”

“I loved Kevin’s grandma,” Dravecky said. “Every time she was at the ballpark, I would run over to where she was sitting and we would talk. And she’d say, ‘You watch out for my Kevin. You take care of him.’”

Dravecky took that to heart, even to the point of saving Mitchell’s baseball career.

Great excitement

One of the first faces Dravecky, Mitchell and Lefferts saw when they walked into the visitors’ clubhouse at Wrigley Field to put on Giants uniforms for the first time was Mike Krukow’s.

“He came up to the three of us,” Dravecky remembers. “And he said, ‘Gentlemen, welcome to the San Francisco Giants. We are so excited to have you with us.’”

Krukow, who pitched for the Giants from 1983-89, and has been a beloved television broadcaster for the club along with Duane Kuiper for more than 30 years, knew early on that Dravecky was different.

“‘Fierce’ would probably be the best way to describe him,” Krukow said. “He was a fierce competitor. And there was no moment that was too big for him. He never got steamrolled by a moment or the size of a game. He just went to work. And he was humble.”

Dravecky would be key in the Giants’ run all the way to Game 7 of that year’s NL Championship Series against the Cardinals. In 18 regular season starts following the trade, he posted a 3.20 ERA. In the NLCS, he yielded only one run over two starts (15 innings), including a two-hit shutout at Busch Stadium in Game 2.

The moment never got too big for Dravecky. And he had already experienced some big moments prior to joining the Giants.

Born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, Dravecky was a 21st round Draft pick by the Pirates in 1978 out of Youngstown University. Three years later, he was traded to San Diego. He made his MLB debut with the Padres on June 15, 1982, and just over a year later, he was an All-Star.

Dravecky threw two scoreless innings for the NL in the 1983 All-Star Game at Comiskey Park, giving up a hit and striking out two. The next year, he helped San Diego reach the World Series for the first time. Dravecky threw 10 2/3 scoreless innings that postseason, including 4 2/3 frames in the Fall Classic against the Tigers.

He didn’t throw particularly hard, but what Dravecky had was determination, guile and a great cutter.

“When I got traded from Pittsburgh to San Diego, I was sent to Double-A Amarillo,” Dravecky said. “Our manager was Eddie Watt, a former pitcher for the Orioles. He said, ‘Look, you’ve got a really good sinker and we need to get something to move off your four-seam fastball.’”

Watt taught Dravecky the cutter, which Dravecky combined with a bulldog mentality on the mound to become one of the best starters in the league, one who would finish with a career ERA of 3.13.

Things were looking up heading into the 1988 campaign, both for Dravecky individually and the Giants collectively.

“We were in a great spot,” Dravecky said. “Spring Training rolled around, and everybody was really excited about the upcoming year because of coming off such a great ’87. And we had a great team. There was great excitement.”

Then, everything changed.

‘You’ll never pitch again’

Dave Dravecky’s left arm was his livelihood and the instrument that enabled him to play a kid’s game that he loved at the highest level as an adult.

But for a couple of years, there had been something unusual there, something that was not considered serious at first. It was a lump that started small and gradually increased in size to the point where Dravecky went to have it looked at by a doctor in the fall of 1988.

Dave and his wife, Janice, were waiting in the doctor’s office as the MRI results were being read. But before the doctors even came into the office, Dave and Janice knew the diagnosis.

“They were out in the hallway reviewing the MRI,” Dravecky said. “And then we heard the word ‘cancer.’”

Dave and Janice looked at one another in shock.

“It’s not supposed to happen to me,” Dravecky thought. “I’m a well-oiled, fit machine called a baseball player. I’m in my early-30s.”

About five seconds of silence followed.

“And then I said, ‘Babe, we need to pray,’” Dravecky remembers. “And then I looked into her eyes and said, ‘God, I have no idea what we’re about to face. But whatever it is, give us the strength to endure. That’s all I ask.’”

Dravecky had what’s known as fibrosarcoma, a very rare cancerous tumor in the tissues that wrap around tendons, ligaments and muscles. The survival rate is between 40% and 60% within five years of diagnosis.

Doctors would have to remove half of Dravecky’s deltoid muscle, meaning that he would lose 95% of its function.

“Outside of a miracle,” the doctors told him, “you’ll never pitch again.”

‘Why are you here?’

The operation took 10 1/2 hours.

The surgeons removed 50% of Dravecky’s deltoid muscle, using cryosurgery to freeze and destroy the cancerous tumor.

The next time he saw his Giants teammates, his arm was in a sling and a large portion of it was missing.

“We were devastated,” Krukow said. “When you see a guy who’s in his prime, one of the premier pitchers in the league, go down to a cancer, it was … it shocked all of us. It hit all of us like a thunderbolt. It was just awful. We were just thinking, ‘What a horrible way to have your career taken away from you.’”

Dravecky, however, wasn’t willing to concede that his career was over. He began working with a physical therapist in Ohio and eventually returned to the Bay Area to rehab under the Giants’ orthopedic doctor.

By the time Spring Training arrived in 1989, Dravecky was at the team’s Spring Training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. His teammates were floored.

“When you understood the severity of what had gone down and what they had to do surgically to get the cancer,” Krukow said, “we never thought -- we knew he’d never come back.

“All of a sudden, one day during the first week of camp, he’s there. And he walks in with his baseball bag. And then he took off his shirt and you saw the shark bite that was in his shoulder. And it got quiet. We’re all there with a lump in our throats.”

Krukow walked over to Dravecky and asked him the question that was on everybody’s mind but Dravecky’s: “Why are you here?”

“And he looked at me,” Krukow said. “And he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna pitch again.’”

Tears began to well up in Krukow’s eyes. In his mind, as in the minds of his teammates, not only was a Dravecky comeback improbable, it was impossible.

“I just nodded,” Krukow said. “I didn’t want to be the guy that said, ‘No, you’re not.’ So I just walked away quietly, emotionally racked.”

The physical therapy to this point had been intense, but Dravecky had passed every test. The next step was to begin throwing from longer and longer distances, and then stepping back onto the mound.

That’s when things got much harder.

'Sooner or later, you’ve got to find out'

“I just couldn’t get anything on the ball,” Dravecky said. “It was like, three steps forward and two steps back.”

One day prior to a game in May, Atlee Hammaker, a fellow pitcher and a close friend of Dravecky’s, had a suggestion.

“He looks at me,” Dravecky remembers, “and he said, ‘Hey, I know you’re frustrated because you don’t feel like you’re getting anything on the ball. Why don’t we just go out in the outfield and just long-toss?’”

Hammaker suggested that when Dravecky was loose and felt comfortable, he should “air it out” -- in other words, just throw hard without any inhibition.

Dravecky had been understandably cautious and measured as he tried to make a comeback no one believed was possible. But when Hammaker offered his two cents, Dravecky saw that his friend had a point.

“What have you got to lose?” Hammaker said. “Sooner or later, you’ve gotta find out.”

Dravecky had to find out. He had to find out whether his arm could truly take the strain of throwing a baseball as freely as he had done before the cancer diagnosis.

So he did.

“On the second or third ‘air-out’ that I did, something popped,” Dravecky said. “But it didn’t hurt.”

Hammaker saw that Dravecky seemed bothered by something. He asked what was wrong. When Dravecky told him about the painless “pop,” Hammaker encouraged him to throw another one.

After Dravecky aired the next one out and Hammaker caught it, Hammaker was stunned.

“Where did that come from?!” he exclaimed.

Dravecky found out. He could throw again.

“The next thing I know, I’m making a Minor League rehab start for the San Jose Giants in Stockton on July 23,” Dravecky said.

His teammates back in San Francisco couldn’t believe it.

“So the day came where he said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do a rehab start -- I’m gonna pitch,’” Krukow remembers. “And I said, ‘In a game?’

“We were like, ‘What are we watching here?’”

The pitching coach for the San Jose Giants was Todd Oakes. Oakes told Dravecky he had a strict 75-pitch limit.

“I said, ‘OK,’” Dravecky remembers. “‘Let’s see if I can throw a complete game in 75 pitches.’”

It was one of two seven-inning games that day in a doubleheader. With two outs in the bottom of the seventh, Dravecky was one strike away from that complete game. He had thrown 75 pitches.

Oakes emerged from the San Jose dugout and approached the mound.

“Dave, I’ve gotta take you out,” Oakes said.

Dravecky looked at Oakes and said: “Todd, go sit down. Just trust me.”

It was a 76-pitch, seven-inning complete game in Dravecky’s first professional outing since having half of his deltoid muscle removed less than a year earlier.

Dravecky’s next rehab start for San Jose was in Reno. Before the game, he told his teammates that if he won, dinner was on him that night.

He threw a 93-pitch complete game.

“I said, ‘Guys, meet me at the restaurant at the Peppermill Inn,’” Dravecky remembers. “And they go, ‘Great!’

“I meet those guys down there and they had brought wives or girlfriends, children, everyone. It was ‘Dinner’s on Dave, so just show up.’”

The bill came to around $1,000 (about $2,500 today). But given what Dravecky and his teammates were celebrating that night, it was hard not to feel as though it was worth every penny.

Welcome Back, Dave

For Dravecky to even get as far as he had gotten by this point was nothing short of the “miracle” the doctors told him he’d need.

But the reality was that he had made two Single-A starts. The next test was much bigger: a start for Triple-A Phoenix.

In early August, Dravecky threw a complete game on 93 pitches again.

“I go into the clubhouse and I’m really excited,” Dravecky said. “Bob Kennedy, who was working with [Giants general manager] Al Rosen at the time, was at the game and he was evaluating where I was at.”

Kennedy came in and approached Dravecky. His mood was somber.

“Dave,” he said. “I just want to congratulate you. What a great game today. But I just got off the phone with Al Rosen and I hate to tell you this, but you’re not ready. We just think you need more time.”

Dravecky was incredulous.

“Bob, come on,” Dravecky replied. “What more do I have to do? I’ve just thrown three complete games. I’m ready to go!”

Kennedy looked sadly at Dravecky.

“I’m sorry. But I just spoke to the boss. He said you’re gonna have to wait.”

Kennedy began walking away and Dravecky yelled, “Bob!”

That’s when Kennedy turned around with a big smile on his face.

“Just kidding. You’re going to the big leagues.”

This was it. Dravecky was on the cusp of doing the impossible. He was headed back to San Francisco, and this time, it was to take the mound at Candlestick Park.

“There are two things I remember from that time,” Dravecky said. “One was Alex Vlahos, a 6-year-old boy who was battling leukemia that I connected with. The other thing that sticks in my mind, and that I’ll never forget, is when Jan and I were in our bedroom and she knelt on one side of the bed and I knelt on the other, and we clasped hands across the bed.

“We just prayed and thanked God that I was given another opportunity to be able to play this little kid’s game that I fell in love with when I was eight years old.”

When word got to his Major League teammates that Dravecky would be making his next start at Candlestick, the reaction was one that, when recalled even to this day, gives goosebumps to the men who were there.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how emotional it was for all of us,” Krukow said. “To feel that we were in the presence of a man that just would not accept ‘No.’ That he pressed on through enormous odds.

“And then he went out there against the Reds, and he was spectacular.”

On Aug. 10, 1989, Dravecky completed his comeback. As he warmed up prior to the first pitch of the game against Cincinnati, he was given a standing ovation by the 34,810 fans in attendance. Behind him, the giant Candlestick scoreboard was lit up with three giant words: “Welcome Back, Dave.”

Dravecky was not only back, but he pitched as if he had never left. With two outs in the fifth inning, he had retired 14 of the first 15 batters he had faced and he was working on a shutout.

Then Reds catcher Joe Oliver drew a walk on a close pitch.

“Somebody on our bench yelled at the home plate umpire,” Krukow remembers. “He yelled, ‘Read the script!’ Because that’s how we all felt. We felt like we were watching a movie.”

Dravecky worked around that walk and completed seven scoreless frames. He was one out from completing the eighth when Luis Quiñones hit a three-run homer.

Overall, Dravecky went eight innings, giving up those three runs on four hits, walking one and striking out five on 92 pitches.

“He was just like Dave of old,” Clark said. “When you’re out there after whatever has happened, you’re kind of worried about yourself -- you’re worried about whether it’s OK, can I do this? Can I finish?

“Instead, he was focused on his target and how he was throwing the ball. Probably his least concern was his arm. It just shows you the character.”

It also gave the Giants inspiration in their quest for a pennant.

“Here we are in the dog days of August,” Krukow said. “You need a push. And here he comes. He had everything to do with us making the World Series. We were completely enriched and our gas tanks were filled.

“And then we go on the road and head up to Montreal. And it would all end there.”

Nightmare

Mark Letendre was in his fifth season as the Giants’ head trainer in 1989. He would serve in that role for more than a decade after that.

When he saw Dravecky’s broken arm wrap around the front of his body as he was on his way down to the Olympic Stadium turf on Aug. 15, 1989, Letendre feared his worst nightmare had come true.

“He later told us,” Krukow said, “that he would have recurring nightmares that one of his pitchers would be out on the mound, and he would throw a pitch and his arm would come off.

“Knowing what injury Dave had, how much they had to scrape the bone to get the cancer out and how brittle that bone was, Letendre really, seriously thought his arm might come off.”

Things had been going smoothly for Dravecky up to that moment. He had thrown five scoreless innings against the Expos and, while he surrendered a home run and hit a batter to lead off the sixth, he was still working on another strong outing with his team ahead, 3-1.

Up stepped Tim Raines. As Dravecky began his windup, pulled back his left arm and went through his motion to throw the first pitch to Raines, he heard what he called “an explosion.”

“It was like a gunshot went off right at my left ear,” Dravecky said. “It was that loud. And then there was just this extreme pain. The pain was so intense that I thought my bone had protruded through the skin.”

Dravecky has tried to describe the pain, something that is quite possibly indescribable. But he’s used a baseball analogy.

“The only way I could describe it,” he said, “is if Bo Jackson grabbed a bat at both ends and broke it over his knee. Or Will Clark or Barry Bonds took a bat and they decided they were going to swing it at you, halfway between the shoulder and the elbow.”

As Dravecky lay in front of the mound, he heeded Clark’s advice to breathe. That helped him “regain his faculties,” as he put it.

One often wonders what someone who experiences such a traumatic moment, be it on the baseball field or anywhere else, thinks of in the immediate aftermath.

For Dravecky, it was about the reason for what had just happened, along with the purpose.

“The thought that came to my mind was, ‘God, what are you up to?’,” he said. “This is so much bigger than baseball.”

After a few moments, Dravecky was placed on a gurney and wheeled into the visitors’ clubhouse. He was shocked by what happened next.

Teammate after teammate, coach after coach and his manager all streamed in to see how Dravecky was. And then the Expos’ starting catcher, who was still in the game, ran in, with other Expos behind him.

“Mike Fitzgerald, who was catching in that game, was Danny Gausepohl’s cousin,” Dravecky said. “And Danny was one of my close friends and my center fielder in Amarillo, Tex., when I was in Double-A.

“Mikey comes over with tears streaming down his face, and he gives me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek and says, ‘I love you,’ before running back out to the field.”

The rest of the game was a blur for Dravecky’s teammates and even many in the other dugout.

“When you have a teammate go down like that and you know it’s a severe injury,” Clark said, “your mind’s not as focused as it was before.”

After the game, the Giants players hurried into the clubhouse to find out whatever they could about Dravecky’s condition. They were told he had broken his arm and an ambulance had transported him to a nearby hospital.

When manager Roger Craig was being interviewed after the game, which San Francisco won, 3-2, he couldn’t make it all the way through without crying.

It’s over, but it’s not over

On Oct. 9, 1989, the Giants won the pennant. A five-game victory over the Cubs sent San Francisco to its first World Series in 27 years.

With two outs in the ninth inning at Candlestick Park, Dravecky was sitting next to a retired legend.

“All we need is one more out, and I’m sitting next to Tom Seaver,” Dravecky said. “Tom, at the time, was announcing for NBC. I’ll never forget this. He came over, sat next to me and said, ‘You’re not gonna go out there, are you?’”

Dravecky badly wanted to celebrate the momentous occasion with his teammates on the field. But Seaver had a point. With Dravecky’s arm in a sling and vulnerable in a mob scene at the mound, going out there was a dicey proposition.

“I said, ‘Tom, I don’t know how I can’t go out there,” Dravecky remembers. “I’ve got to celebrate with my teammates.’ I don’t know what he said after that, but we got the final out and we all rushed out there. I was kind of leading the pack.”

Dravecky was in the thick of the joyous celebration when, from behind, he was inadvertently hit hard in the left arm. The impact fractured it again, just above the previous break.

Despite the intense pain, Dravecky took some painkillers and gingerly continued to celebrate with his teammates.

“With all this joy that was there, and this team was finally going back to the World Series, nobody knew Dave was hurt,” Krukow said. “He didn’t want to pour vinegar on any of that.

“I mean, here he is, he’s just fractured his arm again, and there he is with a smile on his face and happy to have been a part of it.”

The next month, when Dravecky had another checkup on his arm, the doctors discovered that the cancer had returned.

Over the next 18 months, Dravecky underwent numerous operations and radiation therapy. By the summer of 1991, there was only one thing left to do.

“My arm literally got fried by the radiation,” Dravecky said. “After that, I went home and contracted a staph infection. I battled that for 10 months. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, I was on intravenous antibiotics.

“Eventually, when I went back to see the doctor in New York City, he said, ‘Dave, it’s time to take your left arm.’”

This limb, which had been central to so much of Dravecky’s life to this point, could take no more. And on June 18, 1991, it was amputated.

Dravecky’s question of the purpose for all of this hadn’t been answered yet. But in his mind, it -- as well as the heretofore unknown answer -- was growing bigger by the day.

So much bigger than baseball

Dravecky received thousands of letters following the loss of his arm.

"Through the outpouring of all these people, you're hearing their stories," he said. "All of this starts hitting us -- it's not just a wave, it's a tsunami."

That tsunami of correspondence is how Dave and Jan were able to learn of the suffering of others with cancer or other debilitating conditions, as well as the perseverance, courage and hope that those people embodied in their battles.

The purpose for what Dave was going through was beginning to take shape.

“Right after the amputation, one of the things that happened while we were in Ohio was that the Giants were going to have a ‘Dave Dravecky Day,’” Dravecky said. “They said that what they wanted to do was create a souvenir card with my story on it. They wanted to sell it, along with t-shirts, with proceeds going to a charity of our choice.”

That charity was one that Dave and Janice began themselves.

“As a result of that, we were able to start the Dave Dravecky Foundation,” Dave said. “That’s where our Endurance Foundation ministry was birthed.”

Dravecky’s foundation helps those who are suffering with cancer or other diseases by providing counseling, support groups and other resources to those in need. It has impacted countless people over the past three-plus decades.

That provision to battle the pain of others was born of Dravecky’s own pain, in which there was purpose all along.

Dravecky is also a motivational speaker, sharing his story of hope with people all over the country. As Mitchell said, "The man is a motivator."

Krukow saw it all happen from the beginning and he’s seen the fruit of Dravecky’s incredible story. It’s one he can’t tell without getting goosebumps, even today.

“For him to do what he did without the muscles in his arm to stop the throwing motion, let alone start it,” Krukow said, "to this day, I’m telling you this story and I’ve got chicken skin, and I’ve got the hair on my neck standing up.

“We all witnessed something that was just supernatural.”