Touched By An Angel

When Angels pitching coach Mike Butcher walked out of the UC Irvine Medical Center at dawn on April 9, one of his players was dead, two of the player's friends were dead and a third friend was on life support, his skull no longer attached to his spinal column. Butcher wanted to believe that the third friend could pull through, but after what he had seen that night, hope was hard to muster. "His chances," Butcher says, "were slim to none."

Dr. Nitin Bhatia, the 36-year-old director of the Spine Center at UCI, had delivered the grisly diagnosis: internal decapitation. "I read the CT scan, and it was depressing," Bhatia says. "Ninety-five percent of people with internal decapitation die immediately or within a day or two. Of the other five percent, most are either quadriplegic or on a ventilator the rest of their lives."

By the afternoon of April 9 the baseball world had learned of the death of Angels starting pitcher Nick Adenhart and his friends Courtney Stewart and Henry Pearson in a car crash, and information started to emerge about that other passenger, a 24-year-old youth baseball coach named Jon Wilhite, who had been a catcher at Cal State--Fullerton. One television network reported that he too was dead.

After a somber meeting with Jim Adenhart, Nick's father, in their clubhouse that afternoon, the Angels vowed to use baseball as their sanctuary. But on the first road trip after the crash, they lost five of six games, suggesting that there was no escape.

By the time they came home to Anaheim on April 21, their most feared hitter, Vladimir Guerrero, had gone on the disabled list, joining four of their starting pitchers. Their bullpen had an 8.31 ERA, worst in the majors. Their lineup had scored the second-fewest runs in the AL. Worst of all, their top pitching prospect was gone and never coming back.

"What's happening to us right now is mental," centerfielder Torii Hunter said then. "Guys miss Nick. They're mourning." When the team gathered on April 23 for a private memorial service at Angel Stadium, manager Mike Scioscia told the players to move on in their own time and in their own way. But he reminded them: "We will move on."

The Angels have won the American League West four times in the past five years and were widely expected to do it again this season. Despite losing free-agent first baseman Mark Teixeira to the Yankees and closer Francisco Rodriguez to the Mets last winter, they had gone 26--8 in spring training, leading the majors in batting average and runs. But on May 1 they were 9--13 and stuck in third place in their division. "We had the worst month a baseball team can possibly have," Hunter said recently. "It's like we were all telling ourselves, Hey, it's just a game, it's not that important, it's nothing compared to life and death. That went on for a month—maybe two months."

The malaise spread all the way to the Angels' Triple A team in Salt Lake City, where Adenhart had spent the 2008 season. "I'd take the mound, look back at the outfielders, and they've got their heads down," says righthander Matt Palmer, who started the season in Salt Lake before his promotion to the bigs on April 23. "Then I'd look in at the catcher, and he's got his head down too. How do you throw a pitch if everyone's got their head down?"

The TV report on the accident was, in fact, wrong. Wilhite was alive. Bhatia had wanted to operate immediately, on the morning of April 9, but Wilhite had too many other injuries—collapsed lungs, fractured disks, torn muscles, broken ribs and swelling in his brain. Bhatia screwed a ring, called a halo vest, into Wilhite's skull and sent him to the intensive care unit. "They brought his body back to life," Bhatia says.

Six days after the crash Wilhite lay facedown on an operating table as Bhatia and a team of 30 prepared to reattach his skull to his spine. A nurse asked Bhatia, "Are you nervous?" He certainly had reason to be. "Every step could kill him," Bhatia says. "Turning him the slightest bit on the table could give him permanent paralysis. It's a tightrope. Every step has to be perfect."