October isn’t just the start of playoff baseball in MLB, it’s a month that we remember, and stand up for those who can’t in cancer awareness month.
Unfortunately, with all of the innovations in our society in the last 10, 20, and 50 years, there is one thing that has not been discovered — a complete and total cure for cancer.
It has impacted all of our lives in one way or another. You may have family members or friends who have had cancer in some form or, perhaps, even yourself. Major League Baseball is no exception. Each year, MLB embarks upon a tradition to ‘Stand Up To Cancer’ during the World Series.
This season, FanSided has spoken to a pair of players and a broadcaster about their battles with the disease and how they have triumphed over them. In some cases, they are not household names, but they ought to be. They have persevered through the biggest battle of their lives and serve as inspiration to others.
Cancer awareness month: Twins pitcher Devin Smeltzer and his story
Devin Smeltzer has spent parts of each of the last four seasons in the major leagues with the Twins. In 2022, he had his best season to date — a 3.71 ERA in 15 games (12 starts). But his future wasn’t always so certain.
When he was nine years old, Smeltzer was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called pelvic rhabdomyosarcoma. In layman’s terms, a tumor had grown against his bladder that was connected to his prostate.
Earlier this season, Smeltzer talked to FanSided about it.
“I would have a sip of water and 10 minutes later, I’d have to pee,” Smeltzer said.
Smeltzer grew up in New Jersey, just a few miles away from the Pennsylvania border. “[O]ne of my teammates on a little league team my dad coached, his dad was a pediatric doctor at (St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia). So he got me in relatively quick.”
To treat pelvic rhabdomyosarcoma, the doctors “hit it heavy” with chemo and radiation. Smeltzer was diagnosed on Aug. 5, 2005, and one year later, he was declared to be in remission. However, he still deals with side effects to this day.
“I’ll have side effects from the treatments here and there,” Smeltzer said. “I had some bladder bleeding issues pop up. 2017, I got through that season and then that offseason had surgeries to fix it, and then had some hormonal issues (last year).”
In 2021, Smeltzer only appeared in one game in the majors and none in the minors because of said side effects and another unrelated injury. Originally, they thought he was having an elbow issue, but that was actually a side effect of a herniated disc in his back.
“So we originally thought it was my elbow. But it turned out the elbow was just a side effect of the nerve issues from the herniated disc,” Smeltzer said. “And the hormonal issues are separate.”
However, being out for nearly all of last year for the elbow and the herniated disc was a “blessing in disguise” because he had to deal with the hormonal issues, which have stemmed from his treatment for cancer.
Before Smeltzer debuted with the Twins in 2019, he was with the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was minor-league teammates with third baseman Connor Joe.
Cancer awareness month: Rockies 1B/OF Connor Joe and his story
Joe made it to the majors himself with a different team in 2019, as he made his MLB debut with the Giants but now, he is a member of the Colorado Rockies as a first baseman and an outfielder. Joe had a cancer scare of his own.
After he made his MLB debut with the Giants, he returned to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who signed him in 2020 to a minor-league deal with a Spring Training invite. Joe tried to battle his way onto the team’s MLB roster.
At the beginning of Spring Training, he received a physical, as all players do that time of year.
“The doctor was really thorough,” Joe told FanSided. “And I was getting a bit frustrated just because of how long he was taking. Then, he got to the physical exam and he felt something on my right testicle and he said, ‘you know, it’s a hard spot.’”
Joe underwent further testing, including an ultrasound, but the results “weren’t really cut and dry” on it. Then, he underwent blood tests for tumor markers and they were “so high.”
“I remember the day like it was yesterday,” Joe said. “Sitting in that doctor’s office and the doctor at the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale came in … He knew what I was trying to accomplish that year. And he said ‘hey, there’s no easy way to tell (you) but all your tests came back and you everything’s consistent with (having Stage III testicular cancer). And I mean, I was shocked. I felt healthy, had a great offseason … but then, my goals for that year completely changed.”
He felt that he needed to be at home with his family (in Los Angeles) so he decided to get treatment at UCLA … but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
He was with his wife, Kylie, and their dog but his parents were still able to be involved, despite the COVID-19 lockdown. “My parents actually totally quarantined themselves off from their friends just so like they could come help us out during my treatment weeks,” Joe said.
He received chemo and treatment from Dr. Mark Litwin, who had testicular cancer himself when was only 18 years old. Joe was able to have the tumor removed but it moved into his left lung, as well. That took four more rounds of chemo and three more months of recovery time.
Thankfully, Joe was declared cancer free on July 20, 2020, just a few weeks before the MLB season started with their truncated schedule.
Since then, he has fortunately not had any side effects.
Cancer awareness month: MLB broadcaster Jack Corrigan and his story
The man who announces all of Joe’s games for the Rockies on the radio is Jack Corrigan. Corrigan has been in the majors for nearly 40 years — he first started broadcasting MLB games for the then-named Cleveland Indians back in 1983.
2006 was a tough year for Corrigan, as was 2016. In 2006, he was skiing at the beginning of Spring Training and due to an accident, he tore his rotator cuff. As a result, Corrigan had to go off his medication for atrial fibrillation, or an irregular heartbeat. A few months later, while the club was in San Diego in July, he suffered two minor strokes on the way to Petco Park.
As Corrigan told FanSided in a nearly 30-minute conversation, after broadcasting one game with a “tremendous migraine,” he got in touch with the Rockies’ head trainer, Keith Dugger (who is still their head trainer today).
Flying back home to Denver, “we were about halfway home. And I sneezed,” Corrigan said. “And I thought I blew the top of my head off, it hurt so much.”
George Frazier, the team’s TV color analyst at the time, told Corrigan he thought he should go to the hospital as soon as they landed. Instead, Corrigan went home and went to bed. The next day, the voice of the Rockies swallowed his pride and went to see his primary doctor, Dr. Allen J. Schreiber at Rose Medical Center in Denver.
At first, they thought he had a tumor, but they determined later that day that he had a stroke. Since, with medication, Corrigan hasn’t had any issues with it. That scare changed Corrigan’s entire mindset as it pertains to medicine and disease prevention.
A decade later, the same doctor, Schreiber, gave Corrigan a physical before Spring Training, just like they do with the players. His numbers were off so he was sent to a urologist to get a biopsy, where eight of the cultures taken were negative and four were positive. Other tests showed that he had prostate cancer, but it was caught fairly early.
Fortunately for him, Corrigan was proactive this time around. Much of that was because of family history — his father had prostate cancer, and his mother and sister both had breast cancer. Corrigan, who turned 70 in September, was aware of that and, as he described, the genetic markers for the two forms of cancer are very similar.
“(Dr. E. David Crawford, a renowned urology surgeon at University of Colorado Health) looked at me and said ‘you know, you had no chance of missing this.’ … He said that the similarities between breast cancer and prostate cancer are so close. So many of the genetic markers are the same that it’s in a lot of ways the same disease separated by gender.”
“So middle of the year — the All-Star break– they did this technique that he’s developed this 3D mapping biopsy that they take. The previous urologist took a dozen samples This 3D mapping biopsy takes 125 samples and they basically do a 3d map. It’s pretty cool. It’s like a virtual prostate, if you will, and he showed the stuff and so the four sample positives from the other one, were really just part of one single tumor.
And it enabled him to do a procedure because there weren’t many nerves or blood vessels to worry about. He did what’s called a “cryoablation,” where they go in circle the tumor with needles and inject gas at minus 70 Celsius and kill themselves by freezing them … The beauty of it is they’re not removing anything and a lot of times, I think men are hesitant about a prostate cancer visit but it has to be totally removed or significantly removed. Well, you know…I was very fortunate with that.
Four years later in June 2020 (during the pandemic), it came back.
But again, due to getting regular check-ups, they found it early. Just four years later, the treatment for it was much different.
“Dr. Crawford developed (a new detection machine) that finds stuff that they, in the old methods, wouldn’t have found for maybe another several years. At first, I was like ‘okay, do we do the same cryo again? He said ‘no, that’s like dropping an atom bomb on a small village.’ And instead, they he said, recommended doing seeds, radiate radioactive seed implantation. My wife (Lisa) goes ‘wait a minute, David. You told us four years ago, seeds weren’t the way to go. And he smiled at us and said ‘well, shows you what happens in my business in just four years.’”
“And during the shutdown of the pandemic, I was able to drive over one week for because they have to map it out and they use a physicist now because there’s different levels of radiation and where it gets placed to do what’s needed to be done. And I thought well, they put a couple of seeds in now they blanket the blanket the prostate to make sure they’re gonna get anything that might be a potential issue. And so they they like you now to have you know, a few numbers for with your PSA (prostate specific antigen test), there’s grave concern they’d like you to be at like one and a half is ideal.
Corrigan was last tested in January. His PSA test was 0.1, or “next to nothing.”
At the end of each and every broadcast he has, Corrigan tells his male listeners to be proactive and get a prostate exam. And that message has saved at least one life, as Corrigan said.
“I got a letter. First of all that it was a letter was unusual, but I got a letter early this season. The guys first sentence says ‘I’m not a big Jack Corrigan fan. I grew up listening to Bob Prince in Pittsburgh.’ He said, ‘but I had to write to you because you saved my life.’ And then the next paragraph, he says, ‘I hear you do that prostate cancer stuff all the time so I went in and got a checkup and I was stage two. The doctor told me if I had waited another three weeks I would have been stage three and probably would have had a lot of issues.’ So if I get people like that, it’s more than worth while to have people get tired of me saying it every game because if it hits home, it hits home.
“I wrote back to him, I said, ‘Hey, that’s the beauty of a broadcasting, you decide who you like I said, I’m glad you listened. Because it did help you and help your family. And I try even more now I’ll push the family side of it.”
To the men out there who are hesitant to get a prostate exam, Corrigan has a clear message.
“You’re married? You’ve got (children)? And you can handle 10, 15 seconds for an exam (that could save your life)? Get over yourself.”
It could end up saving your life.