Last night I watched an Angels game on MLB Extra Innings, which I bought so that I could catch the Angels all year from AZ. Their brightest pitching prospect was starting, Nick Adenhart, 22 years old and pushing his potential by gaining a birth on the starting staff due to injuries to more established pitchers. Adenhart was just short of brilliant, pitching six innings of shutout ball and leaving the game ahead 3-0. What followed was a tragedy of epoch proportions, not because the Angels couldn't hold the lead and lost the game in the ninth inning but because Nick Adenhart was killied in a traffic accident only hours after the game when a red-light runner apparently T-boned the Mitsubishi Eclipse that Adenhart and three friends were in. Two died at the scene, one in the hospital and only one of the four has so far lived through the experience.
LA Times Story
For baseball, Spring is hope. The hope of October baseball is still strong when your team has yet to lose too many games. You follow these kids through Spring Training and you become emotionally invested in their careers. I first saw Nick Adenhart last year in the Spring, pitching for the Angels in Tempe during the pre-season. At that time he certainly looked like all he was built up to be, a young phenom having a brilliant Spring Training.
He didn't make the team coming out of Spring 2008 but he went down to AAA and tore up the place. He was the ace of a minor league staff that set a record by starting the season 21-1, or thereabouts. Adenhart was brought up to the big club at midyear as an injury replacement and made several starts, none of which was very impressive. In fact, his first start was a disaster in which he seemingly lost all control of the strike zone. When he was sent back down most everyone brushed off his struggles as rookie nerves, but then a funny thing happened back down at AAA. When he returned to the minors Adenhart couldn't seem to regain the form that had made him so dominant in the first half of the year and he struggled the rest of the way, ending up with a pretty poor stat line at the end of the season.
He was not expected to make the team coming out of Spring Training this year, but injuries and a very good Spring performance changed the Angels starting rotation to include Nick. Last night was his first start of the year and after some early struggles with control, Adenhart settled down and pitched a gem. Six innings of shutout baseball, leaving the bases loaded in two of the six. This outing reaffirmed his status as the Angels' best young pitching prospect.
The future certainly looked bright for Nick Adenhart's baseball career. He was 22, so he probably had the potential of 15-20 years pitching in the big leagues for millions of dollars. He had just come off of the most impressive pitching performance of his short life and presumably he was out celebrating after the game with friends, as anyone would. I can picture them driving along, joking and laughing and believing the future held nothing but good things for them. It must have been over in an instant, but that is small concillation for what has been taken from baseball and the Angels, and most importantly from the friends and family of Nick Adenhart and his unfortunate companions in the middle of last night.