TRU baseball team devasted by injury to teammate

By MARK HUNTER
Daily News Sports Reporter 
The TRU WolfPack baseball team is reeling after a "devastating" injury left one of its players faced with the possibility of losing his right eye. 
Tyler Lowey, a fourth-year infielder from Calgary, was injured Sunday in a game against the Douglas Royals at the WolfPack's Thanksgiving Classic at NorBrock Stadium.
Lowey, 20, was hit in the eye with a ball while batting. Reports indicate that a pitched ball deflected off Lowey's bat and struck him in the face. 
Ray Chadwick, head coach of the WolfPack, was out of town on the weekend so didn't see the accident, but said he has been in touch with Lowey every day since it happened. 
"He lost his eye," Chadwick said. "I wasn't there and I don't know much, but . . . he lost his eye."
Lowey, who has been released from Royal Inland Hospital, returned to his home in Calgary on Wednesday and couldn't be reached for comment.
 "He's always been a high-energy, good-spirited kid," Chadwick said. "I talked to him right after, when he was in tears, and I've talked to him other times, when he was laughing again."
The WolfPack plays in the Canadian College Baseball Conference, whose season runs from March to May. TRU always plays a fall exhibition season, and the Thanksgiving Classic serves as a final weekend of play. 
According to Chadwick, the doctors told Lowey that he wouldn't see again out of the injured eye. In such cases, it is protocol to remove the eye, although Lowey's injured eye hasn't been removed yet. 
The news was a blow to his teammates, who had a meeting with TRU director of athletics and recreation Ken Olynyk and Peter Soberlak, TRU's chairman of physical education who also is a sports psychologist. 
"We wanted to make sure (the players) were OK, too," Olynyk said. "It's a situation where someone's hurt and you don't know what's going to happen - we just wanted to address that." 
Lowey was a member of the WolfPack team that won the CCBC title in 2009, and listed that as his greatest moment in the 2011 WolfPack media guide. 
During the 2011 CCBC regular season, he went 23-for-77 (.299), driving in 16 runs and stealing eight bases, to go along with five doubles and four triples. 
Chadwick said he had penciled in Lowey to bat second and split his time at first or second base or in the outfield during the spring season. Lowey also would have been available to pitch - he threw a complete game victory on Saturday against the Okanagan A's. 
Chadwick has been around baseball a long time, so has seen his share of injuries. But this is much, much different.
"With a shoulder or elbow or knee injury, you can have surgery, do rehab and come back," he said. "But when you're not going to come back, it's devastating."I tell the guys to play hard - this may be your last at-bat or last inning. . . . I never thought, in a million years, something like this was going to happen."
It was the second scary injury to mar what Chadwick referred to as a "crappy fall."
In late August, pitcher Kevin Cramer of Camp Verde, Ariz., broke his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a day of fun in the Thompson River. 
The WolfPack had a Sunday game canceled, so the players went to the river and set up a slip-n-slide, with a two-foot jump into the river. On what was to be one of the final runs of the day, Cramer, 23, took a turn, but didn't make the jump and landed awkwardly. 
Chadwick said there initially was some paralysis, but added that Cramer is making strides and was released from hospital last week.
"He's almost back to normal," Chadwick said. "He actually came to our games (on the weekend) and he's under the impression that by the time we get inside in mid-November, he'll be ready." 
mhunter@kamloopsnews.ca

A young man's thoughts turn to baseball . . .

Tyson Gillies of the Reading Phillies rounds
second base and heads for third.
(Photo by Ralph Trout/Reading Phillies)

There is nothing quite like the glint in a young man’s eyes as he contemplates baseball.
After all, baseball, of all the sports, is the one that most attacks the senses.
The start of a new baseball season is signalled by the warmth of a new spring, by the sight of fathers playing catch with their sons, by new grass turning from yellow to green, and by the smell of that first cut.
Not to mention the crack — OK, the ping — of bat on ball, and the smell of oil on leather.
As Jim Bouton wrote to conclude his legendary book Ball Four: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
No other sport has that kind of hold on a person.
And as I sit across from Tyson Gillies while we enjoy a late lunch at the Frick and Frack Tap House it is evident that baseball has him in its steely grip.
The excitement is palpable, in his eyes and his voice, as he contemplates returning to Florida in mid-January and resuming his pursuit of a job in the outfield of a Major League Baseball team.
Gillies, who turned 22 on Oct. 31, says he has learned that one of the important things for a minor league baseballer is to focus on getting to the major leagues. Period. Don’t get zoned in on one team — even the big league team that holds your rights — because the goal is to get to the major leagues. Period.
A year ago, Gillies was closer than he has ever been to getting there. He had been part of one of the biggest trades in recent MLB history as he and two other prospects were dealt by the Seattle Mariners to the Philadelphia Phillies for left-hander Cliff Lee, a Cy Young winner.
Gillies, who is from Kamloops, was coming off a terrific season with the Mariners’ top Class A team.
(He hasn’t forgotten his Kamloops roots, either. He mentions Ray Chadwick and Sean Wandler and he talks of perhaps one day going into business here. The city, he says, is badly in need of some batting cages. So maybe some day . . .)
The Phillies couldn’t get him into Class AA quickly enough, assigning him to the Reading Phillies, the Eastern League affiliate that is located about 40 minutes from Philly.
But soon after landing in Reading, everything — yes, everything — went south.
A slow starter throughout his career, Gillies was just warming up — he was, as they say, finally seeing the ball and hitting the ball — when he blew a hamstring. An outfielder with blazing speed, it was one of the worst injuries he could have experienced.
To make matters worse, Gillies tried to return to action before he should have, and, of course, he reinjured the hamstring, which only lengthened his stay on the disabled list.
“I was hitting the ball so well when I got hurt, though,” he says, seemingly feeling a need to explain why he rushed back even though something told him he wasn’t yet ready.
He says, however, that he has learned.
Oh, has he!
He talks of having learned the value of patience, something that often is in short supply when one is young and full of pith and vinegar.
Most of all, he says, he has learned not to put himself in situations that might lead from one thing to another, like winding up in the back of a cop car after a night of revelry in Clearwater, Fla., the home of the Phillies’ minor league complex. It was in late August. He hadn’t played in two months and was in Clearwater rehabbing his injury. He had been in a bar and was waving his shirt around outside in the hopes of landing a ride back to his hotel. He got a ride, but it was to the Crowbar Hotel, not La Quinta Inn.
Police later claimed that Gillies was sharing the back of that cruiser with a baggie containing cocaine and charged him with possession. The Florida State attorney’s office in Pinellas County dropped the charge in October.
Kevin Hayslett, Gillies’ lawyer, told The Daily News at the time that “a drug screen that was done within hours of the incident showed that (Gillies) clearly had no drugs at all in his system.
“All the screens and all the evidence they had showed that he did not possess or consume or ingest any narcotics. Upon their investigation, after they had the benefit of the evidence that I was in possession of, they determined to drop all charges and basically vindicate Tyson.”
Still, the damage was done and Gillies knows it. If he has doubts, all he has to do is Google his name.
Gillies, who is legally deaf and wears hearing aids, has done a lot of work with young, hearing-impaired people. He knows the damage he did to his reputation. As he says, “It’s part of me now . . . it always will be.”
But nothing compares to the pain he knows he caused his mother. He heard the anguish in her voice and saw the hurt in her face. He says those memories, as much as anything else, will serve to guide him in the future.
Gillies and other professional and college players who winter in the Vancouver area have been working there while coaching some youngsters. Gillies came home to visit family and was to return to the Lower Mainland late last week. He will spend some more time working out and coaching, and then it will be time to head south.
Gillies is in constant touch with players like Dominic Brown, an outfielder who got a taste with the Phillies last season and now is on their depth chart in right field. Those conversations fuel Gillies’ excitement.
The hamstring, he says, has healed  and he is anxious to get to Florida and get back to work.
As he gets up to leave, he moves with the litheness of an athlete whose muscles are just waiting to propel him forward in a burst of speed. There is nothing herky-jerky about Tyson Gillies. He doesn’t get up and out of the booth. No. He unfolds.
Nor does he climb into his car. Rather, he slides into it, all smoothness and grace. He drives east on Victoria Street but, really, he is headed to Florida. You wonder as he drives away . . . is that John Fogerty?
“Put me in, coach — I’m ready to play today;
“Look at me, I can be centerfield.”

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
gdrinnan.blogspot.com
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