Earlier this season, Bryan Vogel hit the 300th home run of his career. We sat down with him expecting to talk about that homer, but came away with something totally different.
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Bryan Vogle hit his 300th career home run in the first week of the season, but that isn't what he wants to talk about as we sit down at a local Denny's to have a chat.
"I'm so pumped," Vogel said as he ordered two eggs, over easy, with wheat toast and jam. "I spent the morning in a high school gym with a kid named Vince. He was diagnosed a week ago, and was trying to decide if he should play basketball or not."
I asked what Vogel told him.
"What do you think?"
I don't need to look beyond the glow in his eyes to know where Bryan Vogel stands on the issue of whether a kid with MS should be playing basketball. The man is 33 years old, and for a moment he looks like a teenager.
I ask him about the number 300. He shrugs.
"Life is too short to get caught up in too many things like that," he says. "The best part of it was that all the guys greeted me at the plate." He goes on to talk about his time in the league, which has primarily been spent in Hawaii, but has seen stops in four cities, including the last two years here in Yellow Springs. "This is a special place, really. I'm happy to be here. This is the place that embraced me after the diagnosis. It's a good place, a place where regular people live."
Yes, the diagnosis.
Multiple sclerosis.
The story is well known--dashing young ballplayer with the gorgeous wife, two beautiful kids, a big bat, and a Gold Glove starts feeling poorly, and a year later is finally diagnosed. "It was a tough year," he said. "But to be honest, after all that time and all the tests, I was happy to hear the final word." He eats toast when it comes. "I was so tired all the time, and by the time the diagnosis came in I was actually getting worried it might be something worse--the doctor at one time even said 'brain tumor,' which I can tell you causes you to see things in a different light."
After that kind of talk, it's hard to make it a priority to ask him what he thinks about that number, 300. Or, to put it properly, since he's on a tear, 305 (which is the number of homers he's hit after only 19 games of the season). Two more will put him on the all-time list of top 100 home run hitters in league history. Six more will put him into the 98 position. Twenty more--not an unlikely number by the end of the year, would put him up near 80.
Given that he's got three years left on his contract, it is not inconceivable that I could be sitting across from a guy who winds up with some 400 homers or so at age 36. This would make him a top 50 kind of guy--and as a second baseman would make him within sniffing distance of the Hall of Fame. If the disease doesn't raise its head too much, who knows how much longer he could keep playing, and if so, where that number winds up?
But today, Bryan Vogel doesn't want to talk about home runs or about the Hall of Fame. He doesn't even really want to talk about baseball, though he placates me for a little while. Instead, though, Bryan Vogel really just wants to talk about a high school kid named Vince who wants to play basketball.
"We shot free throws for a while, then he went off to his Algebra class," Vogel says as he puts pepper on his eggs. He takes a sip of orange juice and it seems like that orange juice is suddenly the most important thing in the world. "It was pretty damned cool."
We talk about the kids he works with for another 30 minutes after that. He tells me about Melissa, a girl who paints. And about Kashid, a kid whose favorite book is about a kid who gets three wishes and uses them to save the world. By the time I finish my breakfast and have another cup of coffee, he's discussed his calendar--he's due at the park in an hour to get started preparing for a game. The Indy Grasshoppers are in town, and he's got a set of tickets to take to the local YMCA for kids who can't afford to go to games other ways.
I thank him for his time, and he says he enjoyed the conversation.
"It's a great time to be alive, isn't it?" Bryan Vogel, possible future Hall of Fame candidate with MS and a six-pack of free tickets in his pocket, says to me as he leaves.
And all I can think as he leaves is that, yes, it is, indeed, a great time to be alive.
