MLB Finally Casting Light on Players’ Troubles With Mental Health

Pablo Torre’s Sports Illustrated feature on MLB’s efforts to combat depression and address mental health issues in the sport begins with Ian Snell telling himself to take his life.

⇥⇥Do it, he thought. Just do it already, and be at peace. As the clock struck midnight on April 30, 2009, Ian Snell, the onetime ace of the Pirates, was still brooding in the shower of his apartment outside Pittsburgh. Hours had passed since he’d arrived home from an afternoon game in Milwaukee, an agonizing 1--0 loss in which he’d thrown 131 pitches in seven innings, a career high, but yielded the game-winning home run to opposing starter Yovani Gallardo. Now, standing beneath the spray of hot water—his body exhausted but his pulse racing—the 27-year-old Snell wanted to end his life.⇥⇥⇥⇥Kill yourself, he thought. Get it over with, and you won’t have to deal with this anymore.⇥⇥

It doesn’t get much more depressing than that. But the rest of baseball’s efforts are actually heartening.After denying mental health issues or writing them off as toughness deficiencies for decades, baseball has seen a flurry of “mental DLs” in the last few years, from Zack Greinke (who Mike Sweeney compares to Jackie Robinson) to Dontrelle Willis to Joey Votto to Snell. The culture of secrecy and rejection that led teams to have mental coaches stay at different hotels than their patients-slash-players is mellowing, figuring out that the best way to get a player out of a funk—and recoup the massive investments made in major leaguers—is to give him all the help he needs. It’s not novel for much of the rest of America, but it’s almost revolutionary in the retrograde world of baseball.

The full story is really worth reading, and Torre does an admirable job of weaving the personal and structural impacts of the change together, making the point that baseball is realizing its mistakes and trying to change. At story’s end, Snell is breathing a little easier. Fans of sane responses to mental health issues should be, too.

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