FRATES TRAIN IS COMING!
BC’s Pete Frates has become an inspiration as he challenges country to beat ALS
BOSTON — Chris Shaw is a strapping outfielder who bats left and throws right and doesn’t hit baseballs so much as pulverize them. A junior at Boston College and a former Mets draft choice, Shaw is on the midseason watch list for USA Baseball’s Golden Spikes Award, presented annually to the top amateur player in the country, and is widely expected to be a first-round selection in the June free-agent draft.
Chris Shaw is doing more raking than a yardman in the fall. He’s on a 17-game hitting streak, belting seven homers and driving in 22 runs over that span. He hit three homers in a game against Wake Forest, one of them a grand slam, and for the season, he has a .350 average, 11 homers and 41 RBI and a ludicrous OPS of 1.136.
It's hard to know where those numbers might be now, if Shaw hadn’t sustained a terribly timed bone break in his hand last month.
Shaw had surgery almost immediately, and even though he was able to return to his teammates this weekend, it still was a major blow, all the more so with the draft looming and big-league scouts tracking his every clout. So it sure did give him a lift when he heard from one of the greatest people he has ever known, a mentor and former BC outfielder himself — and the guy who first touted Shaw to BC baseball coach Mike Gambino when Shaw was a sophomore at Lexington (Mass.) High School.
In a series of text messages, Chris Shaw’s mentor wrote: so sorry bud thinking bout u u ok? Shaw took in the 27 characters, and took them in again. All it did was completely change his outlook, and fill him with fresh waves of gratitude and admiration for Pete Frates, the 30-year-old man who texted him — a man who keeps reaching out and helping and comforting, who remains on a singular mission, even as his body is being ravaged by the unspeakable horror known as ALS — Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
How could Shaw do any sort of wallowing about not being able to play baseball for a little while, after hearing from Pete Frates? How could he not look up from his phone in awe that a man dying from ALS — a man with a wife and a baby girl who he might not even see celebrate her first birthday — would express sympathy about his broken bone?
“This guy has the worst disease in the world and still gets up every day and is happy and optimistic,” Shaw says. He pauses and looks out at the outfield of Shea Field, the BC baseball park, before the school’s annual ALS Game late last month.
“Pete is the single most inspirational person in my life,” Chris Shaw says.
Something much more than a baseball season is going on at Boston College this spring, and indeed, for the last three springs. Certainly the games are important (the team was 24-21 going into this weekend’s series with Virginia Tech), but Mike Gambino and his players speak of a deeper mission, of a brotherhood built amid sunflower seeds, batting practice and dugout banter. Even as they pitch and swing and field, the BC players are living out a narrative of devotion and love that ultimately means more to them than a hundred trips to the College World Series.
Their mission, simply put, is to honor Pete Frates, former team captain, BC class of 2007, an outfielder who was a sculpted, 6-2, 215 pounds and known for his near-maniacal intensity, and is now one of the most famous ALS patients on the planet. They honor him by joining his quest to generate both awareness and research dollars to find a cure and/or treatment for a disease that for now remains incurable — a quest that Frates and the BC team did yeoman work on during last summer’s Ice Bucket Challenge, an initiative that was first championed by pro golfer Chris Kennedy and a pair of New York area ALS patients, Anthony Senerchia of Pelham, and Pat Quinn of Yonkers, and went viral largely because of Frates.
Within a few months, the Ice Bucket challenge raised $220 million, according to the ALS Association, and made Lou Gehrig’s disease more of a part of daily discourse than it had ever been.
Such has been Frates’ raison d’etre since March 15, 2012 — the day he was diagnosed with ALS. It continues even now, no matter that Frates’ body has been under unrelenting, neurological assault for more than three years, his motor skills gone, his physique withered, what’s left of him tethered to a wheelchair and a breathing tube. He can’t speak on his own, can’t feed himself, can’t do much of anything with his body. With his mind he is doing plenty, most all of it aimed at his dreaded enemy.
“My new team is the ALS community and I have felt since Day 1 that I owe them my best effort to try to raise awareness/funds to end this truly crappy disease,” Frates writes in a chat session, employing technology called EagleEyes, which was developed at Boston College and allows a disabled person to basically use his eyes to move a computer mouse.
Says Gambino, a former BC
ballplayer himself who was an assistant coach during Frates’ playing days, “Right from the beginning, Pete said, ‘I am going to beat this disease.’ I don’t know if he ever meant himself personally. There may not be time, but it’s going to help others, and that’s just how he was as a teammate, and that’s who he is as a person. It’s who his parents are, who his family is. Not to sound trite, but it goes back to BC, too, and the Jesuit education, and what you are taught here. Your education is not yours. It’s for you to go out and make the world a better place.”
Days after Frates’ diagnosis, he and his father, John Frates, were in Gambino’s office. Pete Frates was working in the insurance industry at the time, but knew that would not last for much longer, and had no idea what his next step would be, until Gambino congratulated him.
“Why are you congratulating me?” Frates asked.
“Because you are our new director of baseball operations.”
Pete Frates and his father were stunned.
“What does the director of baseball operations do?” Frates asked.
“I don’t know. I never had one, but we’ll figure it out,” Gambino said.
Before he got sick, Frates had already been closely connected to the BC baseball team, establishing a mentoring and career-placement program for BC ballplayers. Now he was in that much deeper. He made every road trip in 2013, and made a number of them in 2014, before declining health made it too difficult. At home and away, everybody on the team looked after him.
“It was constant. You never had to ask, ‘Where’s Pete? Who’s got Pete? What does Pete need?’ ” Gambino says. The kids would do whatever they had to, from tying his shoes, helping him on and off the bus, putting on a jacket, even feeding him.
More than once, during a game, Gambino would look over and see one of his players bundling Pete in a blanket, or feeding him a granola bar.
“We’d be in the middle of the game, and I’d almost start crying,” Gambino says.
“To see a group of 18- and 22-year-old boys doing that, to see how much they love him and care for him — they were teaching me in how they handled it.”
To see Pete Frates, one-time specimen and Div. I ballplayer, show the confidence and grace to accept help was no less moving.
Blake Butera, senior second baseman and captain, has an older brother who was teammates with Pete. Butera, who wears Frates’ No. 3, said being there for Pete Frates is as easy as a 1-3 putout.
“He’s the guy you look up to,” Butera said. “He’s like a team captain, a tremendous leader. You
On a brisk and sunny Saturday at Shea Field two weeks ago, a record crowd of 3,033 turned out for the team’s fourth annual ALS Game. Pete Frates was on the field with his wife, Julie, and baby daughter, Lucy, along with his parents, John and Nancy, and brother, Andrew. The BC players and coaches warmed up in bright red T-shirts that said “TEAM FRATETRAIN” on the back, and “We Will Strike Out ALS” on the front, and the game balls were stamped with the same “Strike Out ALS” logo. The day went off perfectly. BC beat Georgia Tech, the middle game of a weekend sweep, and Pete Frates couldn’t have been greeted by more people if he’d been Big Papi, or the mayor of Boston.
The ALS game was held about six weeks after the BC team played the Red Sox in Fort Myers, Fla. during spring training, every player on the field wearing a jersey with Frates’ name and No. 3 on the back, and five days after the Red Sox gave him a one-day contract in a stirring Opening Day ceremony at Fenway Park. On the final day of the 2014 season, the Derek Jeter farewell, Pete Frates was on the field, along with Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski and many of the most iconic sports heroes Boston has ever had, just one more way Frates kept up the fight against what Lynn Aaronson, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the ALS Association, calls “an orphan disease,” because it is so often overlooked compared with cancer and heart disease — afflictions that strike in far greater numbers.
The first time Frates met Aaronson, he told her, “No tears, anybody. ALS — bring it on.”
Says Aaronson: “He couldn’t accept that so little progress had been made against this disease. This is a guy who rallies people. He’s a natural born leader. He just goes at things full force.”
Sometimes, before Pete started deteriorating rapidly, his father would tease him about all of his public appearances.
“The disease may have attacked your body but it sure hasn’t done anything to your ego,” John Frates would joke to his son, and they’d share a laugh.
Looking out at all the people and well-wishers at the ALS Game, seeing all the players and coaches in their red FRATETRAIN shirts, John Frates took it all in and didn’t laugh, and said, “Every day, no matter what he was going through, he kept up his campaign. If it weren’t for his leadership and his vision, none of this could’ve happened.”
When Pete arrived at the game, someone removed his hat to show off his new Mohawk haircut, another bonding exercise with the guys on the team, almost all of whom had just gotten Mohawks, too.
“I’m pumped,” Frates texted to Gambino the day before, accompanied by a photo of his new hairdo. The players were pumped when they saw him.
Justin Dunn is a sophomore reliever from Freeport, L.I., a kid with a cornstalk body and easy heat.
“Pete means the world to me,” Dunn says. “If I can have half his strength and be half the man he is, I’ll be set for life.”
Says John Frates, “If this all were not so profound, you’d just want to crawl into a hole.” He watched the grounds crew manicure the mound and line the batter’s boxes. He smiled faintly and spoke about the irony of the Yankee-Red Sox connection in all this — a disease named for a Bronx icon possibly getting cured with the help of a man the Sox signed for one day.
Most ALS patients survive between two and five years after their diagnosis, studies show. Boston College’s director of baseball operations is early in Year Four. It’s not a subject his baseball brothers want to dwell on, nor one Pete Frates dwells on, either. The neuromuscular pit bull inside him knows nothing but attack, but the pit bull has never touched Frates’ will and courage. Not once, say his BC brothers. It is why he inspires slugging Chris Shaw every single day, although Pete Frates tells you the gift has been all his.
“I truly believe baseball and being part of the teams helps me endure,” Pete Frates says. “It has been such an honor and a privilege. I get more out of it than the boys and Mike will ever know.”