PRAYERS FOR ROD CAREW

I love legend Rod Carew. I've loved him since I was a kid. I loved him approach. In fact, I love the way he played and respected the game.

I was touched to hear that newly acquired Aaron Hicks got a great piece of advice from Carew when he was with the Twins. He basically told Hicks not to give up switch hitting. That it was "a blessing".

Because of that, Hicks stuck with it.  Read JUST ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE ROD CAREW...for more on that.  I wrote that November 13th, never knowing what I just found out about the great Rod Carew, he's looking for a heart transplant.  Not gonna lie, reading that broke my heart.

According to several sources, but we'll go with the original source on this, Sports Illustrated:

"It was 11 days before his 70th birthday. Stepping off that tee box, Carew suddenly felt his chest burn and his hands go clammy. Retreating to the clubhouse, he lay on the floor and asked a woman there to call a paramedic. 'The next thing I saw was a man with paddles in his hands,' Carew says. 'He was yelling, ‘We’re losing him! We can’t lose him!’ Then I blacked out.'

When he woke in the emergency room at Riverside Community Hospital—to more paddles and more shouts of 'Don’t lose him!'—Carew closed his eyes again. 'I decided to go to sleep,' he says softly. 'And I didn’t know if I’d wake up.'

He had suffered a massive heart attack—'the kind they call the widow-maker,' says his wife, Rhonda. And though doctors told Carew he was extraordinarily lucky to be alive—his heart had stopped beating on two separate occasions—he doesn’t always feel fortune-kissed. 'My wife will tell you I get up in the morning and cry and wonder, Why me?' Carew says, convalescing in a friend’s house in the suburbs of San Diego after seven weeks in five hospitals. 'But you can’t say that. I go back to when my youngest daughter was dying. I never asked my friend upstairs, Why me? And He’s the only one who has the answers.'

Carew is sitting in an easy chair. Minx, a black Bombay cat, is perched above his right shoulder. Both exude a quiet grace—they look equally feline in repose—and there’s a brief silence in the house as Carew considers that a kind of mechanical heart has been implanted in his chest, alongside his damaged one. After a moment, the most elegant hitter of his generation puts his face in his hands and sobs.

'I was dead,' he says, 'and they brought me back to life.'”

Gotta feel for Rod Carew and his family right now.  Hey, we're a Yankee site, but we're more than that here at Bleeding Yankee Blue. We believe in kindness and family and support and all of that.  Rod Carew, one of my childhood heroes needs support right now.  Say a prayer today in your busy day. It takes a second.

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