‘You’re never going to leave this hospital’: How a Cleveland Guardians prospect beat the odds after a freak injury
‘You’re never going to leave this hospital’: How a Cleveland Guardians prospect beat the odds after a freak injury
By Brittany Ghiroli
5h ago
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It’s Friday, March 11, and the baseball world is buzzing: Major League Baseball and the Players Association had finally agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement less than 24 hours before.
Nationwide sports headlines are splashed with the big news: Baseball is back and teams are scrambling to fill out their rosters, players are packing for an abbreviated spring training and media outlets are flying to camps to chronicle it all. Everything is chaotic, frantic and exciting again. It is hard to believe there can be a bigger win.
But on a set of pitching mounds at the Cleveland Guardians’ minor-league camp in Goodyear, Ariz., a skinny, 19-year-old lefty is lacing up his cleats and holding back tears. He’s getting ready to throw his first bullpen of the spring.
The teenager, Frank Lopez, doesn’t throw particularly hard. He’s not a top prospect. The Dominican Republic native, signed in February 2020, has yet to pitch — at any level — in a professional game. COVID-19 took away the 2020 minor league season. And 370 days earlier, a freak accident while swimming in a river nearly took Lopez’s life.
There is a small crowd for this bullpen session — perhaps 10-12 people in the organization watching — many who are just as emotionally invested as Lopez. He spent three months in hospitals and rehab facilities in two different countries, had screws hold his cranium in place for five days, underwent multiple neck surgeries and lost close to 60 pounds from his signing weight.
Lopez talked to The Athletic six days before that spring bullpen session, dabbing at the corner of his eye with a tissue as he recounted the past 12 months for the first time, thinking of all the moments, the miracles, that got him here. Sometimes he’ll stop and go back to a story or pause to catch his breath.
There is so much to mention, details that will later flood back as he scrolls through old pictures and videos. But there’s one singular moment he’ll never forget, one that still makes his stomach queasy, words no 18-year-old should ever have to hear, let alone have seared into their skull.
“You’re never going to leave this hospital,” a doctor in the Dominican Republic told him last spring. “You’re going to die here.”
It’s March 6, 2021, and Lopez, who is from La Victoria, just outside of the capital city of Santo Domingo, is home in the Dominican Republic. While MLB — coming off a 60-game season — has a normal spring training, minor-league camp is delayed because of the pandemic. For a time, Cleveland’s Dominican Academy was also closed.
Lopez is at a river a few hours away with some family and friends, taking turns jumping into the water. His mother, Bricelda Rubén Abreu, is off cooking at the top of the hill. They’ve been there maybe an hour when Lopez takes another turn. He careens off the steep edge, splashes into the water and is met with immediate impact. Lopez has landed head-first on his best friend’s back. His neck snaps back underwater. Everything gets cloudy, but he doesn’t completely lose consciousness. He grabs for a rock and his friend helps pull him to shore. Lopez is in excruciating pain.
A drive to the closest hospital that should be 30 minutes becomes two hours because many of the roads in the Dominican Republic aren’t paved and are full of potholes. They have to go slow and maneuver around any slight bump, as Abreu cradles her son’s head. At the hospital, Lopez gets a neck collar and they run tests. Everything, they say, is normal but Lopez can go to another local hospital with more resources. The following night, on a Sunday around 8 p.m., his heart stops and he’s in intensive care. That’s when the doctor leans over and delivers the bone-chilling news.
“She said I was going to lose all my strength,” Lopez said through an interpreter, his eyes welling at the memory. “That I wasn’t going to be able to move and that I was eventually going to die there.”
Abreu also heard the doctor and subsequently passed out. She spent the next month sleeping in her car in the parking lot of the hospital.
The doctor was right: López was getting weaker, but the hospitals in the Dominican Republic still couldn’t find anything wrong. After about a week of assessments, they sent the X-ray to Cleveland’s local medical staff, who forwarded it on to the group in the United States. There, they could see on the imaging that Lopez had a broken vertebra.
Cleveland’s medical team knew Lopez needed to get out of the Dominican Republic and get surgery. The problem was getting him to the U.S.; flying in his fragile condition was too risky. Even driving from his house to the airport, given the state of many roads, was worrisome. Cleveland’s medical team was in constant contact with specialists, trying to figure out what to do.
“It was such a sensitive situation. The stakes were not low,” said Jeremy Harris, the Guardians’ assistant director of medical services in Arizona. “You talk about getting somebody on the field. That’s one thing. We are talking about someone having preservation of their neck.”
They decided to put Lopez in a max support brace, a halo of sorts, to try to build up a little stability in his neck. The brace cost 300,000 pesos (nearly $15,000 U.S.), a price tag that initially sent shock waves through Lopez, who is from a low-income family and knew they couldn’t afford it. (Cleveland stepped in financially.) Lopez wore the brace for nearly a month. The doctors initially sent him home, but Lopez passed out the first day he wore it due to the pain. He ended up back at the Dominican hospital until he flew to Cleveland in May, wearing the brace and a face mask on the plane.
Lopez was admitted to the Cleveland Clinic, where he was told his neck still wasn’t in good enough shape to operate. So he spent the next five days laying in bed with screws inserted into his skull to hold his cranium. The idea was to get some traction for his neck and to get the best alignment for surgery. He was 18 years old, in the United States for the first time with no family or friends, unable to eat, sleep or move without excruciating pain, and unable to understand what the doctors and nurses were saying.
Lopez during his stay at Cleveland Clinic. (Courtesy of Frank Lopez / Cleveland Guardians)
“Just think about the mental perseverance,” Cleveland’s rehab strength and conditioning coach Mo Cuevas said. “He’s got a new country, a language barrier. He told me the hospital played all English channels on the TV. Five days with screws in his head and he’s got to take all that on.”
On May 20, nearly 11 weeks after the accident, Lopez had an open reduction internal fixation (ORIF) of his first vertebra performed at the Cleveland Clinic. Not completely satisfied with the amount of closure he initially got in the operating room, the surgeon went back and operated on Lopez again the next day.
Lopez, who was bedridden for two weeks following the operations, was then transferred to the Cleveland Clinic’s rehab hospital in Avon, Ohio. Something as simple as standing up was difficult and would often cause Lopez to get lightheaded. The pain was horrible, but the worst part was trying to eat.
“My whole throat was stopped up,” Lopez said. “I would try to swallow and it would feel like my entire neck was exploding.”
The Guardians sent Nilda Taffanelli, an administrative assistant in player development, to check in with Lopez. She didn’t have to go every day, but Taffanelli — who Lopez affectionately calls his second mother — began doing it anyway. She thought of how she would feel if one of her children was in another country with no visitors. She wanted to give Lopez a sense of comfort. She held the phone up for him when he FaceTimed his family. She brought Lopez yellow roses for his room. The flowers, like their recipient, never wilted over that month. They joked about which was harder to kill.
On June 12, Lopez was discharged and flew to Arizona to continue his rehab. It had been more than three months since his accident and Lopez was finally able to safely set foot outside of a hospital. Rehab was a relative term. When he got to Goodyear, just standing was difficult. At an age when players are constantly adding muscle and weight, Lopez had done the opposite. Eating was still painful. His throat had atrophied so much that his voice was a whimper. He still had to wear the neck brace 24/7. Cuevas started him squatting to a chair while holding TRX cables for support. His mortality no longer in question, all Lopez could think about was whether he would be able to play again.
“It was always my dream to be a baseball player and I started that dream being able to sign a professional contract. And then this happened,” he said. “It was so hard some days, I felt empty and didn’t know if I could go on. But every morning I would look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m strong, I can keep moving forward, I can keep getting better.’”
If Cuevas suggested Lopez do 10 reps of something, he’d try to do 12. When he suggested he meet with a team nutritionist, Lopez told him in their next session he was now getting extra shakes. He attacked learning English with the same fervor, using every spare second to study. The reality show “Love is Blind” became a favorite learning tool.
“It was touch and go early on. And I think he felt motivated to learn English out of desperation,” said assistant director of player development Jennifer Wolfe, who met Lopez when he came to Arizona. “He couldn’t understand anything that was going on (in the hospital and rehab center) and that motivated him to get better. And a lot of that comes from who he is inside.”
In July, Lopez celebrated his 19th birthday at the complex with his teammates, who made a video for him when he was in the hospital. They had pizza and cake. The simple act of being able to chew felt like a big win. He was slowly gaining weight and doing light baseball activities that didn’t require moving his neck. In the third week of August, Lopez graduated high school, completing the CENAPEC classes and Dominican National Exams required to get his diploma.
Lopez with his diploma in August 2021. (Courtesy of Frank Lopez / Cleveland Guardians)
The following week, on Aug. 24, he got cleared to transition out of the neck brace.
“He had so many obstacles,” Cuevas said. “Even when it came time to take off the brace it started with 10 minutes at a time and then put it back on. This kid was raring to go 24/7, to get a little more, get a little more. It’s 115 degrees out for games, and he’s sitting there with the brace, with everything on and can’t move and he’s still into the game. We have guys that would rather eat dinner and not come to the game. He has the mental state of a Navy SEAL. There’s no other way to describe how mentally there he had to be to go through all this and not just be OK with normal function, but now put a glove on and compete with everyone else that’s here.”
Three weeks later, Lopez cut the brace out completely. His progress soared. He could lift and run with no restrictions.
“After he left the DR, when he went back to the academy, I saw him (again). He had gained like 30 pounds already. He was almost about to start throwing. He was fluidly speaking English. I was like, what?” said Derrick Diaz, an athletic trainer for one of Cleveland’s two Dominican Summer League teams, who helped coordinate Lopez’s travel post-accident.
“Sometimes I talk about this and I get goosebumps, ’cause it’s just incredible.”
There’s a long scar that runs across Lopez’s neck, a physical reminder, the last lingering one, of the accident. It comes up every time he gets a haircut or someone who is new to the organization notices. There is no hiding it. The scar is part of Lopez’s amazing story and he is brave enough to want to share it.
Frank 2.0. That’s what Lopez likes to call this version of himself. When he was in rehab, he did a lot of reading about his neck injury and couldn’t find a single person who went through what he did and survived. The way Lopez sees it he has two birthdays: his real one in July and the day of the accident.
Lopez at Guardians minor-league camp in March. (Cleveland Guardians)
“I’m forever grateful because if Cleveland hadn’t taken over my case, I wouldn’t be here today,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes. “I’m a different person than I was before (the accident). I’ve realized how strong I am. Now, coming back to spring training, the guys are coming in saying, ‘I can’t believe it. You’re not the Frank that we saw before.’”
This spring, Lopez squatted 345 pounds. He threw bullpens. He is still in the organization’s rehab group but Diaz, Cuevas and Harris can’t think of a single setback Lopez has had since he left the Cleveland Clinic’s rehab facility.
“We talk about grit here and he is the poster child, living proof of what grit can look like,” Taffanelli said. “He was devoted to getting where he is today, into a new person.”
She smiles. “Frank 2.0.”
Lopez still has dreams of being a big-league baseball player, but first things first: Lopez is still working toward making his pro debut in the DSL. When he does, dozens of people in the Guardians organization — in Arizona, Cleveland and the Dominican Republic — will again be moved beyond words.
“When you get a kid who’s humble, who’s willing to work hard, people are going to gravitate to (him),” Harris said. “Just thinking about all those steps that just got him to Cleveland in the first place, it took so much incredible work from so many people. Frank feels that gratitude very deeply. And that’s part of what I think makes people want to be a part of it.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of Frank Lopez / Cleveland Guardians)
