David Wright - The Captain: A Memoir

I thought I was going to throw up.

By age thirty-five, I figured I had experienced most everything one could on a baseball diamond. I was a first-round draft pick who had been to a World Series and seven All-Star Games. I had twice represented my country at the World Baseball Classic, wearing the letters USA across my chest. Id swung my bat thousands of times for the team Id grown up loving. Id stared down the greatest closer who ever lived on one of the games most pressure-packed stages. But until this day, I had never felt the emotion of standing in uniform, knowing I was wearing it for the final time.

Seven years earlier, Id fractured my back on a hustle play at third base, beginning a health spiral that would ultimately end my career. In 2015, doctors diagnosed me with stenosis, a degenerative narrowing of the spinal canal. Twice a day that summer, I ground through the monotony of physical therapy, trying to will my body to cooperate. It worked, at least temporarily; I made it to the World Series for the first time that autumn, even hitting a go-ahead home run early in Game 3. But the injuries never ceased. The next year, my neck required surgery. Then my shoulder. Then my back. Late in 2018, I finally admitted to myself that I would never truly return to the field on my terms. So the Mets and I hatched a plan: I would suit up for two final games before calling it a career.

That is how I found myself in the on-deck circle at Citi Field in New York City, bent in a crouch, trying to prepare for my first at-bat in twenty-eight months. I remembered being nervous for my big league debut and the World Series, and for dozens of moments in between. But I had never felt like this, physically sick, unsure if I could stand up and make the short walk to home plate. My legs wobbled as a sold-out crowd chanted my name. I took a couple of practice cuts and then the inning ended with me stranded on deck. Back to the dugout I retreated, hoping to regain my composure.

From the time I was young, baseball meant everything to me. My father helped introduce me to the game in our backyard, installing a homemade tee made out of concrete, a PVC pipe, and a little bit of rubber, and hanging a fishnet between two trees so I could hit balls into it. Growing up, I attended minor league games in my coastal Virginia hometown, then watched on television as those players broke into the majors. I wanted badly to become one of them, and eventually I succeeded, playing for the only team Id ever rooted for as a kid.

Maybe from the outside, it seems like things came easy to me. They didnt. As much as I tried to do everything the right way, my career wasnt about skating by without adversity. It was about refusing to let pain define me. It was about the value of hard work, of perseverance, of living life in a manner that leaves no room for regrets.

As the years passed, my body failed me, making it impossible to go out on my terms. But at least I could dictate a small part of my ending. After another half inning passed that night at Citi, I grabbed a bat and walked back onto the field, steeled a bit better this time to keep the crowd from frazzling my nerves. I made my way back into the on-deck circle, looped my bat in an arc around each shoulder, then dropped into a squat to survey the fieldthe site of some of my greatest triumphs as a baseball player, and also some of my most jarring failures.

Then I stood back up and strode to the plate.