NEW YORK — Lucas Erceg has switched gloves since becoming a member of the Royals on the Trade Deadline this yr, choosing a darker blue glove with the KC brand of his new staff, the one which has him pitching within the largest moments of October as its finest reliever.
The date stays the identical, although, stitched onto the surface in white lettering: 06/10/2020.
A relentless reminder of the day Erceg’s life modified.
“It’s why I’m here, I think,” Erceg mentioned, trying down on the glove and patting the date. “I can’t thank my choices enough for allowing myself to be here. If I hadn’t chosen to put down the bottle, I don’t know where I would be.”
Four years in the past, Erceg was in “dark spaces,” as he detailed to MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy again in 2022 as a former Brewers prospect. When baseball shut down in spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Erceg developed a brand new routine at house in Phoenix: Waking up, enjoying video video games and consuming for hours, and infrequently taking a visit to the comfort retailer close by for restocks.
When his now-wife Emma returned house after an extended day at work, Lucas could be the place she left him.
“I had been up since 10 o’clock drinking and playing video games,” Erceg mentioned. “It just got to a point where she was sick of it.”
Emma informed Lucas she was taking a visit house to California, and that if he didn’t have “this all figured out,” as Lucas recalled, “then she wasn’t coming back.”
In hindsight, that was the awakening for Lucas. In the second, he didn’t care.
“I got so drunk that over the next couple of days, I was like, ‘What am I even doing?’” Lucas mentioned. “And I wasn’t even doing it to spite her. I was doing it to spite myself. At the end of the day, it was to get in my own way.”
On June 9, 2020, Erceg made the choice to cease consuming. June 10 was the primary day of his sobriety.
Emma, the “love of my life,” Lucas says with a smile, was the preliminary push. But he's clear that he stopped for himself greater than something or anybody else.
“In the past, I tried to become sober, and I never really made that choice for myself,” Erceg mentioned. “At first, I thought if I was able to make others feel happy for me, then I would feel happy for myself. And that just wasn’t the case. When I finally decided that I needed to do this for myself, so I could be happy for myself, and know at the end of the day that I am good enough to make a choice like this, that’s when it all came to fruition.”
It wasn’t straightforward. Withdrawals brought about him to shed pounds. He couldn’t sleep. But he was convicted in his determination and stayed true to it. Even when he drove 16 hours to Sugar Land, Texas, to play impartial ball, which introduced a complete new set of challenges — and never solely as a result of he hit .180. One evening as he performed Fortnite with his teammates, a pal poured him a shot of bourbon and positioned the glass on Erceg’s PlayStation.
Erceg was confronted with one other choice. He declined the drink. He informed his mates his story.
“To this day, I haven’t ran into anybody who has had an issue with me telling them I’m sober, a recovering alcoholic,” Erceg mentioned. “Nobody’s made enjoyable of me, everybody has revered my determination, they’ve all supported me.
“That was the biggest scare. That thought of, ‘How are they going to react to me telling them something like that? Are they going to think I’m weak? Are they going to make fun of me because I don’t drink and I had an issue with it?’ But nobody has ever wronged me, or put me down. It’s been nothing but awesome support.”
Erceg has come a good distance, though it doesn’t imply the exhausting days are over. He’s a pitcher now. He’s with his third group and is establishing himself as probably the greatest relievers within the recreation. His 99 mph fastball, nasty slider and depraved changeup are why the Royals made him their prized Trade Deadline acquisition in July.
His competitiveness and confidence are why they'd no qualms about slotting him instantly into excessive leverage roles.
“We just threw him right in there to high leverage as soon as we got him,” supervisor Matt Quatraro mentioned. “… He has not backed down one time from any of those challenges.”
The date on Erceg’s glove, proper there in entrance of him as he takes a deep breath and will get set on the mound, is a reminder he can tackle these challenges — after which use them, and his story, as assist and inspiration for others.
“There’s always a way to turn yourself around,” Erceg mentioned. “There’s no giving up, right? You don’t think there’s a way to get out of this? There is. I found my way out, so for me to be able to use this as a platform and extend my hand out to others, that’s what I want to do. To tell them this isn’t just a baseball thing, this is a life thing, and you learn plenty of lessons through hardship, through adversity.”
