Nick Adenhart seemed bound for baseball greatness. The 22-year-old Angels pitcher was killed by a drunk driver on April 9, 2009.
Black patches with Adenhart’s name and No. 34 were sewn over the hearts of jerseys. A mural of Adenhart in mid-delivery was affixed to the center-field wall. Decisions were made to keep Adenhart’s locker intact and to set up lockers for him on the road. Adenhart’s jersey was hung in the dugout for every game.
Then the Angels rallied. A 10-3 run pushed them above .500. A 17-6 run in June and July and an eight-game win streak in mid-July vaulted them into first place. “We weren’t only playing for Nick, we were playing for his dad, playing for his family,” Saunders said. “We as a team kind of thought that if we could win games, his family would maybe smile. Nick would smile looking down on us.”
The Angels swept the Boston Red Sox in the AL division series before losing to the New York Yankees in a six-game AL championship series, falling two wins short of the World Series. A Little League field in Hagerstown, Md., is named after Adenhart. Weaver, who carved Adenhart’s initials into the back of the mound before every start until his retirement after 2017, named his son, born in 2013, Aden.
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