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New Braves |
by Thomas Stinson, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The uncontrollable shaking has stopped. His appetite has returned. Mark Wohlers can sleep through the night now. And if the anxiety returns, it is nothing like the pangs that ravaged him through his summer in hell, when each ring of the bullpen phone was only another summons to degradation.
"There'd be times when I was in the bullpen, especially when I was down in Richmond--and I'm not sure if it was just because I was nervous about pitching--that I'd be all nervous and shaky, feeling like I was just losing control of a lot of different things," Wohlers said. "It was scary. I lost a lot of weight this summer. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating.
"I think now a great deal of it had to do with not being able to perform on the baseball field. I didn't realize my personal life was in such jeopardy until the end of July. I didn't realize how bad things really were."
If you haven't thought of Mark Wohlers in a while, that's the way he wanted it. Since concluding the most excruciating season perhaps any Braves player ever has, closing out August in a shambles at Class AAA Richmond, Wohlers went to ground. Besides sharing an occasional visit with former teammate Jeff Blauser, seeing to the final stages of his divorce and sorting himself out through therapy, Wohlers fell from view two months ago to reclaim a life, like his fastball, gone out of control.
Saturday, he played in a charity softball game at Georgia Tech for the Humane Society--no, he didn't pitch but played first--in his first local public appearance since Aug. 5, when he struck out Cincinnati's Dmitri Young in a Reds' blow-out. Wohlers intends to pitch for the Braves next year. But as the season ended, he knew that was surely impossible without fixing his head first.
"My agent (Seth Levinson) was getting calls from 'Inside Edition', 'Dateline NBC', 'Hard Copy', all this crazy stuff," he said. "I just felt for a while . . . this is the first time I've been in public really. I really wanted to stay away from a lot of stuff. Because it was embarrassing. Hell, I was absolutely embarrassed this whole summer."
Only the true disciples remember the Braves' first month, when Wohlers converted his first seven save chances, had a 1.93 ERA with 15 strikeouts in his first nine innings. But while his marriage to Nancy Wohlers was unraveling, things changed drastically after he tore an oblique muscle in his left side while pitching against San Francisco May 2 in Turner Field.
Whether he rushed back into action too fast--he missed 19 days--or was distracted when he returned is undeterminable
Email: javydaman@juno.com
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