Things are uneven from Anthony Molina’s perspective. There is just the slightest asymmetry to his cheekbones, if you know where to look. He has 20/15 vision out of his right eye and 20/60 vision out of his left. The man who hit him in the head with a 90 m.p.h. fastball well outside the batter’s box is in big-league spring training while Molina tries to relearn how to field the high hopper.
What was once instinctive is now sometimes laborious. Molina has to think the ball into his glove, making up for blind spots and distorted depth perception. But he knows he is fortunate. He could have died. He could have lost his left eye. Instead, two weeks ago at Louisville, the University of Evansville senior played his first game in 10 months. He has played two error-free games at second base and is 2 for 7.
He generally chooses not to dwell on what Ben Christensen may be doing on a diamond 1,500 miles away at the Cubs’ camp in Arizona.
“The way sports are today, if the guy can play, they’re going to take him,” Molina said. “I knew he was going to get drafted. That didn’t faze me. It’s just the fact that he can still play and be his normal self, and it’s so much more effort for me to play. I’m not going to say it was effortless before, but now the game’s a lot harder.
“I still love it. It’s still fun for me. What happened to me isn’t baseball. Baseball didn’t do this to me. A person, or persons, did it to me.”
Things are uneven, and they always may be that way. The next venue where that inequity will be addressed is the state court system of Kansas. Out-of-court settlement talks have been fruitless and so Molina will be the plaintiff and Christensen and Wichita State University the defendants in a civil lawsuit that may be filed as early as next month.
At issue will be Molina’s injuries and how they may have undermined whatever chance he had to be a professional ballplayer. Not at issue, but very much on the minds of many, will be whether Christensen is truly sorry. He wrote Molina a letter of apology weeks after the incident, but Molina and his family discount it.
“He didn’t show any remorse then and I don’t think he really has since,” Molina said.
Molina and his family, his teammates and his coach always will contend Christensen’s act was pure thuggery. Christensen and his supporters always will maintain it was a warning toss that got away.
The game April 23 was about to begin. Molina, the Purple Aces’ leadoff hitter, took his cuts in the on-deck circle, walked around to the first-base side and was standing 24 to 30 feet from home plate, according to various accounts. The Shockers claimed Molina was timing Christensen’s warm-up pitches. He says he wasn’t. Brent Kemnitz, the Wichita State pitching coach, admitted directing pitchers to brush back hitters in such circumstances. Missouri Valley Conference officials suspended both player and coach for the rest of the season.
Molina talks about his recovery in even tones, with no apparent anger or self-pity and even an occasional quip. He has not sought out attention, but resolved long ago to answer questions, even when they get repetitive. He rattles off medical terms and pulls up his left eyelid to describe details of surgeries that are not for the squeamish.
His coach, Jim Brownlee, said Molina comes across as he always has–a hard-nosed kid who can’t wait to get to the field every day.
People thought Molina might flinch in the batter’s box when he came back, but he has been fine. He bats left-handed, for one thing, so he literally turns the other cheek toward the incoming pitch. More important, he said, “It didn’t happen to me in the box.”
His abilities have been affected more than his attitude, but that, too, has shifted slightly.
“I look at it more as a game and not as do-or-die,” Molina said.
“I’m not going to back down or be tentative. I’ve always been pretty aggressive. This was a control issue. There’s a point where you stop, and he didn’t. Whether he was told to or he did it on his own, there’s no way it should get to that point.”
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The infield at Wichita State is artificial turf, and the bloodstains near the on-deck circle were still visible when Molina’s stepmother, Carolyn, arrived at 10 a.m. the day after the beaning after driving through the night from Moline.
Molina’s parents had no idea how severe their son’s injuries were. He didn’t let on much when he called them.
“I asked how far he was from home plate,” his father, Augie, recalled. “I said, `Do you know this guy? Did you do anything to this guy?”‘
Anthony was stoic, but something in his voice made Carolyn think she ought to get to him right away. She took photographs of the spot where he fell, and then she took him home. He gave a statement to police, but local authorities elected not to bring criminal charges against Christensen. At the conference tournament, played at Wichita State, fans heckled Evansville’s players and their families, blaming them for Christensen’s absence. The Purple Aces went two-and-out for the first time in 20 years.
In June, Molina returned to Evansville to take the final exams he had missed. That same month, the Cubs picked Christensen in the first round of the amateur draft, 26th overall, and gave him a $1 million signing bonus. He spent the summer at Class A Daytona.
Molina spent most of the summer on the couch. He watched television and played video games and waited for the swelling to go down so doctors at the University of Iowa could start repairing the damage. In initial tests, the vision in his left eye was 20/400.
“I could see the big `E’ on the eye chart, but only because I knew it was an `E’,” he said.
He couldn’t drive or exercise or even go outside much because the eye was so fragile and light-sensitive. He lost 20 pounds and felt his body go slack. His parents had to help him put six different drops in his eyes every two hours. Carolyn took three months off her job at Federal Express to drive Anthony to his doctor’s appointments in Iowa City.
Anthony spent nights on the couch, too, rather than in the basement bedroom he shares with his younger half-brother.
“He slept 10 feet away from me, literally,” his father said.
He believes his son needed physical closeness.
Augie Molina got custody of his son when Anthony was 3. He has seen him tough out a lot of things in the last few years. Anthony’s mother, Marcia, died the summer before he left for college. He was mugged in Evansville. His car once was totaled on the way to a game when another driver ran a red light. He was banged up, but played anyway.
Father and son talked nearly every day after Anthony left home.
“I missed him a lot,” Augie Molina said. “He has been my whole life. I was pretty protective of him. He’s dealing with this a lot better than I am.”
When Anthony finally was cleared to start working out again, Augie started hitting grounders to him in the alley behind the house. Watching his son struggle to pick up the ball was almost more than he could stand.
“He was like a Little League kid,” Augie said.
Molina has permanent retinal damage, which causes the blind spots. He has had two operations to correct glaucoma and cataracts and relieve the pressure caused by fluid buildup in his eye. He will undergo another laser surgery in March and probably will need similar procedures periodically for the rest of his life. Doctors removed the lens in his left eye and implanted a plastic replacement. When the light strikes it just right, Augie said, “it looks like a cat eye.”
At the suggestion of a major-league scout, Augie drew 1-inch colored circles and numbers on tennis balls, threw them to Anthony and had him call out the numbers and colors to see if he could track the ball. They worked out for a couple of weeks before Anthony went back to school.
Things did not go well at first. During the winter, the team practices in an armory adjacent to the Carson Center field. The lighting is poor and Molina floundered. As late as a month ago, Brownlee was sure Molina would have to sit out this year.
But when the team moved outside, suddenly Molina looked like himself again, especially at the plate. He started doing some catching last season and feels confident at that position. He has no trouble seeing pop flies or pitches.
The matter-of-fact Molina said he has not felt the need to consult with a sports psychologist.
“I’ve never been afraid and I wasn’t worried about the mental part of the game,” he said. “The only thing that really gets me is that I get irritated when I don’t do well. It’s frustrating. There are some things I can’t do anymore, or can’t do as well as I used to.
“The second surgery made things look a lot brighter to me. I’ve gotten better. I was used to seeing the ball without any problems and now I’m getting used to seeing it with impaired vision.”
If Molina’s condition deteriorates early in the season, the team could pull him out and petition for a hardship redshirt, but there is no guarantee the NCAA would grant it, the injury having occurred last season. For better or worse, he committed himself when he stepped on the field against Louisville earlier this month.
Molina has a career batting average of .314 with 130 RBIs. There is no way to know, of course, whether he would have been drafted last year. He will get another look, if only because Evansville will attract scouts this year, many of them evaluating standout sophomore pitcher Preston Larrison of Aurora.
“We had seven kids in the low minors last year,” Brownlee said. “Anthony is, or was, every bit as good as those kids. He can play any infield position and he’s a left-handed power hitter who can run.
“All this has made him a better student because he realizes he might have to go out into the real world. But I wouldn’t rule out anything because he’s playing now. I would hope somebody would give him a chance.”
Molina still nurtures some hope, but it is laced heavily with pragmatism. He is doing what he hopes his good eye will do for the bad one: adjust and compensate.
“People will be more hesitant now about drafting me,” he said. “I want a chance to play at the next level. Last year I was so close. To have it taken away from me… “
His voice trailed off.
“I never counted myself out. I never felt I was done playing. Even if it was just for one at-bat, I wanted to get back in and show myself and show everyone I could do it.
“But there are more important things than baseball. I don’t want to be some 40-year-old guy not being able to play catch with my son or daughter.
“I want to be able to show them the things my dad taught me.”
