The Pecan Park Eagle

Jackie Price
A talented man met a sad end.

My first literary exposure to depression as the infamous destroyer of life occurred in my junior year English class at St. Thomas High School. That was also  the year I recall Father Sheedy telling us, “Don’t simply listen to the measured rhyme and meter of a poem. Listen first for the life message it contains.” With that kind of aim in mind, Father Sheedy then introduced us to Richard Cory:

Richard Cory

By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

And the beat goes on. Last weekend, Academy Award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was sadly the latest portrayal of Richard Cory, snuffing out his own life, however, unintentionally, with a heroin syringe full of deadly poison. And please, never let those of us in the baseball community ever forget people  like Don Wilson, Ken Caminiti, and Willard Hershberger of the 1940 Cincinnati Reds. They were all Richard Cory at the end of things. Drugs and alcohol may have provided the fatal bullet, but depression was the gun that fired it in the first place.

 Jackie Price was an extraordinary athlete. As a 33-year old shortstop, he went only 3 singles for 13 times at bat for the 1946 Cleveland Indians. He never walked, but he also never struck out. His ability to coordinate his body and get the bat on the ball were too uncanny for the usually handful of “K”s by a rookie breaking in to the bigs. Price retired from active play after 1946, but soon moved into a new career as a performer of incredible baseball tricks in pre-game shows at baseball parks all over the country.

By the late 1950s, Price was pretty much washed up as America drifted into becoming a nation that stayed home to watch television more and seemed to care less about going to the ballpark and watching a guy chase fly balls in a jeep. If only cell phones had been around back then. I would have loved watching the jeep chase of fly balls with Price handling a conference call at the same time.

The word is that Jackie Price battled depression for several years. Then, one day, on October 2, 1967, at age 54, he simply ended it all, hanging himself in his San Francisco home.

Unfortunately, people too often ignore clinical depression, mistaking it for the normal down mood cycle that e all experience to some degree, until the day comes that mood deflation hatches this erroneous, but compelling thought or  feeling: “Things are horrible and they are never going to get better. Life is a bottomless, endless pit of pain and there’s only one thing that can change it – End your own life.”

If you think you may be clinically depressed, please talk to your doctor, or someone objective you trust before it’s too late.

Tags: Depression and Suicide, Jackie Price

This entry was posted on February 5, 2014 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.