November 21, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, R.A. Dickey’s rise to a Cy Young Award made him the face of the modern knuckleball, but the story that shaped him started long before baseball noticed his talent. As a kid, he carried trauma he didn’t have words for and a silence that followed him well into adulthood. That silence eventually caught up to him, nearly costing him everything he had worked for. Dickey talks about the turning points that mattered most and how honesty, more than any pitch, gave him a way forward.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee hbebe but and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins.
Fort Worth, Texas major League baseball pitcher ra A. Dickey
is one of the most unlikely success stories in baseball,
man who rows from years of pain and heartbreak to
(00:31):
win the game's highest honor. What he found along the
way was something far greater than baseball. Yours, ra to
join us with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
When you're sexually abused, you feel less than human. You know,
you feel like you're something that has been used and
thrown away, and you start forming these big, macro kind
of things about the world from this place of hurt
and deception and secrets and dark and wickedness. And if
(01:07):
you do not deal with that, it will hurt you
to your core for a very long time. And that
was the beginning of my path. My mom got pregnant
and had me when she was seventeen years old. It
wasn't smooth sailing from a family life standpoint. I started
to figure out, you know, the tribulations and tragedies of
(01:30):
life pretty early. My parents got divorced very early in
my life. A lot of it I thought was because
of me, or you know, the burden of having children
and not having enough income like those are some of
the motifs that I felt as a kid. At the
same time my parents were getting divorced and moving on,
the first real trauma of my life occurred outside of
(01:53):
just the divorce. I went through some sexual abuse by
the of a babysitter or someone that was supposed to
be in charge or in care of me. And then
another time in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a stranger, and so
those things happened simultaneously in the same summer. It changes
(02:16):
you when something like that happens at such an early age,
and maybe at any age, but to me, you know,
I was, you know, eight years old. It stunts your
growth as a human being. It's almost like you stop
growing emotionally. And the only real concern you have in
those moments are self protection, self preservation, how you can survive,
(02:38):
how you can hide. You learn all these toxic mechanisms
for getting through life without anybody knowing who you really
are because you're so ashamed. And when that happens as
you're forming at eight, nine, ten years old, it's just
it's a very lonely place. I became very good at
stuffing and being a chameleon, making people see what I
(03:00):
wanted to see. From a very early age, I was
super manipulative, lying about where I came from, trying to
cover up pain and loneliness, and no one knew. And
as I grew up, the one sanctuary that I always
had was sports, I threw myself into him. I wanted
to compete all the time. I was always playing a sport.
(03:23):
There was always a ball in my hand. I went
to Write Junior High, which was a kind of an
inner city school, and my hope was that at some
point I would be able to go kind of to
the other side of town to a place called Montgomery
Bill Academy, where my uncle Ricky Bowers went. I'd grown
up kind of going to watch him play basketball. You know.
I just always was competing, always at something, and so
(03:44):
that was kind of the place where I felt the
safest on a field somewhere. It gave me a breather
from the things that I battled in the darkness. And
so I threw myself into sports real heavily and worked
at it relentlessly. So that got wreckedgized to the degree
where Montgomery Bell Academy, which was an all boys prep
school in Nashville, they took notice enough, and I had
(04:07):
a little bit of pedigree there and legacy with my
uncle having gone there and done well that I got
an opportunity to go over there. At this time, my
mom was working two or three jobs. I was a
latchkey kid, you know, the key was under the map
for me. I'd come home from school and be on
my own until she would get home from her second
job sometimes, and so I was just running the neighborhood,
(04:27):
playing sports with whoever I could, and then I would
see her at nighttime and wake up and then go
back to school. But I was going from that environment
over to a very affluent area where this prep school was,
and I did not fit in and did not feel
like I measured up. You know. I didn't grow up
with money, didn't understand it. You know, felt inadequate a
(04:49):
lot of times, and not because people would even make
me feel inadequate. I came in with this stigma attached
to the things that had happened to me already. And
there was a god that took notice of me. We
were on the middle school football team together, and he
(05:10):
invited me to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event that
we were having on campus, and that was my real
first exposure to Jesus. I was captivated. I was captivated
by this person of Jesus and what I didn't yet
buy into what he had done for me, like I
didn't quite understand that part, but the way that he
lived and why he had come and what he potentially
(05:35):
was able to hold for me stuck with me. You know.
I was always one that was going to rather see
a good sermon than hear why, and so I was
always watching how people behaved to see if I could
trust it. And so in Bo, who confessed to have
(05:57):
a relationship with Christ, I was watching a human being
act selflessly and still compete hard. And he would be
the first guy to smash in the mouth, but the
first guy to pick you up off the ground. Like
I was getting to see that kind of behavior, and
I just watched. His mother, Vicky, talked about Christ all
(06:18):
the time when I would come over, and she would
always be trying to convert me, and I would always
pump the brakes on it or I would slip out
because I was uncomfortable still, I just was scared. Man.
I operated out of fear, the fear that somebody might
know me, really, the fear that I'd be rejected, you know,
if they did know me. And what I was being
(06:38):
invited into by Christ was a very intimate relationship, and
I was scared of the intimacy, petrified of it. But no,
Bartholomew Is represented something that I felt like was worth chasing.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And you've been listening to our A Dicky, who happens
to be the first knuckleball pitcher to ever win this
Cy Young that's the greatest award a pitcher can win
in Major League Baseball.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
And he was.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Sexually abused when he was young. And also his parents
were divorced when he was young, and of course he
blamed himself for that and the shame and the trauma
from being sexually abused, well, he just hit it. He
did what people do. There was one sanctuary sports and
one that looked interesting, and that's Jesus Christ. When we
(07:25):
come back more of the story of ur A. Dickey
on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of
our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell
stories of history faith, business, love, loss, and your stories.
Send us your story small or large to our email
(07:47):
oas at Ouramerican Stories dot com. That's oas at Ouramerican
Stories dot Com. We'd love to hear them and put
them on the air. Our audience loves them too, and
(08:09):
we continue with our American Stories and with the story
of ra A.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Dickey.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
When we last left off, he was sharing a story
about a friend at school who noticed he was struggling
and invited him over to his home. A simple invitation
that would change everything ears.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
R And so one afternoon I went home with him
and his mom, just like she always had done, said Hey,
I really like FREEDO know Christ. And of course many
many times I'd say, you know, miss b I'm just
not ready, or like I said, I'd go outside and disappear.
And this particular time, I said, I want to know
(08:49):
the piece that comes with that and the relief I
feel like I can get If I were able to
share my most wicked self and the things that were
most evil in my life that I felt like were
overwhelming with I wasn't willing to share that with other
human beings, But in Christ, I found someone that I
could do that in my bedroom, and that's what I did.
(09:11):
I got down on my knees when I was thirteen
years old and invited Christis in my life. And that
was the beginning of a journey for me. That faith
wasn't necessarily cultivated, but the foundations had been laid that
I was never going to be able to reject. It
was still always playing in the background, but sports is
where I found my worth purpose. That's where I felt
(09:33):
most at home. But as I moved on into high
school between my tenth and eleventh grade year, it moved
from I'm just having fun to I may have an
opportunity here to get my school paid for. That was
the only way I was going to go to college.
I started getting letters from Old Miss and Vanderbilt and
all these schools would come before there were cell phones
(09:55):
or you know, people would call your home. You would
get letters that would show up at the school, and
you would go every day and you would check your
mailbox at school. It was really cool, and every day
i'd go there'd be a different letter. And then as
I started to go from my junior to my senior year,
I started to get letters from Major League Baseball clubs
like tryouts and invitations and tests that they wanted me
(10:16):
to take, and questionnaires they wanted me to answer, and
so I went all in. As I started to get
into my senior year in high school, there was a
chance I was going to be drafted by a major
league ball club out of high school. And I had
already at this time accepted a scholarship to go play
at the University of Tennessee play baseball at the University
(10:37):
of Tennessee, and I was drafted the day of my
graduation by the Detroit Tigers. They sent me a telegram.
A telegram came and it said, You've been drafted by
the Detroit Tigers in the tenth round. And so from
there I had to make a decision on whether to
accept one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars and start
my major league career or go to college and try
(10:59):
to cultivate my craft so that I could become a
better pitcher. And with a lot of deliberation and trying
to seek as much wise counsel as I could, I
decided that I was going to go to college. You know,
had a lot to learn and a big runway to
grow from a pitching standpoint. So I decided to go
to the University of Tennessee and turned down the one
seventy five out of high school. I didn't really know
(11:22):
what to expect. I went in as a college freshman,
and at that time, you know, they were only carrying
thirteen and fourteen MAYI pitching staff, so if you were
on the staff, you were going to pitch at some point.
And my very first collegiate start was really interesting. I
started against the University of Miami Miami Hurricanes, where ay
Rod went, and I had not known any baseball outside
(11:44):
of Nashville, Tennessee, or going to play summer ball somewhere,
so it was packed. I pitched against Miami and lost
three to one, and then from then on I won
fifteen straight games and then lost my last one. So
I was fifteen and two my freshman year, and a
lot of good things were happening. As a freshman All American.
I got bited to be on the Olympic team, the
(12:04):
Olympic trial team, and after my freshman year came back
from my sophomore year, I had another very good year,
played with the Olympic team again. My sophomore year, we
went to College World Series and we finished third and
then went to play against the world on the Olympic Tour.
And then my junior year, which was my draft year.
So I was drafted as a senior out of high school.
(12:24):
And the next time I could be drafted it was
after my junior year in college. And here we were
my junior year in college, and we had a pretty
good year. We made it to regional we didn't make
it to the College World Series. But then I got
to play in the Olympic Games in nineteen ninety six,
had a really fun time and learned a lot and
got better and improved my draft status from tenth rounder
to first rounder. I was drafted by the Texas Rangers
(12:48):
in the first round of the June amateur Draft. So
I had agreed in principal to a contract that was
for about eight hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. Now
that was more money than I had ever heard of,
much less seen, you know, from where I came from.
So I was super excited about that, of course, and
very hopeful and you know, getting to live out a
dream and the culmination of so many hopes. So there
(13:09):
was a mandatory physical that every first rounder had to
take to make sure that the team, you know, was
getting a healthy prospect. And I had nothing to hide.
I never had anything to hide. I hadn't been heard
a day in my life. Like I said, I was
a quarterback and never missed a bullpen or a practice
really literally in three years at ut and never missed
a start on the Olympic team. But when I went
(13:29):
down from my physical after the Olympics were over, and
I had agreed to my contract and I'd flown down
to meet Nolan Ryan throw out the first pitch, you know,
do the whole thing. I took my physical before and
went to the field, and one of the doctors that
was there had noticed a picture on the cover of
a Baseball America that I was on where my arm
was bent, and the picture kind of funny. You can
(13:50):
look the picture up online. It's still there, but it's
just that my arm was bent in a way that
was concerning to the doctor. So we decided to do
a protocol of tests to see that if there was
something going on in there. He thought there might be
something wrong. And so by the time I had left
the doctor's office to the time I had arrived at Arlington,
to throw out the first pitch they had taught the
(14:10):
doctor and the general manager, and the general manager proceeded
to call me in the office and tell me that
they were rescinding the contract and they weren't sure that
I was healthy, and they needed me to go down
and get a second opinion, and they were going to
put everything on hold. And so I was devastated. I
had already, you know, internally, been dealaying my whole life
with feeling broken and inadequate and you know, ugly and
(14:33):
all those things. And now the one thing that had
brought me so much value and identity was being threatened
by it being broken, and it being undervalued and worthless
and all the things that I had felt internally. I
will not forget the emotion internalizing all that and not
(14:54):
feeling like I had anywhere to go with it. And
so I flew back, went down to doctor James Andrews,
a world renowned orthopedic surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama, and he
had me take an MRI and they expedited it up
to his offices from the bottom floor where I was
in the MRI tube. And I'll never forget walking upstairs
(15:16):
so we could read it right there and call the
Rangers and tell them everything was okay. It was bad
news for me. It was bad news for the Rangers
and the potential relationship between the Rangers and I took
a hit. What the discovery was was that I did
not have a UCL on my right elbow at all.
So the ligament that is supposed to stabilize that elbow joint,
(15:39):
it had disintegrated. It was not there. They had never
seen anything like it. Doctor Andrews even said, I don't
believe that this is true. I want you to go
down and take another MRI. So I took two MRIs
and sure enough, the discovery was made that I didn't
have the existence of an ulnar collateral ligament. Now, in baseball,
that is the ligament of all ligaments, right like, that's
(15:59):
the Tommy John ligaman. That's the ligament that everybody has
replaced or tears when they're pitching and throwing these high velocities.
I did not have that. Obviously, Doctor Andrews had to
call Doug Meldon, who was the general manager of the Rangers,
and say, hey, we discovered that this kid doesn't even
have a UCL. So not only is it not ripped,
he just doesn't have one. But what was crazy was
(16:21):
I was asymptomatic, like I could still throw, still throw hard,
spine never been hurt. And I tried to argue that
I should get more money because you were never going
to have to replace it. But they did They didn't.
They didn't go for that. They thought they yeah, they
thought they were getting damaged goods. And so not only
did they rescind the offer, they actually said that we're
not sure we even want to sign you to any
(16:43):
amount of money. We just want you to go back
to college. And my thought was going back to college
with this condition already over me meant I just lost
my chance to play professional baseball. I'd gone through all this,
had all the success, and yet here I am being
told I wasn't going to be able to ever do
it again.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you're listening to our a Dickie tell one heck
of his story. Baseball is his refuge. She knows the Lord,
he knows Jesus Christ. But not like he would as
he became an adult. Well, he'd always said he'd felt
broken and inadequate in the one place that didn't happen
was on the ball field. And in came that diagnosis.
(17:23):
He did not have a UCL, and the deal from
the Texas Rangers was rescinded and he was back to college.
Who knew what next? When we come back more of
our A. Dickey's story here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we're back with our American stories and with R. A.
Dickey's story. When we left off last, he just learned
that his pitching arm was missing. It's UCL news that
threatened to end his dream, one that he thought was
just beginning. Here again is ri Dickey.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
I went back home and was thinking, I'll just go
back for my senior year and do the best I
can as a ut vol and see what happens. But
there's no guarantee I'd even be drafted again. And then
the night before I had to go back to class.
And once you stepped foot in the classroom before your
senior year, you become ineligible to sign with the major
league club until the following draft. So if something was
gonna happen, it had to happen before my first class
(18:51):
first eight am. I was enrolled in in English class
eight am the next day, and it was about nine
thirty at night and I still hadn't left Nashville. And
the phone rang and it was the general manager of
the Texas Rangers, and he basically said, hey, we have
seventy five thousand dollars for you. Take it or leave it,
and you can start your professional career with us, and
(19:11):
we'll give you a chance. Now I was crushed, you know,
but at least it was an opportunity and I was
willing to bet on myself in that moment. And I
called him back and said, okay, I'm happy to be
a Ranger. And so I accepted the offer, even though
it was even less than what I had agreed to
as a tenth rounder out of high school. And so
(19:32):
that's how I started my professional career. My first year
down there, it was a tough year. I didn't do well.
I ended up having a bone chip that I had
to have taken out. So it was also confirmation that again,
like they were right, I was broken and this and
that it was unrelated to the absence of the UCL
but nonetheless it was an injury that I sustained and
(19:53):
had to have fixed. And so I felt like I
had a scab that was just being ripped off over
and over and over again. So many different times in
my life because that had become identity. My identity had
become the victim of being sexually abused. I didn't perform
very well my first year. I went back to A
ball for my second year. At this point, I was
(20:14):
married and we were making six hundred and fifty dollars
a month with a roommate and a roommate. His roommate
had a wife, so the four of us lived together
as newly weeds. That's not always great, you know, but
my wife was such a trooper, you know, like she
supported me, encouraged me. So that second year in pro ball,
I did a little bit better. I actually was a
(20:36):
closer instead of a starter for the first time in
my career. And I had the Florida state record for
most saves in a year with thirty eight. Like, my
stuff was better, and so I would go from Double
A to Triple A all the while. You know, I
was married and we had our first child while I
was in Triple A. And I was drafted in nineteen
ninety six and got my first cup of coffee in
the major leagues in two thousand and one, and that
(20:59):
was like a thirty days dent with the Texas Rangers
as a conventional picture. And from then on, from basically
two thousand and one till two thousand and five, I
just was this journeyman that would bounce up and down.
You know, you're good enough today, you're not good enough
for this day. We're going to send you back down.
And my wife was with me up and down the
whole time, and we were spending time apart, and you know,
(21:21):
it's hard, it's very very difficult. I mean that the
divorce rate in professional baseball is like fifty nine percent,
which is horrible.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
It's just really really hard.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
On a marriage. But still I was living a lot
of my life in the dark and in secret and embarrassed.
Every time that I would perform poorly, I would feel
that wound open up. Every time I would get sent down,
I would feel that wound open up, and it was
like I was being abused all over again. Because I'd
never grown up. I was working second jobs, trying to
(21:53):
earn enough money to make a house payment, and I
had two kids, and so there was another dynamic that
was part of the thing, like, you know, kind of
I was sad about, you know, my ability to be
a father and be present for my children and carrying
all this baggage around from a past that had been
so ugly that I didn't feel worthy of having these
beautiful children, and like it just would compound and compound,
(22:16):
and I just was at the end. I was at
the end of myself, man, I just was. I was
ready to have relief. And I felt like if I
took myself out of the world, that felt like the
best scenario of a bunch of different scenarios for me.
I had decided that how was it. I had driven
(22:39):
my car underneath my car port. I had duct taped
a rubber hose to the muffler of my car and
run the hose into the driver's side window and stuffed
towels around the crease of the window. I remember weeping
and being sorry and filled with shame. Man, it was
just and utter shame. And as I was turning the key,
(23:04):
all I heard was this, this loud voice in my spirit,
and so loudly that you cannot deny that that's what
it was saying, don't do it. I have something else
for you. I felt like God saw me, like he
saw me. I didn't turn to keep I hit all
the paraphernalia that I'd used on the car for my wife,
(23:25):
and the next morning, the pastor of my church happened
to drop by unannounced, and we started having a conversation
and I started to let him in on kind of
what was going on internally, and I didn't share with
it about the abuse, but I did say I was
in a bad way, and that's kind of how I
(23:46):
eventually got to Stephen James, a well known counselor here
in Nashville, Tennessee, and we met one time, and he
had a gift of being able to see through all
my Sports Center answers to his questions right like you
could see through it all. The one thing that really
changed me was when he looked at me and he said, hey,
all right, listen. He said, no matter what you tell me,
(24:07):
no matter what you've done, like I'm not going anywhere,
like I'm here, I'm not leaving you. And that melted
me on the spot. I'd never had another human being
say those kinds of words to me, but I felt
in that moment like if I were to tell him this,
he's going to get up and walk out or kick
(24:28):
me out of the office, or like that's what the
enemy does, so that you won't bring the truth to light,
and God wants the truth to be brought to light.
And so when I did that, it was like a
burden and then lifted in a way that I can't
even describe to you. It was just overwhelming, and I
just sat there in it for I felt like an eternity.
(24:50):
We didn't even talk. Man. I told him what had
happened and started crying, and he started crying and he
hugged me. He's probably the first man that I'd hugged,
and you know, because like my abuser was a man.
It's just it was I can't describe it. Man, I
had a chance, after being in that car and almost
(25:11):
committing suicide, to that couch where I felt so much
redemption in a moment, just was it was overwhelming. I
could care less about baseball at that point. It was
the first time in my whole life the thing that
had brought me so much validity and value and worth
and my identity was tied up in so deeply. I
could have cared less about being a major league baseball
(25:34):
player for a minute. All I cared about was now
that I'm free of this, how can I be the
best husband, the best father, the best friend, the best, Like,
how can I gain back all this time that I
had lost from you know, not letting people in on
who I was. And Stephen was the first person I
ever told about my abuse before my life, and we
(25:57):
got to this place in therapy I had to be
okay with her looking at me and say, hey, all right,
I didn't sign up for this. You lied to me,
you didn't tell me the truth about who you were.
You know, I'm sorry, but this is not the life
for me. Like I had to be. I had to
come to the place where I was okay with that,
even though it would have been devastating for me. And
so when I got to the place through therapy that
(26:17):
I could accept that if that were the answer, I
brought her in to tell her the truth about everything,
and she said, hey, man, I can't. I can't love you,
and pieces I love you fully and I'm sorry you
didn't tell me or trust me enough to do that,
but I'm not going anywhere. And again, like, it's just
(26:41):
it moved me so much that it just kept motivating me.
Don't want to get deeper and deeper and that's all
I cared about.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And you've been listening to our a Dicky's story, and
what a story you're listening to. My goodness, to hit
that low of lows in his car, duct taping rubber
to his muffler, then hearing that voice, don't do it.
I have something for you. And then to have his
(27:11):
wife say, no matter what you tell me, no matter
what you've done, I'm here life changing for our A Dickie.
When we come back the rest of our A Dickey's
story here on our American stories, and we continue with
(27:38):
our American stories and with our A Dickie, the former
Major League baseball pitcher who's here sharing his story of
brokenness and redemption. By the way, pick up his book
wherever I wind up on Amazon or wherever you get
your books. Let's return to our A Dickie for the
(27:59):
rest of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
One of the things that helped shape the best parts
of my baseball career was when I had a real
change in perspective from who I was as a human being,
like Ari Dicky the baseball player, the athlete, or the
guy that had played on the Olympics, went to college
World Series, like all those accolades that somehow get messed
into who you feel like you are as a human
(28:23):
being that you cling to so dearly because it gives
you value. When I changed from that perspective to the
understanding that baseball was just what I was able to do.
It's not who I was. For so long, it had
been who I was. I was a victim of sexual abuse,
and I was an athlete. And the less I really
(28:43):
worried about the baseball part, the more success I actually
started to have. I'd gotten called in the office in
two thousand and five and Oral Herscheizer, who was our
pitching coach, Buck Shoalter was our manager. They pulled me
aside in the office after an outing I had in
the big leagues where I got beat up and said,
hey man, you just don't have it anymore as a
(29:03):
conventional pitcher. And then they said, but we do think
you have a good enough knuckleball to be a full
time knuckleballer. They had seen me play catch on the
side with my knuckleball and beat up my catch partner
with it and he couldn't catch it, and Oral would
walk by and say, hey man, what's that. I'd say,
it is just a knuckleball. I'm just messing around. And
I started to throw it in the games a little bit,
(29:25):
but they wanted me to throw it ninety percent of
the time, and so they said, we don't have room
for you anymore in this organization as a conventional pitcher.
There are guys that are so much better than you now.
But we do think that you have possibly a future
as a knuckleballer, so we want you to go down
and learn that pitch. Basically, a good knuckleball only rotates
(29:46):
about half of a revolution from the time it leaves
your hand until the time it gets to the plate.
And that's a really hard thing to do. When you
think about how many balls are spinning that come out
of a pitcher's hand for their career, you know, there's
not a lot of people that can keep them knuckleball right.
It's a real rare thing. In fact, Tim Wakefield was
the only knuckleballer for quite a while in the major leagues,
(30:07):
and as I was learning the pitch and trying it,
you know, my pitching coach with the Rangers couldn't tell
me much. He couldn't teach me much. So I reached
out to Charlie Hoff, who was a longtime knuckleball guy
and an icon in the Ranger community, and he helped
me a lot. He changed my grip. He gave me
a different kind of way to look at my mechanic,
and that was real important. And in my first major
(30:29):
league start in two thousand and six as a full
time knuckleballer, I gave up six home runs and three
and a third innings and tied a minor day major
league record for the most home runs given up in
a game. And then O seven came and I was
able to sign a contract with the Milwaukee Brewers, and
the Milwaukee Brewers Triple A affiliate is the Nashville Sounds.
(30:53):
God said, look, man, I'm going to allow you to
stay home, play baseball and work on your marriage. I
was going to counseling in the weeks as much as
I could. I would go play at night, go in
the afternoons, the counselinger in the mornings, and the more
release I gave over to the things that should have
the priority, the more success I had on the baseball field.
(31:14):
I ended up in seven with the Nashville Sounds as
a knuckleballer, being the PCL pitcher of the Year. You know,
I cared like I'd been given a gift to be
able to throw a knuckleball. Well, so I wanted to
cultivate that, and I loved getting to the field and
working on that. But man, when I left, I left
like it was all left behind, and I just wanted
to get home to my wife and I would go
(31:34):
back to the Nashville Sounds, have a start and throw
a shot out. I think there's only been thirty maybe
in the history of Major League Baseball to throw a
knuckleball with any amount of success, and so it's hard
to do. And so because of that, the fraternity is
very tight, and we pull for one another real hard,
(31:54):
and so much so that I had made the club
with the Seattle Mariners. In two thousand and eight, after
the Nashville Sounds, I was back up in the big
leagues and we were playing the Boston Red Sox and
Tim Wakefield was throwing a bullpen, and he not me,
He invited me to come watch his bullpen. So imagine
an opponent inviting me to come watch away where I
might could beat his team, Like it was just unheard of, right,
(32:17):
And so of course I went over there and he
was sharing with me all his secrets, and then from
there I went to Phil Neicro the next year, and
so I had Charlie Hoff and Tim Wakefield and Phil
Nicro like on my rolodecks. It's like the Jedi Council
of knuckleballers, man. I mean, it was unbelievable. They were
so willing and so generous to share it and want
(32:37):
they pulled for me, they called me. Those men were
instrumental in my journey leading up to twenty twelve. When
I won the National League so young, I said the
acceptance speech, I said, this isn't a win for me,
this is a win for every knuckleballer that's ever lived,
that's had success that people kind of put to the
margins because they did something differently, you know, like think
(32:57):
about Phil Nicro won three hundred games in the major leagues.
Never want to say young, And a lot of it
was because of the bias that sports writers had at
the time about a knuckleball pitcher, you know, like it
was this kind of side freak show thing that might
not should even be in baseball, but yet here it
is and it's having success. But anyway, when I won that,
it was really a celebration of all those guys, man.
(33:20):
I mean, they all poured into me, and they all
gave me a piece of themselves. That's what I was
able to run with through all the success that I
had from basically twenty and ten until twenty and seventeen,
when I got to finish my career with the team
that I grew up watching that had Phil Neicro on it,
which was the Atlanta Braves, and all the mistakes that
(33:44):
I had made for so long in my life I
was able to bring to bear in interviews and in
conversations in a way that was really freeing. I didn't
have to pretend anymore. I'd have to pretend to be
somebody I was, and I was okay being a broken
guy that had gone through some really hard things but
(34:04):
yet still had the capacity to do some really remarkable things.
And so when I started to understand that baseball was
just something that I did, like being an electrician or
being now, it's fine. I enjoyed it. I had a
passion for it, and I felt like an opportunity and
a gift God had given me. But that wasn't the
(34:25):
thing that defined me, you know. I wanted to be
seen as someone who God had redeemed, and God is
for me. God is not the God of second chances.
He's the God of infinite chances. Man, he has shown
up for me so many daggum times. It's just remarkable.
You know. I continue to see myself as you know,
(34:45):
an Israelite that got rescued out of Egypt, seeing all
these incredible things, yet still rebelling, and yet there he is,
yet again, yet again. And I wanted to be a disciple,
right man, I wanted to live out my faith in
a way that was life changing. How could I do that? Well?
I got to show up as a husband, right. I
got to care about getting in the word right like
(35:06):
I got to care about living out scripture to my kids.
I got to include them in my story. I've got
to tell the truth. I've got to talk about the
redemption that I've experienced. Like all those things became the
things that I wanted to do more than baseball. So
the baseball part allowed me to have a platform to
be able to do that to a wide audience. But
(35:28):
it's not the thing that drove me to be who
I was. I mean, like being a baseball player that
was no longer the motivating factor for me. When I retired,
I felt like God was calling me into an amazing
organization called the Nashville Anti Human Trafficking Coalition. It not
(35:48):
only rescues and restores victims of human trafficking, but it
also we educate people in our community around you know,
our most vulnerable demographic is middle and high school studentudence.
And so we get to go in and talk about
what to look for on your phones and how to
educate people about the grooming process and how prevalent it
(36:09):
is in our community and how it wants to hide
on the sidelines in so many different ways. And we
get to bring to light a lot of you know
what I talk about, just bringing the truth to light
for a lot of people. And then we also have
a social enterprise that these ladies that we rescue, they
go through a Christ centered curriculum and when they get
to check a bunch of boxes, they get to move
(36:30):
it to our social enterprise, which is a bakery that
we have and they all have had some addictions, so
they go immediately. We have partnerships where they go immediately
into treatment and then they get out and we get
to love on them in a way that they are
not used to and it's transforming. And the only way
we can do that is we get to love broken
people because we're broken. God has given me a gift
(36:51):
and getting to serve in that capacity because I feel
the pain of a lot of the wounds that those
girls have gone through. And you know, there is broken,
but there's also joy and you can walk forward with both.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericott, and a special thanks to R. A.
Dickey for sharing his story and my goodness, the turning
point comes when he realizes that his identity is not
in baseball, it's in Jesus. This changes his whole life,
It changes paradigm. Baseball, he discovered, was something he just did,
(37:28):
like an electrician or any craftsman. But I was someone
God redeemed. He said, He's not a god of second chances.
He's a god of infinite chances. And by the way,
as that walk got better, his success, well, that grew
in baseball and led right to him winning in twenty
(37:49):
twelve the National League Cy Young Award. But you could
tell just listening to him where he takes his pleasure,
where he takes his sustenance, and where he gets meaning
in his life. And that comes from serving as God
and serving other broken people. The story of ra A Dickey.
Here on our American story.
This is Lee hbebe but and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins.
Fort Worth, Texas major League baseball pitcher ra A. Dickey
is one of the most unlikely success stories in baseball,
man who rows from years of pain and heartbreak to
(00:31):
win the game's highest honor. What he found along the
way was something far greater than baseball. Yours, ra to
join us with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
When you're sexually abused, you feel less than human. You know,
you feel like you're something that has been used and
thrown away, and you start forming these big, macro kind
of things about the world from this place of hurt
and deception and secrets and dark and wickedness. And if
(01:07):
you do not deal with that, it will hurt you
to your core for a very long time. And that
was the beginning of my path. My mom got pregnant
and had me when she was seventeen years old. It
wasn't smooth sailing from a family life standpoint. I started
to figure out, you know, the tribulations and tragedies of
(01:30):
life pretty early. My parents got divorced very early in
my life. A lot of it I thought was because
of me, or you know, the burden of having children
and not having enough income like those are some of
the motifs that I felt as a kid. At the
same time my parents were getting divorced and moving on,
the first real trauma of my life occurred outside of
(01:53):
just the divorce. I went through some sexual abuse by
the of a babysitter or someone that was supposed to
be in charge or in care of me. And then
another time in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a stranger, and so
those things happened simultaneously in the same summer. It changes
(02:16):
you when something like that happens at such an early age,
and maybe at any age, but to me, you know,
I was, you know, eight years old. It stunts your
growth as a human being. It's almost like you stop
growing emotionally. And the only real concern you have in
those moments are self protection, self preservation, how you can survive,
(02:38):
how you can hide. You learn all these toxic mechanisms
for getting through life without anybody knowing who you really
are because you're so ashamed. And when that happens as
you're forming at eight, nine, ten years old, it's just
it's a very lonely place. I became very good at
stuffing and being a chameleon, making people see what I
(03:00):
wanted to see. From a very early age, I was
super manipulative, lying about where I came from, trying to
cover up pain and loneliness, and no one knew. And
as I grew up, the one sanctuary that I always
had was sports, I threw myself into him. I wanted
to compete all the time. I was always playing a sport.
(03:23):
There was always a ball in my hand. I went
to Write Junior High, which was a kind of an
inner city school, and my hope was that at some
point I would be able to go kind of to
the other side of town to a place called Montgomery
Bill Academy, where my uncle Ricky Bowers went. I'd grown
up kind of going to watch him play basketball. You know.
I just always was competing, always at something, and so
(03:44):
that was kind of the place where I felt the
safest on a field somewhere. It gave me a breather
from the things that I battled in the darkness. And
so I threw myself into sports real heavily and worked
at it relentlessly. So that got wreckedgized to the degree
where Montgomery Bell Academy, which was an all boys prep
school in Nashville, they took notice enough, and I had
(04:07):
a little bit of pedigree there and legacy with my
uncle having gone there and done well that I got
an opportunity to go over there. At this time, my
mom was working two or three jobs. I was a
latchkey kid, you know, the key was under the map
for me. I'd come home from school and be on
my own until she would get home from her second
job sometimes, and so I was just running the neighborhood,
(04:27):
playing sports with whoever I could, and then I would
see her at nighttime and wake up and then go
back to school. But I was going from that environment
over to a very affluent area where this prep school was,
and I did not fit in and did not feel
like I measured up. You know. I didn't grow up
with money, didn't understand it. You know, felt inadequate a
(04:49):
lot of times, and not because people would even make
me feel inadequate. I came in with this stigma attached
to the things that had happened to me already. And
there was a god that took notice of me. We
were on the middle school football team together, and he
(05:10):
invited me to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event that
we were having on campus, and that was my real
first exposure to Jesus. I was captivated. I was captivated
by this person of Jesus and what I didn't yet
buy into what he had done for me, like I
didn't quite understand that part, but the way that he
lived and why he had come and what he potentially
(05:35):
was able to hold for me stuck with me. You know.
I was always one that was going to rather see
a good sermon than hear why, and so I was
always watching how people behaved to see if I could
trust it. And so in Bo, who confessed to have
(05:57):
a relationship with Christ, I was watching a human being
act selflessly and still compete hard. And he would be
the first guy to smash in the mouth, but the
first guy to pick you up off the ground. Like
I was getting to see that kind of behavior, and
I just watched. His mother, Vicky, talked about Christ all
(06:18):
the time when I would come over, and she would
always be trying to convert me, and I would always
pump the brakes on it or I would slip out
because I was uncomfortable still, I just was scared. Man.
I operated out of fear, the fear that somebody might
know me, really, the fear that I'd be rejected, you know,
if they did know me. And what I was being
(06:38):
invited into by Christ was a very intimate relationship, and
I was scared of the intimacy, petrified of it. But no,
Bartholomew Is represented something that I felt like was worth chasing.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And you've been listening to our A Dicky, who happens
to be the first knuckleball pitcher to ever win this
Cy Young that's the greatest award a pitcher can win
in Major League Baseball.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
And he was.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Sexually abused when he was young. And also his parents
were divorced when he was young, and of course he
blamed himself for that and the shame and the trauma
from being sexually abused, well, he just hit it. He
did what people do. There was one sanctuary sports and
one that looked interesting, and that's Jesus Christ. When we
(07:25):
come back more of the story of ur A. Dickey
on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of
our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell
stories of history faith, business, love, loss, and your stories.
Send us your story small or large to our email
(07:47):
oas at Ouramerican Stories dot com. That's oas at Ouramerican
Stories dot Com. We'd love to hear them and put
them on the air. Our audience loves them too, and
(08:09):
we continue with our American Stories and with the story
of ra A.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Dickey.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
When we last left off, he was sharing a story
about a friend at school who noticed he was struggling
and invited him over to his home. A simple invitation
that would change everything ears.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
R And so one afternoon I went home with him
and his mom, just like she always had done, said Hey,
I really like FREEDO know Christ. And of course many
many times I'd say, you know, miss b I'm just
not ready, or like I said, I'd go outside and disappear.
And this particular time, I said, I want to know
(08:49):
the piece that comes with that and the relief I
feel like I can get If I were able to
share my most wicked self and the things that were
most evil in my life that I felt like were
overwhelming with I wasn't willing to share that with other
human beings, But in Christ, I found someone that I
could do that in my bedroom, and that's what I did.
(09:11):
I got down on my knees when I was thirteen
years old and invited Christis in my life. And that
was the beginning of a journey for me. That faith
wasn't necessarily cultivated, but the foundations had been laid that
I was never going to be able to reject. It
was still always playing in the background, but sports is
where I found my worth purpose. That's where I felt
(09:33):
most at home. But as I moved on into high
school between my tenth and eleventh grade year, it moved
from I'm just having fun to I may have an
opportunity here to get my school paid for. That was
the only way I was going to go to college.
I started getting letters from Old Miss and Vanderbilt and
all these schools would come before there were cell phones
(09:55):
or you know, people would call your home. You would
get letters that would show up at the school, and
you would go every day and you would check your
mailbox at school. It was really cool, and every day
i'd go there'd be a different letter. And then as
I started to go from my junior to my senior year,
I started to get letters from Major League Baseball clubs
like tryouts and invitations and tests that they wanted me
(10:16):
to take, and questionnaires they wanted me to answer, and
so I went all in. As I started to get
into my senior year in high school, there was a
chance I was going to be drafted by a major
league ball club out of high school. And I had
already at this time accepted a scholarship to go play
at the University of Tennessee play baseball at the University
(10:37):
of Tennessee, and I was drafted the day of my
graduation by the Detroit Tigers. They sent me a telegram.
A telegram came and it said, You've been drafted by
the Detroit Tigers in the tenth round. And so from
there I had to make a decision on whether to
accept one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars and start
my major league career or go to college and try
(10:59):
to cultivate my craft so that I could become a
better pitcher. And with a lot of deliberation and trying
to seek as much wise counsel as I could, I
decided that I was going to go to college. You know,
had a lot to learn and a big runway to
grow from a pitching standpoint. So I decided to go
to the University of Tennessee and turned down the one
seventy five out of high school. I didn't really know
(11:22):
what to expect. I went in as a college freshman,
and at that time, you know, they were only carrying
thirteen and fourteen MAYI pitching staff, so if you were
on the staff, you were going to pitch at some point.
And my very first collegiate start was really interesting. I
started against the University of Miami Miami Hurricanes, where ay
Rod went, and I had not known any baseball outside
(11:44):
of Nashville, Tennessee, or going to play summer ball somewhere,
so it was packed. I pitched against Miami and lost
three to one, and then from then on I won
fifteen straight games and then lost my last one. So
I was fifteen and two my freshman year, and a
lot of good things were happening. As a freshman All American.
I got bited to be on the Olympic team, the
(12:04):
Olympic trial team, and after my freshman year came back
from my sophomore year, I had another very good year,
played with the Olympic team again. My sophomore year, we
went to College World Series and we finished third and
then went to play against the world on the Olympic Tour.
And then my junior year, which was my draft year.
So I was drafted as a senior out of high school.
(12:24):
And the next time I could be drafted it was
after my junior year in college. And here we were
my junior year in college, and we had a pretty
good year. We made it to regional we didn't make
it to the College World Series. But then I got
to play in the Olympic Games in nineteen ninety six,
had a really fun time and learned a lot and
got better and improved my draft status from tenth rounder
to first rounder. I was drafted by the Texas Rangers
(12:48):
in the first round of the June amateur Draft. So
I had agreed in principal to a contract that was
for about eight hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. Now
that was more money than I had ever heard of,
much less seen, you know, from where I came from.
So I was super excited about that, of course, and
very hopeful and you know, getting to live out a
dream and the culmination of so many hopes. So there
(13:09):
was a mandatory physical that every first rounder had to
take to make sure that the team, you know, was
getting a healthy prospect. And I had nothing to hide.
I never had anything to hide. I hadn't been heard
a day in my life. Like I said, I was
a quarterback and never missed a bullpen or a practice
really literally in three years at ut and never missed
a start on the Olympic team. But when I went
(13:29):
down from my physical after the Olympics were over, and
I had agreed to my contract and I'd flown down
to meet Nolan Ryan throw out the first pitch, you know,
do the whole thing. I took my physical before and
went to the field, and one of the doctors that
was there had noticed a picture on the cover of
a Baseball America that I was on where my arm
was bent, and the picture kind of funny. You can
(13:50):
look the picture up online. It's still there, but it's
just that my arm was bent in a way that
was concerning to the doctor. So we decided to do
a protocol of tests to see that if there was
something going on in there. He thought there might be
something wrong. And so by the time I had left
the doctor's office to the time I had arrived at Arlington,
to throw out the first pitch they had taught the
(14:10):
doctor and the general manager, and the general manager proceeded
to call me in the office and tell me that
they were rescinding the contract and they weren't sure that
I was healthy, and they needed me to go down
and get a second opinion, and they were going to
put everything on hold. And so I was devastated. I
had already, you know, internally, been dealaying my whole life
with feeling broken and inadequate and you know, ugly and
(14:33):
all those things. And now the one thing that had
brought me so much value and identity was being threatened
by it being broken, and it being undervalued and worthless
and all the things that I had felt internally. I
will not forget the emotion internalizing all that and not
(14:54):
feeling like I had anywhere to go with it. And
so I flew back, went down to doctor James Andrews,
a world renowned orthopedic surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama, and he
had me take an MRI and they expedited it up
to his offices from the bottom floor where I was
in the MRI tube. And I'll never forget walking upstairs
(15:16):
so we could read it right there and call the
Rangers and tell them everything was okay. It was bad
news for me. It was bad news for the Rangers
and the potential relationship between the Rangers and I took
a hit. What the discovery was was that I did
not have a UCL on my right elbow at all.
So the ligament that is supposed to stabilize that elbow joint,
(15:39):
it had disintegrated. It was not there. They had never
seen anything like it. Doctor Andrews even said, I don't
believe that this is true. I want you to go
down and take another MRI. So I took two MRIs
and sure enough, the discovery was made that I didn't
have the existence of an ulnar collateral ligament. Now, in baseball,
that is the ligament of all ligaments, right like, that's
(15:59):
the Tommy John ligaman. That's the ligament that everybody has
replaced or tears when they're pitching and throwing these high velocities.
I did not have that. Obviously, Doctor Andrews had to
call Doug Meldon, who was the general manager of the Rangers,
and say, hey, we discovered that this kid doesn't even
have a UCL. So not only is it not ripped,
he just doesn't have one. But what was crazy was
(16:21):
I was asymptomatic, like I could still throw, still throw hard,
spine never been hurt. And I tried to argue that
I should get more money because you were never going
to have to replace it. But they did They didn't.
They didn't go for that. They thought they yeah, they
thought they were getting damaged goods. And so not only
did they rescind the offer, they actually said that we're
not sure we even want to sign you to any
(16:43):
amount of money. We just want you to go back
to college. And my thought was going back to college
with this condition already over me meant I just lost
my chance to play professional baseball. I'd gone through all this,
had all the success, and yet here I am being
told I wasn't going to be able to ever do
it again.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you're listening to our a Dickie tell one heck
of his story. Baseball is his refuge. She knows the Lord,
he knows Jesus Christ. But not like he would as
he became an adult. Well, he'd always said he'd felt
broken and inadequate in the one place that didn't happen
was on the ball field. And in came that diagnosis.
(17:23):
He did not have a UCL, and the deal from
the Texas Rangers was rescinded and he was back to college.
Who knew what next? When we come back more of
our A. Dickey's story here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we're back with our American stories and with R. A.
Dickey's story. When we left off last, he just learned
that his pitching arm was missing. It's UCL news that
threatened to end his dream, one that he thought was
just beginning. Here again is ri Dickey.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
I went back home and was thinking, I'll just go
back for my senior year and do the best I
can as a ut vol and see what happens. But
there's no guarantee I'd even be drafted again. And then
the night before I had to go back to class.
And once you stepped foot in the classroom before your
senior year, you become ineligible to sign with the major
league club until the following draft. So if something was
gonna happen, it had to happen before my first class
(18:51):
first eight am. I was enrolled in in English class
eight am the next day, and it was about nine
thirty at night and I still hadn't left Nashville. And
the phone rang and it was the general manager of
the Texas Rangers, and he basically said, hey, we have
seventy five thousand dollars for you. Take it or leave it,
and you can start your professional career with us, and
(19:11):
we'll give you a chance. Now I was crushed, you know,
but at least it was an opportunity and I was
willing to bet on myself in that moment. And I
called him back and said, okay, I'm happy to be
a Ranger. And so I accepted the offer, even though
it was even less than what I had agreed to
as a tenth rounder out of high school. And so
(19:32):
that's how I started my professional career. My first year
down there, it was a tough year. I didn't do well.
I ended up having a bone chip that I had
to have taken out. So it was also confirmation that again,
like they were right, I was broken and this and
that it was unrelated to the absence of the UCL
but nonetheless it was an injury that I sustained and
(19:53):
had to have fixed. And so I felt like I
had a scab that was just being ripped off over
and over and over again. So many different times in
my life because that had become identity. My identity had
become the victim of being sexually abused. I didn't perform
very well my first year. I went back to A
ball for my second year. At this point, I was
(20:14):
married and we were making six hundred and fifty dollars
a month with a roommate and a roommate. His roommate
had a wife, so the four of us lived together
as newly weeds. That's not always great, you know, but
my wife was such a trooper, you know, like she
supported me, encouraged me. So that second year in pro ball,
I did a little bit better. I actually was a
(20:36):
closer instead of a starter for the first time in
my career. And I had the Florida state record for
most saves in a year with thirty eight. Like, my
stuff was better, and so I would go from Double
A to Triple A all the while. You know, I
was married and we had our first child while I
was in Triple A. And I was drafted in nineteen
ninety six and got my first cup of coffee in
the major leagues in two thousand and one, and that
(20:59):
was like a thirty days dent with the Texas Rangers
as a conventional picture. And from then on, from basically
two thousand and one till two thousand and five, I
just was this journeyman that would bounce up and down.
You know, you're good enough today, you're not good enough
for this day. We're going to send you back down.
And my wife was with me up and down the
whole time, and we were spending time apart, and you know,
(21:21):
it's hard, it's very very difficult. I mean that the
divorce rate in professional baseball is like fifty nine percent,
which is horrible.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
It's just really really hard.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
On a marriage. But still I was living a lot
of my life in the dark and in secret and embarrassed.
Every time that I would perform poorly, I would feel
that wound open up. Every time I would get sent down,
I would feel that wound open up, and it was
like I was being abused all over again. Because I'd
never grown up. I was working second jobs, trying to
(21:53):
earn enough money to make a house payment, and I
had two kids, and so there was another dynamic that
was part of the thing, like, you know, kind of
I was sad about, you know, my ability to be
a father and be present for my children and carrying
all this baggage around from a past that had been
so ugly that I didn't feel worthy of having these
beautiful children, and like it just would compound and compound,
(22:16):
and I just was at the end. I was at
the end of myself, man, I just was. I was
ready to have relief. And I felt like if I
took myself out of the world, that felt like the
best scenario of a bunch of different scenarios for me.
I had decided that how was it. I had driven
(22:39):
my car underneath my car port. I had duct taped
a rubber hose to the muffler of my car and
run the hose into the driver's side window and stuffed
towels around the crease of the window. I remember weeping
and being sorry and filled with shame. Man, it was
just and utter shame. And as I was turning the key,
(23:04):
all I heard was this, this loud voice in my spirit,
and so loudly that you cannot deny that that's what
it was saying, don't do it. I have something else
for you. I felt like God saw me, like he
saw me. I didn't turn to keep I hit all
the paraphernalia that I'd used on the car for my wife,
(23:25):
and the next morning, the pastor of my church happened
to drop by unannounced, and we started having a conversation
and I started to let him in on kind of
what was going on internally, and I didn't share with
it about the abuse, but I did say I was
in a bad way, and that's kind of how I
(23:46):
eventually got to Stephen James, a well known counselor here
in Nashville, Tennessee, and we met one time, and he
had a gift of being able to see through all
my Sports Center answers to his questions right like you
could see through it all. The one thing that really
changed me was when he looked at me and he said, hey,
all right, listen. He said, no matter what you tell me,
(24:07):
no matter what you've done, like I'm not going anywhere,
like I'm here, I'm not leaving you. And that melted
me on the spot. I'd never had another human being
say those kinds of words to me, but I felt
in that moment like if I were to tell him this,
he's going to get up and walk out or kick
(24:28):
me out of the office, or like that's what the
enemy does, so that you won't bring the truth to light,
and God wants the truth to be brought to light.
And so when I did that, it was like a
burden and then lifted in a way that I can't
even describe to you. It was just overwhelming, and I
just sat there in it for I felt like an eternity.
(24:50):
We didn't even talk. Man. I told him what had
happened and started crying, and he started crying and he
hugged me. He's probably the first man that I'd hugged,
and you know, because like my abuser was a man.
It's just it was I can't describe it. Man, I
had a chance, after being in that car and almost
(25:11):
committing suicide, to that couch where I felt so much
redemption in a moment, just was it was overwhelming. I
could care less about baseball at that point. It was
the first time in my whole life the thing that
had brought me so much validity and value and worth
and my identity was tied up in so deeply. I
could have cared less about being a major league baseball
(25:34):
player for a minute. All I cared about was now
that I'm free of this, how can I be the
best husband, the best father, the best friend, the best, Like,
how can I gain back all this time that I
had lost from you know, not letting people in on
who I was. And Stephen was the first person I
ever told about my abuse before my life, and we
(25:57):
got to this place in therapy I had to be
okay with her looking at me and say, hey, all right,
I didn't sign up for this. You lied to me,
you didn't tell me the truth about who you were.
You know, I'm sorry, but this is not the life
for me. Like I had to be. I had to
come to the place where I was okay with that,
even though it would have been devastating for me. And
so when I got to the place through therapy that
(26:17):
I could accept that if that were the answer, I
brought her in to tell her the truth about everything,
and she said, hey, man, I can't. I can't love you,
and pieces I love you fully and I'm sorry you
didn't tell me or trust me enough to do that,
but I'm not going anywhere. And again, like, it's just
(26:41):
it moved me so much that it just kept motivating me.
Don't want to get deeper and deeper and that's all
I cared about.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And you've been listening to our a Dicky's story, and
what a story you're listening to. My goodness, to hit
that low of lows in his car, duct taping rubber
to his muffler, then hearing that voice, don't do it.
I have something for you. And then to have his
(27:11):
wife say, no matter what you tell me, no matter
what you've done, I'm here life changing for our A Dickie.
When we come back the rest of our A Dickey's
story here on our American stories, and we continue with
(27:38):
our American stories and with our A Dickie, the former
Major League baseball pitcher who's here sharing his story of
brokenness and redemption. By the way, pick up his book
wherever I wind up on Amazon or wherever you get
your books. Let's return to our A Dickie for the
(27:59):
rest of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
One of the things that helped shape the best parts
of my baseball career was when I had a real
change in perspective from who I was as a human being,
like Ari Dicky the baseball player, the athlete, or the
guy that had played on the Olympics, went to college
World Series, like all those accolades that somehow get messed
into who you feel like you are as a human
(28:23):
being that you cling to so dearly because it gives
you value. When I changed from that perspective to the
understanding that baseball was just what I was able to do.
It's not who I was. For so long, it had
been who I was. I was a victim of sexual abuse,
and I was an athlete. And the less I really
(28:43):
worried about the baseball part, the more success I actually
started to have. I'd gotten called in the office in
two thousand and five and Oral Herscheizer, who was our
pitching coach, Buck Shoalter was our manager. They pulled me
aside in the office after an outing I had in
the big leagues where I got beat up and said,
hey man, you just don't have it anymore as a
(29:03):
conventional pitcher. And then they said, but we do think
you have a good enough knuckleball to be a full
time knuckleballer. They had seen me play catch on the
side with my knuckleball and beat up my catch partner
with it and he couldn't catch it, and Oral would
walk by and say, hey man, what's that. I'd say,
it is just a knuckleball. I'm just messing around. And
I started to throw it in the games a little bit,
(29:25):
but they wanted me to throw it ninety percent of
the time, and so they said, we don't have room
for you anymore in this organization as a conventional pitcher.
There are guys that are so much better than you now.
But we do think that you have possibly a future
as a knuckleballer, so we want you to go down
and learn that pitch. Basically, a good knuckleball only rotates
(29:46):
about half of a revolution from the time it leaves
your hand until the time it gets to the plate.
And that's a really hard thing to do. When you
think about how many balls are spinning that come out
of a pitcher's hand for their career, you know, there's
not a lot of people that can keep them knuckleball right.
It's a real rare thing. In fact, Tim Wakefield was
the only knuckleballer for quite a while in the major leagues,
(30:07):
and as I was learning the pitch and trying it,
you know, my pitching coach with the Rangers couldn't tell
me much. He couldn't teach me much. So I reached
out to Charlie Hoff, who was a longtime knuckleball guy
and an icon in the Ranger community, and he helped
me a lot. He changed my grip. He gave me
a different kind of way to look at my mechanic,
and that was real important. And in my first major
(30:29):
league start in two thousand and six as a full
time knuckleballer, I gave up six home runs and three
and a third innings and tied a minor day major
league record for the most home runs given up in
a game. And then O seven came and I was
able to sign a contract with the Milwaukee Brewers, and
the Milwaukee Brewers Triple A affiliate is the Nashville Sounds.
(30:53):
God said, look, man, I'm going to allow you to
stay home, play baseball and work on your marriage. I
was going to counseling in the weeks as much as
I could. I would go play at night, go in
the afternoons, the counselinger in the mornings, and the more
release I gave over to the things that should have
the priority, the more success I had on the baseball field.
(31:14):
I ended up in seven with the Nashville Sounds as
a knuckleballer, being the PCL pitcher of the Year. You know,
I cared like I'd been given a gift to be
able to throw a knuckleball. Well, so I wanted to
cultivate that, and I loved getting to the field and
working on that. But man, when I left, I left
like it was all left behind, and I just wanted
to get home to my wife and I would go
(31:34):
back to the Nashville Sounds, have a start and throw
a shot out. I think there's only been thirty maybe
in the history of Major League Baseball to throw a
knuckleball with any amount of success, and so it's hard
to do. And so because of that, the fraternity is
very tight, and we pull for one another real hard,
(31:54):
and so much so that I had made the club
with the Seattle Mariners. In two thousand and eight, after
the Nashville Sounds, I was back up in the big
leagues and we were playing the Boston Red Sox and
Tim Wakefield was throwing a bullpen, and he not me,
He invited me to come watch his bullpen. So imagine
an opponent inviting me to come watch away where I
might could beat his team, Like it was just unheard of, right,
(32:17):
And so of course I went over there and he
was sharing with me all his secrets, and then from
there I went to Phil Neicro the next year, and
so I had Charlie Hoff and Tim Wakefield and Phil
Nicro like on my rolodecks. It's like the Jedi Council
of knuckleballers, man. I mean, it was unbelievable. They were
so willing and so generous to share it and want
(32:37):
they pulled for me, they called me. Those men were
instrumental in my journey leading up to twenty twelve. When
I won the National League so young, I said the
acceptance speech, I said, this isn't a win for me,
this is a win for every knuckleballer that's ever lived,
that's had success that people kind of put to the
margins because they did something differently, you know, like think
(32:57):
about Phil Nicro won three hundred games in the major leagues.
Never want to say young, And a lot of it
was because of the bias that sports writers had at
the time about a knuckleball pitcher, you know, like it
was this kind of side freak show thing that might
not should even be in baseball, but yet here it
is and it's having success. But anyway, when I won that,
it was really a celebration of all those guys, man.
(33:20):
I mean, they all poured into me, and they all
gave me a piece of themselves. That's what I was
able to run with through all the success that I
had from basically twenty and ten until twenty and seventeen,
when I got to finish my career with the team
that I grew up watching that had Phil Neicro on it,
which was the Atlanta Braves, and all the mistakes that
(33:44):
I had made for so long in my life I
was able to bring to bear in interviews and in
conversations in a way that was really freeing. I didn't
have to pretend anymore. I'd have to pretend to be
somebody I was, and I was okay being a broken
guy that had gone through some really hard things but
(34:04):
yet still had the capacity to do some really remarkable things.
And so when I started to understand that baseball was
just something that I did, like being an electrician or
being now, it's fine. I enjoyed it. I had a
passion for it, and I felt like an opportunity and
a gift God had given me. But that wasn't the
(34:25):
thing that defined me, you know. I wanted to be
seen as someone who God had redeemed, and God is
for me. God is not the God of second chances.
He's the God of infinite chances. Man, he has shown
up for me so many daggum times. It's just remarkable.
You know. I continue to see myself as you know,
(34:45):
an Israelite that got rescued out of Egypt, seeing all
these incredible things, yet still rebelling, and yet there he is,
yet again, yet again. And I wanted to be a disciple,
right man, I wanted to live out my faith in
a way that was life changing. How could I do that? Well?
I got to show up as a husband, right. I
got to care about getting in the word right like
(35:06):
I got to care about living out scripture to my kids.
I got to include them in my story. I've got
to tell the truth. I've got to talk about the
redemption that I've experienced. Like all those things became the
things that I wanted to do more than baseball. So
the baseball part allowed me to have a platform to
be able to do that to a wide audience. But
(35:28):
it's not the thing that drove me to be who
I was. I mean, like being a baseball player that
was no longer the motivating factor for me. When I retired,
I felt like God was calling me into an amazing
organization called the Nashville Anti Human Trafficking Coalition. It not
(35:48):
only rescues and restores victims of human trafficking, but it
also we educate people in our community around you know,
our most vulnerable demographic is middle and high school studentudence.
And so we get to go in and talk about
what to look for on your phones and how to
educate people about the grooming process and how prevalent it
(36:09):
is in our community and how it wants to hide
on the sidelines in so many different ways. And we
get to bring to light a lot of you know
what I talk about, just bringing the truth to light
for a lot of people. And then we also have
a social enterprise that these ladies that we rescue, they
go through a Christ centered curriculum and when they get
to check a bunch of boxes, they get to move
(36:30):
it to our social enterprise, which is a bakery that
we have and they all have had some addictions, so
they go immediately. We have partnerships where they go immediately
into treatment and then they get out and we get
to love on them in a way that they are
not used to and it's transforming. And the only way
we can do that is we get to love broken
people because we're broken. God has given me a gift
(36:51):
and getting to serve in that capacity because I feel
the pain of a lot of the wounds that those
girls have gone through. And you know, there is broken,
but there's also joy and you can walk forward with both.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericott, and a special thanks to R. A.
Dickey for sharing his story and my goodness, the turning
point comes when he realizes that his identity is not
in baseball, it's in Jesus. This changes his whole life,
It changes paradigm. Baseball, he discovered, was something he just did,
(37:28):
like an electrician or any craftsman. But I was someone
God redeemed. He said, He's not a god of second chances.
He's a god of infinite chances. And by the way,
as that walk got better, his success, well, that grew
in baseball and led right to him winning in twenty
(37:49):
twelve the National League Cy Young Award. But you could
tell just listening to him where he takes his pleasure,
where he takes his sustenance, and where he gets meaning
in his life. And that comes from serving as God
and serving other broken people. The story of ra A Dickey.
Here on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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