The Yankees have a fearsome bullpen that will be hard to crack into this season.
Challenges like these are probably laughable to Danny Farquhar.
The newest addition to the revolving door of the Yankees’ bullpen is Farquhar, whose pitching is less impressive than the fact he’s alive right now.
The Yankees signed the 31-year-old to a minor league deal Monday, after which MLB Network released a feature wherein the most frightening story of the 2018 baseball season opened up about what happened in the White Sox dugout and what followed.
April 20, a home game against Houston, Farquhar pitched two-thirds of an inning and gave up two runs, none of which he remembers.
He was told he said “I had a headache and that I wasn’t feeling so good” after the inning.
“‘This is absolutely killing me, it’s driving me crazy,’” trainer Herm Schneider said Farquhar told him. “Really showing some distress. And then he starts to throw up. He just basically passes out. I was fortunate enough, I could grab him before he fell on a concrete floor in the dugout.”
They would learn later that Farquhar had suffered a brain aneurysm. He was unconscious in the dugout as trainers rushed in and players crowded around, trying to block TV cameras from the commotion.
“Danny was just not moving,” said Tom Bafia, assistant clubhouse manager. “Looked like a dead body almost. I’ve never seen somebody be so unresponsive to everything. I literally thought he may have been dead right there.”
Farquhar was carried out and rushed to the hospital, where doctors immediately identified the aneurysm. And it was more complicated than that.
“In Danny’s case, where the aneurysm was, it was very difficult to get,” said Kathy Weber, a doctor at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush. “They had to take a piece of his skull out to get to it.”
She said 40 percent of people who have that brain aneurysm die — and 60 percent of those who survive will have neurological issues.
Danny Farquhar got through.
The well-traveled reliever and his wife admitted his memory is not quite where it was pre-surgery, which is not much of a complaint.
“There are moments when life can kind of overwhelm him a little bit,” said his wife, Lexie Farquhar. “Which, we have three young children, it’s overwhelming before brain surgery. So after brain surgery, that’s going to have its own life right there. But most days I forget he’s gone through such a big deal.”
It remains to be seen how Farquhar, whose fastball has sat at about 93 mph the last few years in Chicago, will look now. But he said doctors have told him he shouldn’t have a problem returning in 2019. There are more important things, though.
“From time to time, you look at your kids, and you’re so excited to be here,” he said. “To give them a father to grow up with.”
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