![]() I wasn't getting enough blood flow into my right arm. I had made a career out of refusing to come out of games, out of pitching complete games. My arm would get fatigued and I could not stay in for nine innings. Why should I argue the point with them?Įven though I was putting up those great statistics, the one thing I was not doing was pitching as many complete games as I normally did. Why wouldn't I want to pitch? It made no sense. At that moment I was just about the best pitcher in baseball. Deep down in my heart, I knew something was wrong. Some said that it was all psychological, that it was in my head. Nolan even said that he wondered if those rumors were bothering me and stressing me out. There were some people who spread the word that I was jealous of Nolan Ryan because he had a bigger contract. Some people gossiped, trying to find reasons why I felt out of sorts. I was pitching as well as I ever had, so I don't know why anyone would accuse me of being lazy. This meant they were wrong, and there was something wrong with me all of that time as I had been saying. People had been talking about how I was lazy. ![]() To tell you the truth, at that point I wasn’t even sure that everybody was sorry about what happened. It started cutting off the flow of blood to my brain. The scar is right below my neck and near the shoulder blade. They spliced two veins together in my arm and put a catheter in my stomach. When they operated they took the blockage out of my arm - they almost cut my arm completely off - they cut into a rib and they took a vein from my stomach. The doctor told me that I was such a powerful pitcher that the muscles in my right shoulder had overdeveloped and were pressing against the ribs every time I threw. It was hard to understand, and I was woozy. I had a blood clot in my neck, on a blood vessel, I think. When I went to the hospital I had a 24-carat gold chain around my neck. Eventually, I learned that I had three strokes. All that time I had been saying there was something wrong, and people didn't act like they believed me. ![]() ![]() The next thing I knew I was at the hospital and I definitely was not all right. The ambulance came onto the field, and the medics picked me up and put me in the ambulance. I heard an ambulance coming down the Astrodome ramp. When they come up to me and say they were at the game I go, "Oh, you were at that game? Really?" I just let them go ahead and talk about it as if there had been a game. It's weird how people think they remember something like that. I basically missed the ride to the hospital. There wasn’t anybody there because the team was out of town. In the years since, I’ve had a lot of people tell me they were at the game in the Astrodome when I fell down. Before I passed out, I had all kinds of things running through my mind, but the chief one was, What's wrong? What’s wrong? I couldn't even guess what had happened to me. I was lying on the floor of the Astrodome and I knew an ambulance was on its way. He kept asking me if I was all right and I think I said, "What do you think?" I was still conscious then. ![]() He ran into the clubhouse and then back out and put a cold towel on my forehead. I remember him coming over to me and saying, "J.R., are you all right? J.R., you all right?" I was lucky that someone was there who saw what happened. He was in the stadium looking down at me. One official, who usually travels with the team, didn't go on the road. I didn't have knowledge of anything that was going on. I had a headache, some confusion in my mind, and I felt weakness in my body. A few minutes later, I threw a couple more pitches, then the feeling got so bad I was losing my equilibrium. And then I threw a couple of more pitches and became nauseated. I was inside the Astrodome doing a workout so I could be in some kind of shape when I came off the disabled list.Īll of a sudden, I felt a high-pitched tone ringing in my left ear. In Still Throwing Heat: Strikeouts, the Streets, and a Second Chance, written with Lew Freedman, Richard chronicles the abandonment by those he counted on after his stroke, the despair of losing everything, and his ultimate redemption and giving back to the community.Īt the end of July and beginning of August, the Astros were on a long road trip out of town. The shocking development ended Richard's major league career and set off a chain of events that led to the former All-Star being homeless by the mid-1990s. Initially scoffed at because he continued approaching 100 mph on the radar gun, Richard collapsed while playing catch with an Astros teammate - later diagnosed as a life-threatening stroke. Richard was at the top of his profession when he inexplicably began complaining of arm weakness in 1980. ![]()
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