Back in the early 2000s, I was a cub city reporter for People Newspapers, D Magazine’s string of weekly community newspapers. As I was hustling after hot breaking stories like the passing of the Neighborhood Stabilization Overlay and the widening of Mockingbird Lane through Highland Park, my colleague, sports reporter Scott Farrell, was reporting on one of the most remarkable athletes to ever come out of North Texas: Clayton Kershaw.
I only remember the stories from my periphery: the local kid who threw the perfect game by striking out every batter, who was named High School Baseball Player of the Year again and again. I was a relatively new transplant from the south shore of Long Island, a part of the country that doesn’t really produce many star athletes. Farrell’s reporting on Kershaw, as well as Kershaw’s generation of local athletes, which included quarterback Matthew Stafford, offered my first look at the Texas athlete-producing machine. I’ve always kicked myself for never going out to “Scotland Yard” to watch Kershaw pitch. What a rare privilege to be able to watch a future Hall of Famer throw a ball at 17.
Kershaw’s links to this city may suggest that when he pitches tonight for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the opening game of the World Series against the Houston Astros, Dallas should be pulling for its native son to take home the glory. After all, Kershaw has been bestowed with just about every honor a major league pitcher can receive – three Cy Young Awards, a National League Most Valuable Player award, multiple player of the year awards, a gold glove, seven-straight All-Star game appearances, pitching’s Triple Crown (leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and earned run average in 2011), and even the Roberto Clemente Award for humanitarian work. A World Series ring would, like Dirk’s NBA championship, put a definitive cap on his career, underlining his greatness.
But there’s another Dallas-born player who will take the field in the World Series, an old teammate of Clayton Kershaw’s whose career has followed an altogether different trajectory.
James Evan Gattis grew up in Forney, followed top high school baseball coaches through a string of Dallas high schools (R. L. Turner High School, Forney High School, and Bishop Lynch High School) and played with Kershaw on the Dallas Tigers, an elite travel team. Gattis was about as natural a baseball player as they come. Strong and agile, he could hit for power, play catcher, first base, and the outfield. While still in high school, he was projected to be drafted within the first eight rounds of the MLB draft. Rice University wanted him to come play first base; Texas A&M University offered him a scholarship to come play catcher. And then, it all inexplicably fell apart.
Gattis didn’t go to college. Instead, after he went on an extended booze and weed bender, which lasted until his mother dragged him off to rehab in Prescott, Arizona. By the time he got out of rehab, Gattis had lost his scholarships and went undrafted in the 2004 MLB draft. He washed up into Seminole State College, a junior college in Oklahoma, before burning out on baseball altogether and walking off the team. He returned to Dallas and worked as a parking valet, before quitting that as well, driving his truck cross-country to the Eldora Mountain Resort near Boulder, Colorado. He sold his truck. Worked the ski slopes and at a pizza parlor. Contemplated suicide. And eventually checked himself into an inpatient psychiatric ward.
What had happened? In the reporting on Gattis’ life, journalists have focused in on his parents’ divorce. As a young kid, as he shuffled back and forth between his mother’s and father’s homes every other weekend, he threw all his energy into baseball. Perhaps he never processed the grief? Perhaps he used baseball as a buffer or a way to compensate? Perhaps there were other fears and unsettled demons? Who really knows?
After being treated for clinical depression and anxiety, Gattis was released from the ward, and he eventually floated back to Dallas, where he found a job working alongside his brother as a janitor at Datamatics Global Services. In Dallas he met a New Age spiritual guru and followed her to Taos, New Mexico. He lived at a hostel and worked at a ski resort, before following another spiritual path and mentor to California. He eventually landed in Wyoming, where he worked at Yellowstone National Park.
By 2010, Gattis’ stepbrother was attending the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, a Division II in the Lone Star Conference, on a baseball scholarship. The Permian Basin baseball coach, Brian Reinke, remembered Gattis from the mid-2000s, when he was coaching at Midland College and Gattis was a promising high school kid with a hell of a swing who then disappeared off everyone’s radar. When Reinke found out Gattis was soul-searching in the woods of Yellowstone, he offered him a spot on his team. Gattis took it. That season, he batted .401 with 11 home runs, a performance that was good enough to get Gattis selected in the 23rd round of the 2010 MLB draft by the Atlanta Braves.
It would take three years for Gattis to make his way up through the Braves’ farm system, but after his years in the wilderness, he had rediscovered his focus for and love of baseball. When he made his major league debut on April 3, 2013, Gattis hit a home run in his second at-bat and was named National League Rookie of the Month. Playing behind starting catcher Brian McCann, he won enough respect from his coach that, when McCann was later traded to the New York Yankees, Gattis took over the lion’s share of the catcher’s duties for the 2014 season. He had a 20-game hitting streak and became the first catcher in Braves history to hit 20 home runs in both his rookie and sophomore season.
During the offseason, Gattis was traded to the Houston Astros, where he was eventually reunited with McCann and with whom he now platoons as catcher and DH. Gattis has become an essential ingredient to the Astros’ young and talented squad. On Sunday night, against the New York Yankees in the seventh game of the American League Championship Series, Gattis smacked a home run that helped send the Astros to the World Series.
With the series kicking off tonight in Los Angeles, a national league park where there will be no DHs, it is likely Gattis will be played from the bench and used as a pitch hitter until the series returns to Houston for game three. Nevertheless, the presence of Kershaw on the mound, one of the most dominant homegrown athletes to ever come out of Dallas, and Gattis in the dugout, the unlikely underdog who clawed his way back from a gig as a valet in Dallas to become a member of a World Series baseball team, sets up an interesting conflict of affiliations for local baseball fans.
Whoever comes out on top, it’s going to be one hell of a series.
