Mets' Carlos Carrasco, White Sox's Liam Hendriks are forever teammates as cancer survivors
Carlos Carrasco of the Mets throws to first base for an out during the fifth inning against the White Sox at Citi Field on Tuesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Liam Hendriks and Carlos Carrasco may have been sitting in opposing dugouts, but on Wednesday, they did their best work as part of a singular club of professional baseball players who have survived cancer.
Hendriks, the White Sox reliever who in April was declared cancer free from stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, teamed up with Cookie’s Kids program — Carrasco’s charity — to host pediatric cancer patients from Cohen’s Children’s Hospital.
Hendriks and Carrasco, who beat chronic myelogenous leukemia in 2019, took a group of children around Citi Field, including the dugout and bullpen areas, and shared cancer stories.
“Cancer changes you,” Hendriks said in his ESPYs speech last week, which has since gone viral. “There’s no doubt about it. Going through this, it changed me for the better. There’s a lot of times where I’m sitting out here thinking about what I could have done differently in my life leading up to this moment. Everything in life is short. Life, it’s just trivial. Things are just trivial when you go through something like this.”
McNeil rebounding?
After Jeff McNeil gathered two hits against the White Sox Tuesday despite feeling clear discomfort in his hip, Buck Showalter said he sees some indication that the reigning National League batting champ might be ready to come out of the marathon slump that’s had McNeil’s average drop to .250, down from .288 on June 1.
He’s batting .196 in that stretch.
“I’d like to say (that he’s coming out of it) and I feel it a little bit, but I’ll jynx it if I say it, so I didn’t say it,” Showalter said. “He’s close. Jeff, he’s a hard grader. You don’t have to wonder about what he’s thinking or feeling.”
The SNY broadcast repeatedly showed McNeil wincing or flexing his hip Tuesday, but Showalter said that though McNeil sporadically gets recurring pain in the area, he was fine to play Wednesday. McNeil played right in lieu of Starling Marte, who was out with a migraine, and batted fifth.
Oh, baby
Francisco Alvarez and Brett Baty’s back-to-back home runs Tuesday were only the second time in franchise history that rookies hit back-to-back homers. Mike Jacobs and Victor Diaz were the last two to do it, in 2005. Alvarez went into Wednesday with a .534 slugging percentage — the highest ever for a Met in his age 21 season.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
