KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
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Rawlings stitches “6/10/2020” into Lucas Erceg’s glove at the Kansas City Royals reliever’s request.
It’s the day Erceg got sober, so he welcomes the reminder of how lucky he is every time he takes the mound.
“It was the greatest decision I've ever made,” Erceg said.
Alcohol cost Erceg a promising baseball career at the University of California in Berkeley. He was an All-Pac-12 performer as a sophomore, a power-hitting corner infielder with an arm capable of throwing 100-mph heat.
Despite landing at tiny Menlo College, an NAIA baseball program at the time, Erceg was talented enough for the Milwaukee Brewers to spend a second-round pick on him.
He reached Class AAA in his second minor-league season, but regressed from there and the drinking never stopped as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.
“It was anything and everything,” Erceg said. “Especially at that point in my life, going to workouts with a half-poured-out-Lacroix and you kind of top it off with some vodkas. Kind of crazy, right? Especially at 7:30 in the morning.”
Erceg, who converted from a corner infielder to a reliever in 2021, was drowning as much in depression and self-loathing as alcohol when his girlfriend, Emma, had enough and asked for a break in early June 2020.
“She would come home to me with 12 beer cans next to my PlayStation,” he said. “It was a bad situation, right? It was just not what you wanted to come home to, and I think she got fed up with that.”
It was another clear sign to Erceg that he had a drinking problem.
“That's what we look for, if it's impacting different areas of your life — whether that's your relationships; whether that's your job; legally, you're getting in trouble with the law,” Research Psychiatric Center’s Behavioral Health Outpatient Services Manager Justina Breit said. “If it's interfering with certain aspects of your life in a major negative way, then that's when we're looking at ‘This is an addiction.’”
But as Erceg learned, the choice to get sober had to be for his own health and well-being. Doing it for someone else had never worked before.
“A decision like that, you need to make that decision for yourself,” he said. “In the past, I tried making that decision for other people and trying to please other people with how well I was doing in baseball and what kind of person I was trying to be off the field. But it never really worked out.”
Now, Erceg is a flamethrowing converted power hitter for a playoff contender after the Royals swung a trade with Oakland in late July — and he’s happy to be sober and let others battling alcohol and substance abuse know there’s hope.
“It's just so unfortunate that we have to allow situations like that to happen before we kind of realize how bad it is,” Erceg said. “I think that's why I'm kind of using this platform as a way to help people maybe figure that out before something bad happens.”
It’s a message that Breit, a behavioral-health expert and therapist, said can have a big impact on others fighting similar battles away from the public eye.
“That person can be an inspiration to somebody in a time where you feel really alone and the only thing you want is to feel like somebody understands, somebody gets it,” Breit said. “Maybe your mom doesn't get it, maybe your brother doesn't get it, but this person that entertains you and you look up to is telling you, ‘I get it, and I've been through it.’ They can use that platform to bring awareness, they can advocate, they can give people a voice who don't have a voice. It can be huge. The impact of that can be huge for people.”
Sobriety has made a huge for Erceg, who married Emma in November 2022.
“Like I said, it's the best decision I've ever made,” he said. “I'm happily married with my wife now and we're excited to keep having these experiences and traveling around the United States — and hopefully the world — with baseball.”
Erceg’s glove still had an A’s logo on it as September arrived, but he’s working to get a new one for his new club — with the same date, of course.
“I have one on the way. It’ll be navy with all that silver, KC and then the same ‘6/10/2020’ logo,” he said.
October is National Substance Use Prevention Month. Erceg, who has six saves since joining the club, and the Royals hope to be playing lots of October baseball.
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