Eisenreich's Homer Touches Thousands

PHILADELPHIA - Once, they thought it was stage fright.

The facial tics. The twitching shoulders. The eyes blinking over and over like a camera shutter that won't stop clicking. The grimaces. The strange sounds emitting wordlessly from his throat.

They've learned differently. Even before Jim Eisenreich hit a home run in the World Series, baseball's biggest theatrical event, and opened the window just a crack more to a world groping to understand a neurological disorder known as Tourette's Syndrome.

"When he hit that home run," Sue Levi said, "it was so meaningful to everyone. A lot is riding on him."

Eisenreich's home run powered the Philadelphia Phillies to a 6-4 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 2 of the World Series.

For Sue Levi, fielding calls in the national office of the Tourette Syndrome Association Inc., the impact of Eisenreich's home run carried far beyond the outfield wall of Toronto's Skydome.

"Jim is an idol to so many girls and boys and even adults who are coping with the same disorder," said Levi, a liaison for medical and scientific programs for the association, based in Bayside, N.Y.

"Jim has come totally out of the closet. It is almost strange that a baseball club will be pleased about a player's disabilities being focused upon and made public."

Eisenreich, who has learned to control his condition through medication, knows what his home run meant. It is why, long after the game, he stood before a crush of questioners, his face trembling but his voice strong, and repeated a story of overcoming fear and loathing and the doubts of both himself and others.

"To me, this is a Rich Renteria story: Rich getting hit in the face, Eisey overcoming Tourette's Syndrome - gosh, it makes you feel good," said John Boles, the Florida Marlins' farm director who held the same job in Kansas City in 1987, when the Royals claimed Eisenreich on waivers from the Minnesota Twins.

"This is a guy who was athletically dead," Boles said. "When I saw the movie `Field of Dreams,' I thought of Jim Eisenreich. Like Shoeless Joe, talking about coming back to the smell of the grass, the feel of the game. That's the way it had to be for Eisey. He was back where he belonged."

Eisenreich had been on the Twins' voluntary retired list for three years when the Royals claimed him for the $1 waiver price. At the time, Eisenreich was working off and on in an archery shop, doing a lot of hunting and fishing, and playing with his youngest brother, Charlie, on Beaudreau's Saints, an amateur team back in his hometown of St. Cloud, Minn., that won a state tournament.

"Until this moment," Eisenreich said after his Series homer, "that was my biggest thrill in baseball, to be able to play with my brother."

"AN UNBELIEVABLE FEELING"

Charlie Eisenreich, a math teacher at St. Cloud Apollo High, was sitting in his living room, watching the 1993 World Series game on TV with his wife, when Eisenreich hit a high, inside fastball from Toronto pitcher Dave Stewart toward the right-field seats.

"When he first hit it, I thought it was a sacrifice fly, and I said, `Yes,"' Charlie Eisenreich said. "But then I saw (outfielder) Joe Carter's back, and it was just an unbelievable feeling.

"I jumped up in the air, picked my wife up, and we had ourselves a good old time.

"Our dad had questioned whether Jim should go back to pro ball after all the things he'd been through, but I guess Jim always had it in his mind to try it again. I had my doubts, too, but I always told him, `If you go back, finish the story.'

"I guess he put another chapter to it, didn't he?"

They had laughed at Jim Eisenreich when he was in Little League, the names other little boys called him ringing in his ears long after he'd flee home. The doctors had told him it would get better as he got older, but instead it became worse. He made it through school, a good student, no troublemaker, but it had been torture, he said.

He always could play ball, though, which is why the Twins had signed him out of St. Cloud State. He was considered one of the team's top outfield prospects, along with Kirby Puckett, and in one year made the jump from Class A ball to the big leagues.

CONDITION INVITED SCORN

His first 34 games for the Twins, in 1982, he hit .303. But while Eisenreich with a bat in his hand was a match for any big-league pitcher, he was powerless to cope with a condition that invited echoes of the scorn he'd suffered through in Little League. The worst night may have come in Fenway Park in Boston, when he was taken out in midgame rather than face any more jeers from a bleacher crowd drunk on its own viciousness (Much later, some of those fans wrote in apology).

He went on the disabled list in June, and missed the rest of the season. He played Opening Day the next spring, then told Manager Billy Gardner he couldn't go on. There was one more abortive comeback, in 1984, then it was back to St. Cloud. The Twins were at a loss for an explanation. They thought he was unnerved by the big-league setting, the crowds, the noise, the pressure.

Charlie Eisenreich said the family never bought that explanation. "We knew it had to be physical," he said.

It was after Jim Eisenreich returned to St. Cloud, his brother said, that he discovered the right dosages of medication to control the symptoms.

Meanwhile in Kansas City, Bob Hegman, the Royals' assistant farm director, was urging Boles to take Eisenreich. Hegman, in one of those great twists of fate, had played with Eisenreich on the St. Cloud State team.

"Bob talked about Eisey like he was some kind of Superman," Boles said. "He'd talk about he was perfect with the bow and arrow, he could bowl like he'd never seen, hit a golf ball out of sight."

Boles admits to having reservations. "The situation was scary," he said. "I had Jim sign a waiver freeing the Royals from any liability if he was injured due to an improper use of his medication.

"Jim told me he had learned how to take his medication so he didn't get drowsy in a game, but we were worried. What if he couldn't move out of the way of a high inside fastball?"

ROYALS PROVIDE OPPORTUNITY

Boles swallowed his fears, and Eisenreich tore up spring training. He still started the season in Class AA - Boles felt he owed another player a chance - but Eisenreich obliterated the pitching in the Southern League. In 70 games in Memphis, he hit .382, with 10 triples and 11 home runs.

On June 17, 1987, three years after he'd played his last game for the Twins, Eisenreich returned to the big leagues - to stay.

"I don't think it's been a long journey," he said the other day. "It's just been a part of the journey of life. I'll cherish this for as long as I live."

Last winter, the Phillies, looking for a platoon outfielder, signed him as a free agent.

WELCOMED BY PHILLIES

The Phillies welcomed him, Eisenreich said, almost from the day he arrived. "They were very sensitive to my situation," he said. "They try to figure you out right away. Either you're in, or you get buried."

Every place in which Jim Eisenreich played this year for the Phillies, and before that with the Kansas City Royals, Sue Levi said he met with other victims of Tourette's, which some estimates place as affecting as many as 1 in 200 people. Eisenreich would invite kids into the dugout before games, in the clubhouse afterward, and always sent them home with a baseball.

"I like kids to think of me as a role model," he said. "I owe it to them. I don't like standing in front of everybody here, but I like the game.

"And I want those kids to know the sky's the limit. Even though we may be the oddballs and the outcasts in or social life, we can succeed at anything we work hard at."