Phils' Eisenreich Turns Curse Into A Calling -- Player Embraces Disorder So He Can Inspire Others

PHILADELPHIA - There's this song he likes. Country and western. And this is the line that speaks to him:

". . . some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers."

James Michael Eisenreich looks up at you through eyes like fjords. He crinkles his nose. It is involuntary, a facial tic that he cannot control.

So are the sounds he makes from time to time. Squeals, grunts, chirps. Guttural and strangled. And the sudden jerks and twitches and spasms. His arms are apt to fly about without warning.

They can come at any moment, the strange noises, the twitches. And, of course, they always come at the worst possible moment. And they cannot be suppressed. No more than you can hold in a sneeze. Or stifle a hiccup when the fit is upon you. Trying to hold it in only makes it worse.

So wouldn't you, wouldn't any of us, ask to be spared?

The stares, the pointed fingers, the giggles, the embarrassment, the cruelty of the crude and the ignorant . . . who among us wouldn't pray for deliverance?

Jim Eisenreich wouldn't.

Oh, he used to.

He'd get down on his knees and squeeze his hands until they nearly bled, and he'd plead for this curse to be lifted from him.

But the neurological disorder known as Tourette's syndrome stayed with him. And one day, over time, it came to Jim Eisenreich that what he had was one of God's greatest gifts. He had an unanswered prayer.

He quit resisting his affliction and embraced it instead.

Jim Eisenreich won the greatest victory that is attainable by a mortal. He has taken the worst life can give him and he has turned it into shining triumph.

He has used himself and what he has done despite Tourette's - becoming a major-league baseball player of singular skill - to inspire others who have the disorder.

Especially the children.

"I try to give them hope," he said.

"I tell them what I felt like when I was their age. I tell them to keep their heads up. I tell them to keep working toward their dreams because dreams are possible."

He told 140 of them these things over the weekend. The kids and their families. Some of them came from as far away as Alabama. Jim Eisenreich bought them all tickets to the Phillies-Braves game, and then he spoke to them in a room at Veterans Stadium before the game, and there was no media alert, no summoning of TV cameras, no notice of a photo opportunity.

This is a man doing what he believes is his calling. This is most emphatically not another self-serving celebrity trying to buy his way into grace.

Jim Eisenreich hosts one of these gatherings every month of the season. He answers, by careful hand, every letter that reaches him. At every city where the Phillies stop, there are Tourette's kids brought to Jim Eisenreich, and there are hospitals where he visits them.

"Maybe there are players who give more money," said Leigh Tobin of the Phillies public relations staff. "But nobody gives more of himself than Jim Eisenreich."

The art of hitting

I have come to this place to learn about the art of hitting a baseball.

"Then you have come to the right place," said Denis Menke, the Phillies' hitting coach, and he pointed to the man inside the batting cage.

"He sure does keep it simple," Menke said in admiration.

And so he does. He has mastered the repeating stroke, Jim Eisenreich has. It is short, compact, economical, level, controlled. He is the no-frills hitter. He does not try to muscle the ball. And he uses every nook and cranny of a ballpark.

The outside pitch is served to the opposite field. The pitch down the middle is sent right back up the middle. The inside pitch is pulled. Home runs are accidents. Broken-bat flares are not.

Jim Eisenreich swings from the left side. His weapon is white ash, No. R205 machine-imprinted on the barrel, and No.8 (Eisenreich's jersey number) hand-scrawled in Magic Marker on the handle.

John Vukovich, the Phillies' dugout coach: "I told Jimmy (Fregosi), `Don't ever trade him, because I don't know how to pitch to him, and I don't know how to defense him.' "

Jim Eisenreich is not a large man: 5-foot-11, 195 pounds. Like his stance and his swing, he is compact and clean and lean. No waste.

If there is any justice at all, Jim Eisenreich, passed over for next week's All-Star Game, will amass enough plate appearances to qualify, and then win, the National League batting title.

"And you know what?" said Vukovich. "There's not a guy in baseball who wouldn't be pulling for him."

And what a magnificent moment of redemption that would be for those with Tourette's.

Recently, his average got up to .377. That was 26 points ahead of the listed league leader, but Eisenreich was a handful of plate appearances shy of qualifying.

"It's not even a thought," he said of the batting championship.

"Tony Gwynn, you know he's won a lot of batting titles, but he doesn't have a World Series ring. If you polled the people of Philadelphia, I bet 99 percent of them would say they'd rather have a World Series than a batting title."

He paused.

"At least, that's what they better say they want."

This was not cloyingly false modesty. This was the voice of a realist, the voice of a man who has been made a pragmatist by a disorder that can seize him and make him utter sounds against his will, make his body act like a marionette with snipped strings.

Jim Eisenreich quit deluding himself a long time ago.

"I can't play every day," he said. "The disorder, the effects of the medication, and the fact that I am 36 years old. Mornings, I can hardly drag myself out of bed."

So he has made his peace and made his accommodation. It has made life easier. On June 24, he had a four-hit game. The very next day, he was on the bench. Most of the pampered egoists would have stormed about. How dare Skip bench them. Jim Eisenreich sat placidly on the wood. Because that is his nature.

And because Jim Eisenreich felt like he'd gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. His system was still trying to work off the medication.

"It took me four years to get it right," he said. "Four years of experimenting to find the best dosage, and even now you can have something you're not expecting."

He has been on the same medication for 10 years. Pills. Taken at bedtime. Tranquilizers, basically. Like swallowing a hammer to the head.

"Problem is," he said, "everyone reacts differently. So you have to experiment. Sleep is important. So is diet. I try to avoid soda. And any artificial flavoring or coloring."

It doesn't take much to disrupt the mechanism. Extra-inning night games are hazardous. So are late-night flights back from the West.

"If it's 3 or 4 in the morning and I haven't taken the medication, then I'm on the edge. I'm about ready to go," he said.

There is something else, too.

There is a genetic link to Tourette's. And Jim Eisenreich and his wife, Leann, have a 4-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son.

This is a question you have to ask with your eyes because you don't trust your voice.

"No, they show no signs of it so far," he said. "But it's usually (age) 6 or 7 before the symptoms manifest themselves."

And the disorder itself?

"Still a lot to learn," he said.

Not only just by the doctors, either.

"Yes, if I could ask one thing from people it would be acceptance of us," he said. "If they could understand that this is involuntary, that we have no control over it. We are made to feel like outcasts at times. But we can live our lives just like you can. . . ."

As you might imagine, Jim Eisenreich is a man of strong faith.

"I believe the Lord has a plan for me," he said. "That will hold true no matter what I do to screw it up. And, being human, I `will' try to screw it up."

Here's the astonishing part: In a sport of pettiness and vindictiveness and crudity, Jim Eisenreich does not have a single enemy.

Vukovich, blunt as always: "If you can't get along with him, you're the one with a problem."

It's not that the Tourette's makes him off-limits. It was never allowed to become an issue because the first day he joined the Phillies, John Kruk looked him over and gave him this name: "Psycho."

"That was the best year I ever had," Jim Eisenreich said. "I don't want them treating me like a crystal vase."

So they don't. And he fires back.

And Fregosi uses him just right.

And the hits run off his bat like raindrops.

And you cannot help but think that probably Jim Eisenreich wouldn't be like this, wouldn't be doing all of this, if he didn't have Tourette's.

If he had been spared, none of this would be.

Unanswered prayers, indeed.