PEORIA, Ariz. — In a quiet room at a care center, a 15-year-old boy promised his father he would take care of the family. If the unthinkable became a horrifying reality, if a life-and-death teeter-totter or crushing financial pressure pushed them to the brink, the teen would shoulder the weight of the world.
Goodbye, carefree days. Goodbye, innocence of youth. Hello, heart, mind and soul jerked into sobering focus.
The waking nightmare began months earlier, when a trip to the swimming pool of the teen’s aunt was interrupted.
“He called me out of the pool and told me he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes,” Joe Musgrove said of his father, Mark, this week at the Peoria Sports Complex. “He was rubbing my shoulders and said, ‘I can’t feel my hands right now.’ So we went to the ER. A stroke is kind of what we thought he might be having. But they tested him. No stroke. No heart attack. Everything came back fine. They pretty much told us to go home and said if it got worse to come back.
“The next morning, I took our dog out and got some coffee before I had to go to school. He couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t get the water bottle open. He had no strength up to his elbows, so it was moving up his arms and legs.
“We went back to the ER at 6 a.m. By noon, he was completely paralyzed from the neck down.”
This was not Joe Musgrove, the Padres pitcher preparing for the season with a fresh $100 million contract. This was not Musgrove, the first player in organization history to throw a no-hitter. This was not Musgrove, a clubhouse compass who dispatched the Mets at raucous Citi Field a season ago to spark the Padres’ run to the NLCS.
This was a kid, terrified to the core.
Everything jarringly was upended when his father — a tough San Diego and National City cop who spent his last 12 years as a homicide detective — began to shut down in front of his son’s eyes. Weeks in an ICU. Months in a care center. A year and a half confined to a makeshift hospital room in the family’s El Cajon living room.
Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disorder that causes the body’s immune system to attack nerves, impacting roughly .001 percent of the U.S. population annually, had taken merciless root.
Then came The Talk.
“It just broke me up emotionally, because I told him, ‘Joe, the reality is I may not make it out of the hospital or make it through this stage in my life,’ ” Mark recalled. “ ‘If that’s the case, I need you to take over the man-of-the-house responsibilities, whatever those may be.’ It was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had.”
Everything changed, in a relative blink.
“I was scared, man,” Joe Musgrove said. “We had doctors telling us there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It was getting worse, where cardiac and respiratory systems were failing. You had machines breathing for him. It was real bad at some point.
“Then my dad is telling me, ‘I might not get out of this.’ In a matter of an hour, I feel like I went from a kid to whatever version of a man I could be at 15 years old. I became a different person.”
The Promise
Sports dreams normally come in tidy, made-for-Hollywood packages. Hit the World Series-winning home run in Game 7. Bury the NCAA Tournament-sealing jump shot as time expires. Sink a snaking 60-foot putt on 18 to capture The Masters.
Rarely do those thrilling moments become interwoven with dire, real-life consequences.
In the summer before his junior year at Grossmont High School, Joe was setting up a cot near-nightly to sleep next to his father. If Mark had an itch, Joe scratched. If those cranky knee and back injuries from the police days barked, Joe rolled him over to relieve the pressure.
Mark couldn’t work. Neither could his wife, Diane, who had become a family anchor and relentless caregiver. The bills mounted; the worries, more so. The entire family rowed and rowed without seeing the shoreline.
“He just kept promising when Mark got sick, ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to take care of us,’ ” Diane Musgrove said. “And that’s exactly what he did.”
It’s one thing for a teenager to say he’s going to sprint through the meat grinder that winnows down pro baseball prospects. It’s another to make it to the major leagues. It’s another altogether to stick there and make the kind of money that alters the trajectory of lives.
Joe’s sports dream was to fix things for his family. Admirable vow. Near-insurmountable odds.
“The percentages weren’t there,” Mark said. “I told him, ‘Joe, do you realize the percentages of you getting to the big leagues and staying there are so stacked against you?’ He said, the term I think people say now is, betting on yourself.
“He felt like no matter what adversity was there, no matter what the hurdles were, he was going to overcome those. As much as he loved the game, I think it was his thought that this was how he was going to take care of his family.”
The crush of it all exacted an understandable toll.
Joe, a good student, quietly began to struggle academically. He became ineligible. He refused to explain to teachers what he was dealing with, how much pressure had mounted, the uncertainty that haunted him daily.
“I never told any of my teachers what was going on, partially out of respect for my dad,” he said. “I didn’t feel like it was my place. I knew how uncomfortable he felt about the whole situation. He went from being the guy everybody else counted on to the guy who couldn’t go to the bathroom by himself. Emotionally, it beat him up. He didn’t like relying on other people. He’s very prideful.
“So by no means did I want to use that as an excuse or say I was failing because of my dad. I didn’t want to do that to him.”
Joe considered giving up baseball to offer even more support. His father pleaded with him to continue playing. Mark knew his potential, desperately needed something positive to focus on and told Joe that walking away would shatter his heart into thousands of pieces. Godfather and personal pitching coach Dom Johnson told Joe the same.
One day, late San Diego State coach and Padres legend Tony Gwynn stopped by for a conversation that cemented his path.
“He said how much he respected the way I played the game and the talent I had, but he laid into me a little bit about the grades,” Joe said. “He said, ‘With everything going for you, why aren’t you taking care of the school stuff?’
“That was the first time I told anybody (outside the family) about my dad. At that point, I felt like I needed to say something. In my mind, being ineligible eliminates your opportunity to get drafted and get into school. So I was honest with him.”
Gwynn’s demeanor shifted.
“We talked for like 45 minutes,” Joe said. “By that end of it, he essentially offered me a full ride (scholarship). He was impressed with how I played the game, but he admired the fact that I stood by my dad’s side and there for him. He said, regardless of what happened you’ve got to focus on getting your stuff done so you can help your family down the line.”
Baseball visions, grainy and pushed into the background, sharpened.
“Hearing that from someone else I really looked up to and admired, that’s when I put all my eggs in the baseball basket,” Musgrove said.
Not always a ‘paved road’
In 2011, Joe became the 46th pick in the first round of baseball’s amateur draft by the Blue Jays. He began his career with the trash-can-banging Astros, earning a controversial World Series ring in 2017.
He spent three seasons with the Pirates before fully finding his mound legs in hometown San Diego. He threw the franchise’s first no-hitter against the Rangers on April 9, 2021, in the club’s 8,206th game. In 2022, he became an All-Star.
His finest moment, though, came before almost all of that.
Joe was awarded a signing bonus of $500,000. A check for $250,000 arrived first. He did not buy a fancy car. He did not scoop up a beachside condo. He knew where the money would go.
“We had no income for about two years,” Joe said. “We were about 30 days away from losing the house. (After a family friend bought the home to stave off creditors) I bought it. The check showed up maybe a week or two before we were about to be foreclosed on. It was a blessing because it came exactly when we needed it.
“You don’t see your parents cry a whole lot growing up. It was emotional for everybody. I was so proud that I was finally able to do something. I hadn’t been able to help, other than being there physically.
“Getting that chance to pay them back was a special moment for me.”
Tears?
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely,” Mark Musgrove said. “That’s the one thing we look back and are ever so grateful. That’s who Joe is.”
How did the younger Musgrove navigate the whole of it, baseball, school, family and all?
“He was a champ,” Mark said. “It was his first experience that life isn’t always fair. You don’t always get the paved road. Sometimes you have to struggle through the bumps. I said, ‘Your success is going to help me heal, make me feel better.’ That’s the way he dealt with it. Playing baseball was a healing process for me.”
The remarkable kid, a man like few others.
