Dave McKay is tired.
Not long ago, he was a bundle of energy. He craved activity. The Diamondbacks’ first-base coach would spend 12 hours at the ballpark only to come home in search of something else to do. But now, by the end of each day and sometimes long before that, his legs feel like jelly.
McKay is 71, and most might chalk that up to the inevitable effects of old age. But McKay’s 71 is different than most. For four decades — all of them, without interruption, spent coaching first base in the majors — he has been a health nut and a medical marvel. He looks 20 years younger than he is. He is in better shape than most of the players he instructs. He is fastidious about working out and disciplined about what he puts in his body.
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The reason McKay is exhausted — not just physically, but mentally and emotionally — is because of a series of health complications that no one could have foreseen five months ago. On March 8, during a spring training game against the Giants at Scottsdale Stadium, McKay lost his footing in the dugout and fell. He hit his side and arm on the bench. “He hopped back up like nothing happened,” says catching coach Robby Hammock. McKay is Teflon. Nobody thought much of it.
Yet two days later, McKay passed out at home in front of his wife. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where he learned he had a broken rib and a third-degree laceration of the spleen. He’d been bleeding internally for two days. He required surgery, and the Diamondbacks expected him back by Opening Day. But McKay remains out.
That first surgery, to cauterize his spleen, was just the first of several that McKay has undergone since his dugout fall. The injured spleen has since been removed. There have been surgeries to repair a punctured colon and to remove scar tissue that had caused his intestines to wrap. There have been innumerable trips to the hospital to drain fluid, including one trip to remove a quart and a half of liquid from one of his lungs. A total of 142 days have passed since his dugout fall, and he guesses he’s spent just more than 30 of them in the hospital.
The ordeal has put him through an indescribable grind, more taxing physically and mentally than any baseball season ever could be. Each time the doctors fixed one issue, a new problem would send him to the emergency room. The staff at the Mayo Clinic, where all of his treatments and surgeries have been performed, now greets him like an old friend. They meet him at the door and usher him inside. His room is often already prepared.
His recidivism rate is so high, McKay has learned to beware of the notion that everything is finally behind him. Except now, he’s allowing himself to hope. Four weeks have passed since his last and most serious surgery, one that wasn’t orthoscopic but required an incision through three layers of tissue in his abdomen. He is hoping to rejoin the team before the end of the season. His hunger to coach is as great as ever.
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And, even though he “can’t imagine it being any worse” than it already has been, he considers himself incredibly lucky to be alive. He’d walk the halls sometimes during his various hospital stays, and he often saw others — many who were much younger than he is — in far worse condition.
“You’ve got to look at it as being blessed,” McKay says. “I’m still here.”
McKay coached first base the very next day after his fall.
The iron man of first-base coaches was going to be slowed by a misstep in the dugout? Please. “He’s a pillar of health, the guy we all strive to be,” says pitching coach Matt Herges, who is 20 years McKay’s junior. Former Diamondbacks pitcher Robbie Ray used to joke with McKay that the coach was the “only 85-year-old who could still beat me up.” Ray would purposefully inflate McKay’s age a little more each time he said it. A fall in the dugout is nothing.
“I never thought it was anything serious,” McKay says.
But two days after his fall, on March 10, McKay lost consciousness in front of his wife. His odyssey had begun. He spent the first two of his many nights at the Mayo Clinic recovering from orthoscopic surgery to fix his lacerated spleen. They told him his recovery time would be about four weeks. But before that timeline reached its endpoint, “I started feeling discomfort,” McKay said. He returned to the hospital.
The rest of McKay’s saga follows the same plot structure, just repeated over and over with escalating stakes. He’s been to the emergency room five times, each disrupting the quiet optimism he’d allowed himself to feel about his recovery. They drained the fluid from his lung. One time, they found three blood clots — two in his leg and one in his lung. He spent nine nights in the hospital on intravenous blood thinners.
That was the end of it, right? It appeared to be. His recovery progressed far enough that his doctors allowed him to be in the dugout — but not on the field — for a few Diamondbacks home games in May. Two months had passed since his fall, and McKay asked his doctors if he could accompany the team on its upcoming road trip to Los Angeles. They said no, that if something happened while he was there, there’d be no way to get him back to Phoenix.
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It’s just as well. Late during one game in the dugout, McKay started feeling unwell. He left the ballpark and headed to the hospital. They found an abscess and an infection in his abdomen. He needed another surgery — his second, if you’re counting at home. “That’s enough,” McKay thought to himself. And he started feeling better. He was improving, walking around and feeling good. And then …
Back to the hospital. “They know me now,” McKay says. “They’re set up waiting for me.” There was a cyst on his spleen. The organ had to come out. This time, life didn’t even afford him that brief period of optimism. The very next day, the doctors rushed him into emergency surgery. His colon was leaking, apparently punctured during his splenectomy. “So many different things,” McKay says, recounting the last few months. “You almost forget.”
Cut to a few weeks later. McKay is at home, doubled over in pain. For him, this has all become depressingly routine. He returns to the hospital, where he no longer has to wait in the emergency room for his turn to be seen. What is it this time? Why, scar tissue from the various draining tubes in his stomach — “I have a belly that looks like a dartboard,” McKay says — has caused his small intestine to wrap. One more surgery, this one a three-hour ordeal that requires an incision in his stomach. The bowel was straightened and a shield put in to separate the scar tissue from his innards.
That was four weeks ago. His recovery should take another four. “We don’t want to see you back here,” the doctors told him when he left. So, McKay’s been sure to take it easy, suppressing his natural urge to work out and put on weight. Once a chiseled 185 pounds, he now weighs 160. “I have no muscle at all,” he says. But he feels good. That optimism is starting to bubble up again.
“I’m feeling better. Feeling better,” he says. “Each day gets a little bit better.”
Sometimes after games, Diamondbacks left fielder David Peralta will enter the clubhouse and be greeted with a text message the length of a novella. It’s from McKay. He’s been watching from home or from a hospital bed, and he’s noticed a few things. Peralta is slipping on this fundamental or that one. Oh, and would he mind mentioning this to that player, and reminding this guy that he’s getting sloppy with that?
“He’s on top of everything,” says Peralta, who credits McKay’s tutelage for helping him win a Gold Glove in 2019. “I’m pretty sure he misses us the same way we miss him.”
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And goodness, do the Diamondbacks miss him. On the field, the effect is obvious. Arizona has been a sloppy team defensively — miscommunications have reigned in the outfield, leading to countless drops of catchable balls — and sometimes on the base paths. It’s not difficult to draw a straight line from that to the season-long absence of McKay.
He is considered one of the best teachers in the game. “You knew if you were playing a team he was coaching for, you had to be on top of things,” says Herges, who joined the Diamondbacks last year. The Diamondbacks have done their best to get by without him, but they have their second-lowest BsR, a base running metric used by FanGraphs, since 2014. That’s the year McKay joined the coaching staff.
“I’m definitely overmatched over at first base myself,” says Hammock, who has filled in for McKay on the field. “We need his experience, his presence, and he’s way better-looking, too. I’m getting killed in every department.”
Looks are in the eye of the beholder, but McKay’s presence and experience might be what is missed most. Hammock raves when talking about the way McKay handles younger players. He lets them know how much they mean to him, how much he believes in them and how much he expects of them. That’s why teams that employ McKay generally excel in the outfield and on the bases. “We know he holds us to a high standard,” says first baseman Christian Walker. “There’s a certain amount of accountability that comes with Mac being around.”
McKay has tried his best to make up for not being there. He watches as many games as he can, although he admits there are some days when there’s just too much going on — too much pain, or too much fatigue — to tune in. When he does, he notices things. He sends texts and makes phone calls. He offers instruction and gives pep talks. It’s hardly ideal. “You can only say so much over a text,” McKay says. “You need to look them in the eyes and see the response to what you’re saying.” But it’s what he’s got.
One such text was sent to Walker early in the season. A funny hop on a throw to first had clocked him in the eye, forcing him from the game. Walker insisted on playing the next day, earning praise from his ailing first-base coach. “He sent me a long text about what I mean to the team,” Walker says, “and that mentality of being out there for your teammates regardless of what’s going on or how bad or good you feel.”
McKay yearns to live those words himself. At the time he wrote them, he couldn’t have known how many obstacles life would put in his way. But he’s nearly cleared the course now, he hopes. He wants to be out there. He’s always said he’ll coach as long as he can sprint to first base, and he’s far from giving up on being able to do so again.
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“As soon as they give me the OK, I’m going to be in better shape for next year than I was last year,” McKay says. “I’ll do whatever I can to get it all back and more. I love being with the guys. I love being on the field.
“Hopefully, nothing gets in the way of that.”
(Photo: Mark J. Rebilas / USA TODAY)