Former Orioles star Trey Mancini is hoping to make a comeback

It had been a month or more since Sara Perlman Mancini saw Trey Mancini in front of the mirror, doing what baseball obsessives often do. Late in the summer – the first summer without baseball in Mancini’s life in as long as he can remember – he practiced his swing.

He wasn’t holding a bat; there was no pitch. But as Perlman Mancini watched her husband simulate the swing that made him a major leaguer — first and longest with the Orioles — she felt the gears turning in Mancini’s mind.

For much of that summer, Mancini was at peace away from baseball. He traveled with his wife. They trained together, played tennis and pickleball, and he watched baseball on television as a fan.

He doesn’t regret that. Looking back on his year away from the majors, he acknowledges that it may have been the best thing for him; after everything he’s been through, he had time to come to terms with the trauma from a stage 3 diagnosis of colon cancer as a 27-year-old.

“Without this year off,” Perlman Mancini said, “I don’t think he could have gotten to this end where he is today.”

As the fifth anniversary of Mancini’s cancer diagnosis approaches in March, the first baseman feels ready – excited – to get back to baseball. He stood in front of the mirror and waved. Then, after a few months of absence, he picked up his bat again and started pitching. The feeling was “incredible,” Mancini said, and Perlman Mancini noticed how much fun he had being there again.

A comeback, Mancini realizes, is no easy task.

But the fire that flickered after his life-changing and life-threatening cancer diagnosis has been rekindled. He feels more complete – there is so much more than baseball – because the year away allowed him to process what was “a lot to process.” Now he hopes a full offseason of work will give him another chance to play the game he loves.

“To be honest, for a few months I thought it was done. And I really enjoyed this year. I enjoyed life. But at the same time I really think I still have something to offer the game,” said Mancini. “I’m going to prepare and act like I’m going to spring training, and I’m hoping and trying and praying that the opportunity presents itself.”

So much changed when he sat down across from Brian Ebel, Baltimore’s head athletic trainer, in March 2020. The look on Ebel’s face conveyed the seriousness of the situation. Mancini’s blood test was abnormal and showed possible internal bleeding, and Ebel – who leaves the Orioles after 40 years – urged Mancini to undergo tests that are rarely performed on a 27-year-old.

The subsequent endoscopy and colonoscopy confirmed that Mancini had an aggressive cancer. Mancini credits Ebel, along with his doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital, with saving his life. But even without a recurrence of cancer, there are long-lasting consequences of the disease.

Mancini admits he has spent most of the past four years putting a Band-Aid on his health problems. He returned to baseball in 2021 without fully processing everything he had endured.

Baseball was a perfect distraction. But when Mancini fell into the usual slumps that happen to any player, he found it harder to escape. There was something else in mind: the scans and tests needed to make sure the cancer has not returned and would act as a cloud as they approached.

For the first time, Mancini said, he had something bigger than baseball to worry about: his life.

For so long, maintaining his career was his driving force, following in the footsteps of his family. And when his world was turned upside down by the diagnosis, his post-cancer playing career took on a different mentality. He cared – that will never leave him – but “at the same time I also had that dark cloud, the health problems, the kind of actual life or death situation still hovering over me.”

“There was a bigger threat than losing my job in baseball, which was my biggest fear before my cancer diagnosis,” Mancini continued. “I think it was just enough of a distraction that it just made it harder to get through the slumps, or correct physical mistakes, or mistakes in the mental approach. It just wasn’t that easy.”

Perlman Mancini added: “Your biggest hurdle was, ‘Oh shit, I had a bad run.’ And then, with cancer, your life just changes. What you find important changes.”

There were periods when Mancini performed as well as he did before his diagnosis. In 2021, upon his return to the Orioles, he hit .255 with 21 home runs in 147 games. The next year he was traded to the Astros at the deadline, and while hitting .176 in Houston, he won a World Series there.

But those last year and a half of his professional career still sting. He signed with the Chicago Cubs for $14 million over two years, but after hitting .234 in 79 games, Mancini was released midway through his first season there.

He looks fondly on his entire baseball career, and for good reason. He competed in the Home Run Derby, earned a World Series ring and overcame the odds to even bounce back from cancer.

But how did it end? That stuck in him, and only now, after some time away from the sport, does Mancini better understand why and how his time in Chicago went wrong, or why he didn’t stay with the Miami Marlins after spring training this year. .

“I think it’s easy to think that it’s okay to take home because your performance has dropped, especially after what I’ve been through, and still look back and be happy with what you’ve accomplished – and that’s me too,” Mancini said. “But at the same time, I guess I don’t really love how things turned out in my career, and I really think if I’m in the right situation, I can still be an impact bat. And I know saying that doesn’t mean anything and I have to go out and prove it, but I’m fully ready to do that. I just got that hunger back, out of nowhere, to be honest.

So in August, Perlman watched Mancini in the mirror as Mancini practiced his swing again without a bat in hand. His lower half, his arms, his eyes – they all followed an imaginary ball and hit it with an imaginary piece of wood.

He knows it will be difficult to get signed; He will be 33 in March and has not been in the eyes of scouts for a year.

But Mancini is also almost five years post-cancer. He is alive and happy. Why don’t you give it a try? Why don’t you pick up a bat again and swing it, even if nothing comes out but a smile?

“I really think he’s loving life and feeling really good about where he is from a health standpoint because he has a year to work on your body and the mental side,” Perlman Mancini said. “And now, with baseball, I almost think it’s the perfect storm of, ‘Okay, I love my life the way it is, but I still feel like I have a lot to give.’”