Eisenreich Counts Blessings, Endures Through the Years

By BILL PLASCHKE

June 14, 1998 12 AM PT

He doesn’t want it or need it, but he’s going to get it.

An apology, to Jim Eisenreich, on behalf of decent Dodger fans everywhere.

For those fools who recently heckled him from the stands.

The Dodger Stadium stands.

Seems they found something funny in their new outfielder’s tics.

“Hey, no big deal, it happens in every park,” Eisenreich said, smiling, sort of. “Yeah, even my home park.”

To those who jeered, or are thinking about jeering, there is something you should know.

Your new target will hear, but he will not listen. He will hurt, but you will not see.

It may not make sense to your tiny mind, but beneath the shakes and tremors is rooted the most unwavering soul in sports.

His life has been chronicled in dozens of stories for more than a dozen years. Yet he always has time for one more.

His message has reached thousands nationwide. Yet he wonders about the ones he might have missed.

“I’ve had a lot of blessings,” said Eisenreich, 39. “I feel obligated to use them to help others.”

Blessings? Did he say blessings?

When one spends his life battling involuntary movements and noises while not having his condition diagnosed as Tourette syndrome until age 23, the first word that comes to mind is not blessing.

When one is heckled as a child for being weird, then ridiculed as a young adult for what many thought was agoraphobia, you wouldn’t think his vocabulary would include blessing.

Then Eisenreich smiled again, sitting on the Dodger bench before a game in his 13th major league season, waving his hands at the deep green field and into the endless sky, and it hit you.

Blessings, as the strong and wise always remind us, are relative.

A few catcalls from a few ignorant Dodger fans, how can they bother someone who would once watch the kids on opposing youth league teams rattle their dugout fence and mock his shaking.

“Sure it would hurt,” Eisenreich said. “But then I would get my revenge on the field.”

How can it bother someone to constantly talk about Tourette when once, before the diagnosis, frightened and uncertain, he ran off a major league field tearing at his uniform and screaming, “I can’t breathe!”

“Do you realize how long I’ve been in the major leagues?” Eisenreich said. “How can I complain when I’ve lived out a dream?”

But not the dream you would think.

“It was always my goal to just be normal,” he said.

There were times he thought it would be easier to hit .400.

Tourette is a genetic disorder that can cause rapid physical and verbal actions, from jerking to kicking, to throat clearing, spitting or other sounds.

Half of all known Tourette sufferers--there are about 200,000 diagnosed cases in the United States--also are afflicted with obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders.

There is no cure, but drugs are available to help control it.

Eisenreich relies on two pills each night and constant prayer.

But we know what you’re still wondering.

Can you look at him and tell he has it? No.

He has no pronounced or constant twitch, nor does anything come out of his mouth other than polite conversation. Despite what hecklers say, when he’s playing the outfield or first base, you could put him in your binoculars for nine innings and never notice a thing.

Can teammates, close friends and family tell he has it? Yes.

Gary Sheffield remembers sitting next to him on the bench when they were teammates with the Florida Marlins.

“All of a sudden he’s humming and twitching and I’m wondering, what is this?” Sheffield recalled.

He also remembers meeting with Eisenreich in the outfield during a break in a playoff game, right after Eisenreich made a diving catch.

“He was really breathing hard, like hyperventilating, and I got kind of worried,” Sheffield said.

Then Sheffield did his research, and understood, and worried no more.

The humming is not a tic, but a device intended to suppress the tics. When Eisenreich’s tics occur, it is only in the dead time before or after a play, never during one.

The disorder does not affect his ability to throw out a runner from the corner, or stand dead still and hit a ball dead perfect.

“It is something I can’t even imagine dealing with,” Sheffield said. “But he deals with it.”

After only a short time with the Dodgers, it is unclear whether Eisenreich’s new teammates understand. But it is clear they don’t care.

“Hey, everybody’s got something,” fellow reserve outfielder Thomas Howard said. “The way we look at it is, you come in here and do your job and no big deal.”

Doing his job, occasionally starting in left field or at first base, finding a big hit, stealing a big base, helping the Dodgers to a 15-11 record since coming over in the Mike Piazza trade . . . that’s the easy part.

“My tough days are not on the field,” Eisenreich said. “My tough days are, how do I feel?”

When he sleeps poorly, the tough days are the next ones.

As a child, he was so uncomfortable with his body, he would begin each night on the floor. Today, those drugs help his rest, but he still struggles with the late-night flights and jet lag.

“I’ll wake up and just feel uneasy . . . a little bit off . . . like I ate something wrong,” he said.

Sometimes his obsessive-compulsive disorder will hit, causing him to return home halfway to his destination because he has to make sure he closed the garage door. Or, before he goes to bed, he repeatedly locks all the doors and windows.

Even on good days--which he says occur 95% of the time--he still always puts on his left shoe first.

“I could put on the right shoe first, it wouldn’t kill me, but it just feels better doing it the other way,” he said.

The routine is the same but, slowly, his empowerment over the disorder has given his life new focus.

For years, he was known as the small-town Minnesota kid who, during his rookie season with the Twins in 1982, began suffering Tourette symptoms on the field.

For three consecutive nights, he ran off gasping for air. Then the team traveled to Boston, where Fenway Park fans serenaded him with “Shake, shake, shake.”

Shortly afterward, he was found to have Tourette, which had apparently affected him most of his life. But growing up in St. Cloud, Minn., his doctors had diagnosed it as a form of hyperactivity, and everyone had simply accepted it.

“I just thought they were my habits,” Eisenreich said. “I had no idea there was a name for it.” A name, but no control. Soon, he quit the pro game altogether. For three years, he lived in his parents’ basement, played for a local amateur team, and tried to figure out how to deal with his life.

In 1987, five years after his aborted rookie season, he finally had the situation and his life under control. He joined the Kansas City Royals organization, and, two years later, made the big leagues for good.

Today, two World Series homers and one world championship ring later, he has grown strong enough to ignore the heckling fans who don’t count, and embrace the little ones who do.

The latter group are children with Tourette syndrome, for whom he and wife Leann have started a foundation.

Eisenreich will be appearing at places in the Southland as soon as he is settled, talking to the stricken kids, loving their response.

“You do that?” they say. “Hey, I do that too.”

“And look at me now,” he says.

Yeah, sure, look, stare, as long as you like. He won’t mind. He won’t budge.