Liam Hendriks and Carlos Carrasco may have been sitting in opposing dugouts, but on Wednesday, they did their best work as part of a singular club of professional baseball players who have survived cancer.
Hendriks, the White Sox reliever who in April was declared cancer free from stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, teamed up with Cookie’s Kids program — Carrasco’s charity — to host pediatric cancer patients from Cohen’s Children’s Hospital.
Hendriks and Carrasco, who beat chronic myelogenous leukemia in 2019, took a group of children around Citi Field, including the dugout and bullpen areas, and shared cancer stories.
“Cancer changes you,” Hendriks said in his ESPYs speech last week, which has since gone viral. “There’s no doubt about it. Going through this, it changed me for the better. There’s a lot of times where I’m sitting out here thinking about what I could have done differently in my life leading up to this moment. Everything in life is short. Life, it’s just trivial. Things are just trivial when you go through something like this.”
McNeil rebounding?
After Jeff McNeil gathered two hits against the White Sox Tuesday despite feeling clear discomfort in his hip, Buck Showalter said he sees some indication that the reigning National League batting champ might be ready to come out of the marathon slump that’s had McNeil’s average drop to .250, down from .288 on June 1.
He’s batting .196 in that stretch.
“I’d like to say (that he’s coming out of it) and I feel it a little bit, but I’ll jynx it if I say it, so I didn’t say it,” Showalter said. “He’s close. Jeff, he’s a hard grader. You don’t have to wonder about what he’s thinking or feeling.”
The SNY broadcast repeatedly showed McNeil wincing or flexing his hip Tuesday, but Showalter said that though McNeil sporadically gets recurring pain in the area, he was fine to play Wednesday. McNeil played right in lieu of Starling Marte, who…
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