An MiLB team's photographer is battling cancer -- here's how the baseball community is helping
Benjamin Hill travels the nation collecting stories about what makes Minor League Baseball unique. This excerpt from the Baseball Traveler newsletter, presented by Circle K, is a mere taste of the smorgasbord of delights he offers every week. Read the full newsletter here, and subscribe to his newsletter here.
David Calvert has served as the Reno Aces team photographer since their inaugural season in 2009. He's an organizational stalwart who has seen, and shot, it all.
Calvert found himself on the other end of the lens on June 12, however, when the Aces -- Triple-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks -- celebrated Cancer Survivorship Night. Calvert threw out the first pitch at Reno's Greater Nevada Field that evening, with thousands of fans cheering him on.
"I've never thrown a first pitch. I’ve photographed a lot of them. So having everything flipped like that was very, very weird," said Calvert. "That was definitely the high point of this whole recovery."
Calvert is recovering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a diagnosis he received less than a year ago that upended his entire existence, virtually instantaneously. On July 25, the final Aces game he worked at in 2025, he was documenting the interstellar kitsch of Star Wars Night. Everything was as it always was. Several days later he was on assignment in Sacramento, photographing an A's game, when he began to feel sick and retreated to his hotel room. He was soon throwing up blood.
"It’s a scary feeling, man. Don’t ignore the symptoms,” he said. "If there's something wrong with your body, you've got to get that stuff checked out. I’m 40 and I didn't expect to have cancer. I expected to have an ulcer because I don’t eat well or something."
Calvert returned home to Reno, then he and his partner Marissa drove to the hospital.
"Within hours I've been diagnosed with leukemia, my world turned upside down. My white blood cell count was through the roof," he said, wryly adding that the disease has "interesting survivability numbers."
"There’s a good chance of making it through the first year. It gets harder after that, and right now I'm happy to say my numbers are looking great. My recovery is going well. But at the time I was thinking about death, and that was hard. Thinking about the things I wouldn't be able to do again, like photograph a baseball game, or was I going to see my dogs again?"
Calvert endured a monthslong period of hospitalization, undergoing an extensive chemotherapy regimen.
"Chemo, the idea is to bring you all the way down and then bring you back up, so they're trying to actively kill you while they’re trying to save your life," he said. "It's hard, man. The hardest thing I’ll ever do is survive."
Meanwhile, the baseball community in which he was so deeply enmeshed mobilized on his behalf. The Aces launched an online auction featuring several items donated by the Diamondbacks, while a still-active GoFundMe page with the intent to “Help David Calvert fight leukemia and stay afloat” has received donations from over 1,000 people and organizations.
"Players from the Aces made donations. The [Aces] organization, the Diamondbacks, my colleagues," he said. "It's amazing to see the support on paper like that from people that you know you've got relationships with, but you don't think of them as the ones that are there to save your life. And that's really what they're doing for me is, they've helped save my life."
Word spread, all the way to baseball's biggest stage. A Stand Up to Cancer segment during Game 2 of the World Series included a shot of on-field reporter Ken Rosenthal holding up a sign with Calvert's name on it.
"That was the World Series. I was on TV for the World Series," he said, still marveling at the improbability of it all. "I got phone calls and text messages from friends all over the place that I hadn't heard from since high school, even. Baseball is a special community."
Calvert takes pride in having never missed a Reno Aces Opening Day, and that streak remained intact in 2026. (Baseball is a game of adjustments; he photographed the game from his wheelchair.) Two months later, he was back at the ballpark for the cathartic celebration that was Cancer Survivorship Night. Calvert had trained for the moment, working with his physical therapist on throwing a baseball from his wheelchair.
"That was one of the highlights of my life. It was definitely the high point of this whole recovery," he said. "There were people chanting my name and clapping and pointing at me, and I got out there. I was with my oncologist, and I just let it rip. I threw it to [Aces pitcher] Tommy Henry, who is a guy I've photographed for a couple of years now, so I had a special connection there. … I will admit that I bounced it, but better to bounce it than to let one fly."
One of Calvert's next goals is simply to go to an Aces game on a Tuesday, reveling in a low-key atmosphere, because "the thing that's special about baseball is they play every day." The daily rhythms of his recovery are integrated into the daily rhythms of baseball, with the game and the people within it providing escape and support in equal measure.
"You've got to have a positive attitude through this process and if you don’t it gets real dark, real fast," he said. "If there's anyone else who's going through this, who has just recently received a diagnosis, keep your head up as best you can. There’s hope."