A little over a year after he tried to end his life, Drew Robinson will resume his professional baseball career as a member of the Sacramento River Cats, the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate.
The River Cats finalized their roster on Tuesday, and Robinson shared a message on Twitter on Wednesday morning.
“I’m officially a one-eyed professional baseball player,” Robinson wrote. “I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve made the Giants Triple-A roster for the Sacramento Rivercats. And the fact that we open our season in my hometown of Las Vegas just really can’t get anymore full circle. For real though, my first games back, after everything that’s happened, are at home in front of all the people that got me through my incident and this last year as a whole? It feels like I’m living out a movie.
“I really can’t believe it and have a hard time putting it into words how much this means to me, my family, my circle of people, all the doctors that put me back together, and the doctors that work with me on a weekly basis. I kind of started baseball again hesitantly and worked hard just to see what could happen. Plenty of times I went down the road of not thinking it was possible and that I was wasting my time. But here I am, getting ready to play another professional season, with an astronomical amount of meaning attached to it. This is so much bigger than me. I’m excited, nervous, empowered and more importantly, ready for a magical experience."
“I'm super proud of the perseverance and the drive and the determination,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. “He's shared some videos with me and I've seen some videos on my own. There’s some really loud, hard contact, and he continues to be a guy who can move around the diamond, play the infield and the outfield at a high level. I’m really excited for him, happy for him and always here to support Drew.”
Robinson severely damaged his right eye (he now uses a prosthetic one) when he shot himself in April 2020. He shared his story with ESPN’s Jeff Passan this past February with the hope of helping others who are going through similar struggles with their mental health.
"I'm supposed to help people get through battles that don't seem winnable,” Robinson told Passan. “[Surviving the suicide attempt] was completely supposed to happen. There's no other answer. It doesn't make any sense. It was supposed to happen.”
Robinson, who has played 100 MLB games and last appeared in the Majors with the Cardinals in 2019, will now get a chance to write the next chapter of his remarkable comeback story.