The Main Event
- July 19, 1993 – John Kruk is struck in the groin by an errant Mitch Williams pickoff throw in Los Angeles, shattering his cup. A lingering issue from the injury led doctors to find a separate issue which was determined to be testicular cancer.
John Kruk was one of baseball’s most beloved characters in the early 1990s — a mulleted, shaggy, self-deprecating first baseman who once told a woman who criticized his physique, “I ain’t an athlete, lady. I’m a baseball player.” But the strangest chapter of his career didn’t happen at the plate. It happened when a wild pickoff throw from his own teammate hit him in the groin, broke his protective cup, and ultimately led doctors to discover testicular cancer.
The Freak Injury in Los Angeles
On July 19, 1993, the Philadelphia Phillies were in Los Angeles to play the Dodgers. Kruk was on first base when reliever Mitch Williams — Kruk’s teammate, better known by his nickname “Wild Thing” — fired an errant pickoff throw toward first base. The ball struck Kruk squarely in the groin with enough force to break his protective cup.
It was the kind of moment that gets a laugh in the clubhouse and then gets forgotten. Kruk played through the discomfort and kept producing at the plate, hitting .316 with 14 home runs, 85 RBI and 100 runs scored that season, and starting for the National League in the All-Star Game. The Phillies went on to win the pennant and play the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series.
What nobody knew at the time was that the impact had left Kruk with a hematoma — a pocket of clotted blood — on his scrotal sac. By his own admission, Kruk didn’t mention it to team doctors for more than a month.
The injury lingered quietly through the rest of the 1993 season and into the following spring. Then, in late February 1994, as the Phillies prepared for spring training, the injury flared up again. This time Kruk finally got it checked out.
What doctors found wasn’t just an old hematoma. On March 7, 1994, they discovered a cancerous tumor — a seminoma — in Kruk’s right testicle. Seminomas are notoriously difficult to catch early because they usually cause no pain and go unnoticed until they’ve grown significant enough to feel or until something like an injury prompts an exam.
That’s exactly what happened here. Phillies team physician Dr. Phillip Marone was blunt about the connection: the pickoff throw itself hadn’t caused the cancer, but the resulting hematoma is what got Kruk in front of a doctor in the first place. As Marone put it at the time, discussing the operation to remove the testicle, “It was no big deal. It’s like taking an appendix out — almost.”
“I’m a Cancer Patient, Not a Ballplayer”
Kruk had surgery, an hourlong operation to remove the affected testicle, on March 8, 1994, just a day after the diagnosis. He addressed the media shortly after, and the tone was serious.
“I want to apologize to my teammates and the Phillies organization. I waited too long to get checked,” Kruk said at a news conference at Veterans Stadium, taking responsibility for the delay in getting the injury examined.
He also made clear where his head was at during those first weeks. “Right now, I’m a cancer patient, not a ballplayer,” he told reporters. “I’m not even thinking about baseball.”
Years later, in an interview for NBC Sports’ HeadStrong initiative, Kruk gave a more candid look at that initial gut-punch moment of hearing the word “cancer.”
“They said, well you have cancer, and I’m like holy crap,” Kruk recalled. “It was scary. I didn’t know. All I kept telling myself is, I gotta play. I want to play. I heard numbers like you have a 50-50 chance. And think about hitting — if you’re 50-50, you’re a Hall of Famer. So I thought, 50-50, you’ve got a shot.”
Surgery, Radiation, and a 99 Percent Cure Rate
Pathology on the removed testicle confirmed the seminoma diagnosis — and the good news that came with it. Seminoma is considered one of the most treatable forms of cancer, and doctors gave Kruk a 99 percent cure rate.
Still, treatment wasn’t optional. Kruk began radiation therapy on March 21, 1994, under Dr. Carl Mansfield, chairman of radiation oncology at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. The regimen called for 15 to 20 treatments, five days a week, over roughly three to four weeks. Doctors wouldn’t commit to a firm return date, saying his recovery would depend on how his body handled the sessions.
Kruk missed Opening Day and the Phillies’ first several games of the 1994 season while his teammates played on without him. He completed a brief rehab stint with the team’s Double-A affiliate in Reading, going 3-for-9 in three games, and afterward joked about missing the clubhouse camaraderie: “The guys in Reading were great, but they aren’t Dykstra, Daulton, or Hollins. I just missed the male bonding.”
The Comeback: Home Opener, 1994
Kruk wasn’t officially penciled into the lineup for the Phillies’ home opener on April 11, 1994 — so he penciled himself in. He grabbed his own nameplate and slid it into the third spot in the batting order on the lineup board, and nobody took it back out.
A sellout crowd of 58,627 at Veterans Stadium gave him a rousing ovation during the pregame ring ceremony for the 1993 NL champions. Kruk later admitted he wasn’t quite sure how to handle the moment. “I didn’t know whether to tip my hat or stand there and be stupid,” he said. “So I just decided on standing there and being stupid.”
He delivered immediately, doubling in his first at-bat to tie the game, then adding two more hits in a 3-for-5 day, even though the Phillies ultimately lost to the Colorado Rockies, 8-7. Teammate Darren Daulton summed up what his return meant to the club: “He’s a great first baseman, a great hitter, and he is a very big part of our team. We need him in there.” Opposing catcher Joe Girardi was equally impressed, telling reporters, “Kruk’s not only a great player. He’s an important character for this game… He doesn’t look like a player. He looks like a non-athlete. But he’s unbelievable.”
Kruk went on to hit .302 in an injury-shortened 1994 season and played one more year, splitting time in 1995 with the Chicago White Sox before retiring that July.
“The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”
Looking back, Kruk never lost his sense of humor about how it all started. Mitch Williams, the very teammate whose wild throw set the whole chain of events in motion, had been traded away by the time of Kruk’s comeback — but Kruk still called him a hero.
In his autobiography, released later that year, Kruk put it about as bluntly as only he could: “I never thought I’d say it, but now I couldn’t be happier that Mitch made that throw. What can you say when the best thing that ever happened to you is getting hit in the nuts?”
It’s a line that captures the strange, almost unbelievable arc of the whole story — a wild pickoff throw, a broken cup, a cancer diagnosis nobody saw coming, and a full recovery that let one of baseball’s most unlikely stars keep playing the game he loved.
Philadelphia Baseball Events for July 19
- July 19, 1943 – Selected utility player Dee Moore off waivers from Brooklyn. Moore played in the majors with the Phillies in 1943 and in 1946 and appeared as a catcher, first baseman, third baseman, and left fielder.
- July 19, 1960 – Juan Marichal, in his major-league debut, holds the Phillies to one hit in a 2-0 Giants win; Clay Dalrymple‘s pinch single is the only hit.
- July 19, 1963 – Roy Sievers hits his 300th home run, a ninth inning two-run shot that hands Roger Craig his 14th straight loss and beats the Mets 2-1.
- July 19, 1932 – Jimmie Foxx homers as the Athletics rout the Browns 16-6 at Shibe Park in the nightcap of a doubleheader sweep, during his 58-homer season.
- July 19, 1977 – Greg Luzinski homers in the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium as the NL wins 7-5; Mike Schmidt appears in the game only as a pinch runner.
Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for July 19
- Rube Marshall (born 1890) – A right-hander who played for the Phillies from 1912-1914. In 43 games – 19 starts – Marshall was 6-9 with a 4.24 ERA.
- Joe Boley (born 1896) – The starting shortstop for Connie Mack‘s Philadelphia Athletics dynasty that won the World Series in 1929 and 1930 and the pennant in 1931.
- Luis Avilan (born 1989) –
- Jonathan Pettibone (born 1990) – Drafted by the Phillies in the third round of the 2008 Draft, Pettibone made 18 starts for the Phillies in 2013 and two more in 2014 with a combined 5-5, 4.45 mark.
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