Daily News-Record

lan Lindsey won't say he won.

To Lindsey, the lone senior on the James Madison baseball team, victories are measured after nine innings. They are produced by hits and errors and tabulated in runs.

Still, in a down year for the Dukes, Lindsey scored the season's biggest win, simply by stepping back on the field.

"I just wanted to write my own ending to my baseball career," Lindsey said after practice Thursday, three months removed from heart surgery.

On Feb. 19, the 23-year-old left fielder went to Rockingham Memorial Hospital, complaining of flu-like symptoms.

"They told me they were going to get me a room," Lindsey said, "and that's the last thing I remembered. I passed out in the waiting room."

The next thing he remembers is being in another hospital, having already undergone surgery.

Four tubes pumped blood and fluids from his chest, and a 5-inch-long incision ran down the middle of his rib cage.

Lindsey had been taken by ambulance to U.Va. Medical Center in Charlottesville, where he had two operations to battle life-threatening endocarditis - clogged heart valves that resulted from a staph infection that invaded his arteries.

He underwent both a valve replacement and an aortic rout replacement, as well as having a patch placed over a hole in his heart.

The 6-foot-2 Lindsey, one of the fittest players on the team, spent the next three weeks in the hospital, being "poked and prodded every day," as he recalled.

"When he went in, we were just worried about his life," JMU coach Spanky McFarland said. "After that, we were just worried about him having a normal life. Him playing? I would've given him a 1 percent chance."

In Lindsey's mind, there was a 100 percent chance he'd return to the diamond.

The Mechanicsville native had been a star at Lee-Davis High School, even getting drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 1999. After high school, Lindsey went to Clemson, where he redshirted before transferring to Madison.

In his previous three seasons for the Dukes, Lindsey hit a combined .294 with 13 home runs and 74 RBIs. He had started 98 of his 145 games.

"It was never really out of the question for me," Lindsey said with the type of nonchalance reserved for ordering fast food. "I don't think I really did anything different than anyone else. It was a goal of mine from the beginning to get back on the baseball field. There wasn't a day that I didn't think about coming back out here."

So while Lindsey's family, coaches and teammates prayed for his health, he prayed to play again.

The doctors, McFarland said, didn't think his prayers would be answered. But it kept the kid positive, so why tell him?

"I think they were encouraging him just to help his rehab," McFarland said. "In conversations with them, I don't think they expected him to play, either."

In his absence, teammates honored their captain every game by hitting a ball out to left field - Lindsey's position - before game warm-ups. No one fielded that ball. It sat in the grass until warm-ups were over.

"Words can't even explain it," junior right fielder Mike Butia said. "It was hard there."

On May 13, the doctors cleared Lindsey to play. Before the team's game against William & Mary, he jogged into left field and fielded the first warm-up ball of the day.

To him, it meant his medical nightmare was over.

"That was kind of the end of it," Lindsey said.

The next night, he was in the starting lineup. He wasn't as muscular as before. Or as strong. Or as fast.

Still, he was there, standing in the batter's box, knocking the dirt from his cleats.

"It was really neat seeing him up there, hearing his name get announced," McFarland. "When he came up, he got a standing ovation from both sides."

William & Mary coach Jim Farr said Lindsey's return to the diamond went beyond competition.

"It was great to see him back on the field," Farr said. "And he played well."

Lindsey smoked a line drive to second in his first at-bat back, but it was caught. He went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts in a 9-0 loss.

The next day, he went 1-for-4 in an 8-3 loss that mathematically eliminated the Dukes from making the Colonial Athletic Association tournament.

Wednesday, Lindsey drove in two runs in a 6-5 loss at Richmond.

Today, the Dukes (27-24) begin their final series of the season, a three-game showdown with first-place George Mason.

Sunday will be Lindsey's final game for JMU. A CAA scholar-athlete who graduated this month with a degree in finance, he plans to spend the summer as a blackjack dealer in Buffalo, N.Y. His future plans are uncertain. Not so his immediate plans.

"I'd love to take two out of three from George Mason, the best team in the league," Lindsey said. "And maybe go out with a hit in my last at-bat."

Regardless, he's already written a perfect ending to his season: He's playing.
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Record Number: 109E3F3318F1F0E0