Now running for office, Adam Greenberg. You may remember his first at-bat

Ted Kennedy Jr., a son of the senator from Massachusetts who died in 2009, had held the seat for four years and was now leaving office.

“I was confident,” Greenberg said last week as he thought back to that moment this spring when he addressed the delegates. “When I’d walk into a batter’s box, I was very prepared.” He said he felt no different as he staked out to the delegates how he would conduct his candidacy.

Greenberg, 37, chief executive of a health and nutrition company, had competition that day. Jerry Mastrangelo, a co-owner of a chain of gyms, was also seeking the Republican endorsement.

And for a while, Vincent Candelora, a Republican assemblyman in Connecticut, thought he would, too.

“But when I heard Adam’s name come up, it took me aback,” said Candelora, who ended up giving the nominating speech for Greenberg and watching him easily beat out Mastrangelo for the endorsement. “I remember thinking, wow, I never thought Adam would ever be interested in this arena. It gets tough, at times. But after I met and spoke to him, I realized it was somewhere he should be.”

And somewhere Greenberg never thought he would be during all those years that he tried to battle back from the beaning he suffered in his first major league at-bat.

A former all-state baseball player at Guilford High School and a ninth-round pick of the Chicago Cubs in 2002, Greenberg was called up to the major leagues on July 7, 2005. The Cubs were in Atlanta, playing the Braves.

“I unpacked my bags at the hotel for my first time as a professional baseball player,” Greenberg said. “I was thinking, I am here to stay.”

Two days later, still preparing for his first moment on the field, he sat at the end of the visitor’s dugout, at what was then known as Dolphins Stadium, as the Cubs prepared to play the Miami Marlins. Cubs manager Dusty Baker had resolved to get Greenberg into a game in Florida because his parents were in town.

“I don’t know what the Cubs expected of him,” Baker said, “but I liked what I saw. His head was on his shoulders as a player and as a person. He was confident but not cocky.”

Greenberg waited for his chance that night, squeezing a bat while wearing batting gloves. In the top of the ninth, with the Cubs leading, 4-2, the team’s pitching coach, Dick Pole, told Greenberg he would be hitting for pitcher Will Ohman.

Greenberg grabbed a helmet. His teammates wished him luck as he climbed the dugout steps.

The Cubs’ first hitter in the ninth, Todd Hollandsworth, grounded out to short against the left-hander Valerio de los Santos.

Then it was Greenberg’s turn. It would be lefty against lefty.

“It didn’t matter to Adam if it was against a right- or left-handed pitcher,” Baker said. “You come up facing everybody. He wanted the at-bat. Every kid remembers his first at-bat.”

Greenberg dug in for the first pitch, slightly bending his knees. It was a 92 mph fastball.

“You get three-tenths of a second,” Greenberg said. “The first tenth I’m thinking don’t bail because if it’s a curve I look stupid, and it’s strike one. The second tenth I realized the ball wasn’t breaking. By the third tenth, my only thought was to get out of the way, and the only thing I could do was to turn into the catcher.”

The pitch struck him under the helmet, the impact sounding like an explosion as he collapsed into the dirt in front of Marlins catcher Paul Lo Duca.

“It scared me to death,” Greenberg said. “My eyes rolled into the back of my head. I grabbed my head because I thought it was split open and that I would bleed out and die. I never lost consciousness. I said two words three times: Stay alive, stay alive, stay alive.”

“Paul Lo Duca looked down and said in a calming voice, ‘Stay down, you are going to be OK,'” he added. “One of the questions the trainers asked me was, ‘Where were you two days ago?’ I said, ‘I was in the minors, and I’m not going back.'”

In the end, Greenberg did go back to the minors — for eight more years. It was a struggle. He had suffered a concussion from the beaning and was then left with vertigo symptoms and vision issues. He did not play baseball the rest of that season and, a year later, with him back in the minor leagues and flailing, the Cubs made the decision to release him.

That led to a minor league odyssey that included stints with other organizations, along with a heavy dose of independent league baseball. A second chance in the major leagues continued to elude him.

In 2009, Greenberg was made aware of a campaign started by a Cubs fan, Matt Liston, to secure him another chance to play in the majors. Nothing came of it.

But several years later, in 2012, after Greenberg had played for Israel in its unsuccessful bid to qualify for the World Baseball Classic, David Samson, then the president of the Marlins, offered him a one-day contract to appear in an end-of-season game against the Mets.

Greenberg accepted, and his new teammates, aware of his saga, embraced him.

“What I remember about him was that he was a cool guy,” said New York Yankees outfielder Giancarlo Stanton, who played right field for Miami that night.

In the bottom of the sixth inning, Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen called for Greenberg, wearing No. 10, to pinch-hit and lead off the inning.

New York Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey, who won a Cy Young Award that season, threw him three knuckleballs. Greenberg took the first for a strike, then swung and missed at the next two.

He walked back to the dugout, his teammates hugging him, the crowd standing and cheering. His major league career was over, but it now included more than just a beaning.

“I wish he had faced Dickey first,” Baker said, thinking back to 2005. “It might have been a totally different story.”

Greenberg remembered feeling overjoyed that he had gotten a second chance, as brief at it was. But the feeling didn’t last long. A week later, his wife Lindsay’s identical twin, Melissa Marottoli Hogan, was admitted to the hospital with Stage 4 lung cancer. She died two months later.

And then, on the night of the funeral, Greenberg got a call from the Baltimore Orioles, inviting him to spring training. Once again, he said, he needed to find a way to balance his emotions.

He was now 32 and running out of time, but he reported to the Orioles early in 2013, still intent on proving he could play at the big-league level. But he was not offered a job. Instead, he again signed with the Bridgeport Bluefish of the independent Atlantic League, giving himself one more chance.

But for the first time, he added, “I had my doubts.”

“My wife was still in trauma,” he said. “My business was taking off. And it began to affect my performance. My average tanked. There was no inspiration to go to the park.”

One night, in a game in Maryland, Greenberg drifted back for a fly ball. It hit the tip of a finger on his throwing hand.

“The finger exploded, split in half,” Greenberg said. “But I went back into the clubhouse feeling more relieved than I’d ever been. Somebody was essentially saying to me, ‘Well, are we good now?'”

He did not play after that season. And by March 2018, his new path seemed assured. Along with running his business, he had written a book and had become a public speaker. And by then a friendship forged at a gymnasium years before was helping to open another door: politics. More specifically, a seat in the state Senate.

“In my position, I have probably talked more people out of running than into it,” said J.R. Romano, chairman of Connecticut’s Republican Party. “I lay down the specifics of what it’s going to take, how hard it will be and the personal difficulties associated with how much they will be attacked. I wanted Adam to know, as a friend, that I was not trying to talk him into something he didn’t want to do.”

Greenberg said the decision to seek the Republican endorsement for the seat was not easy.

“For two nights, I didn’t sleep,” he said. And then he made up his mind to go for it. “Here was the chance to do something on a large scale to help a lot of people,” he said. “I thought I could be that guy.”

And now he will be — if he can win the election. It will not be easy. The Democrats have controlled the seat since 2004, and Kennedy’s two victories over his Republican opponent Bruce Wilson were by enormous margins.

Greenberg does not describe himself as an acolyte of President Donald Trump, who is not particularly popular in parts of Connecticut, a consistently blue state. He said he veers from Trump’s policies in some very specific ways and cited his support for abortion rights.

“I asked the Republican caucus, J.R. Romano specifically, what would my obligations to the party be,” Greenberg said. “When they said you can make your own decisions, I said, ‘I’m in.'”

The Democrats have endorsed Christine Hunter Cohen, the owner of a bagel company in Madison, who sits on Guilford’s Board of Education. Both she and Greenberg are running unopposed in the August primaries.

Nick Balletto, Connecticut’s Democratic state chairman, acknowledged that “Adam has a great story” but maintained that Cohen’s experience in public service would be a significant factor in the November balloting.

Still, the Republicans see a Connecticut footprint that Greenberg can build on. He was born in New Haven, attended public school in Guilford and moved back here in 2013, where he and his wife are raising two sons.

“What I know is what I bring to the table,” he said. “I accomplished something that is very difficult; very few people have a chance to make it to the major leagues. I have been knocked down and gone through tremendous struggles. I can relate to those who also have.”

In a sense, Greenberg is digging in once again, 13 years after a pitch hit him in the head and changed his life. He would appear to be as determined as ever.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Now running for office, Adam Greenberg. You may remember his first at-bat

At stake was the endorsement of 40 Republican delegates to run for Connecticut’s 12th Senate District seat.

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