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Baseball fans around these parts happily remember Rich Dauer as a sharp-fielding infielder for ten great Oriole seasons (1976-1985). Since then, we've enjoyed seeing him, still on the field as a first base coach for several teams.  He's two years younger than I, and he still gets to put on a baseball uniform every summer day and do cool stuff like spitting, and hollering at other grown men, for a living. 

He's in the first-base coaching box for the Houston Astros these days, and you will recall that they recently won the World Series. But the night before their victory parade, Dauer slipped on a wet floor and hit his head. He didn't have a headache or any apparent signs of any problems, so off he went to the parade.

And once there, he felt awful. As the team assembled at Houston's City Hall following the march through the city, Rich was staggering, and told assistant hitting coach Alonzo Powell, "I don’t really feel too good." Soon after that, he became unresponsive. The manager, A.J. Hinch, alerted the team doctor, who put in a call for an ambulance.

But with the insane traffic congestion around the celebration, it took about a half an hour for the medic unit to arrive.


He was taken to  Houston Methodist Hospital, where another team doctor, James Muntz, M.D. went to work on Dauer, who was by then in respiratory arrest, with a CT scan revealed bleeding on his brain. 

“He was unresponsive, just a disaster,” Muntz said, pointing out that Dauer's symptoms indicated severe brain damage. . 

Another doctor, a surgeon named Dr. David Cech, arrived to find Dauer "in a coma, almost brain-dead."  

The diagnosis was acute subdural hematoma, with a 3% chance of survival.  And even when Dauer made it out of surgery, doctors still worried about brain damage. 

But miracles happen every day, and Rich Dauer's breathing tube was removed three days later, and he went home in November pronounced "perfectly fine."

"The magnitude of what he had wrong was intimidating, astonishing," Dr. David Lintner, the Astros' lead physician, said. "The pace of his recovery was just as astonishing."

Dauer, who was nicknamed "Wacko" by pitcher Jim Palmer for his comical ways as a player, was planning to retire anyway, and this will allow him to join the no-work-no-more crowd with a warning to all. In a subdural hematoma, bleeding fills the brain area very rapidly, compressing brain tissue, so let's let this serve as a reminder to all to get the noggin checked out in case of such a bump. He had no way of knowing the blood was collecting up there, but we can learn from his experience.

Dr. Muntz is glad that Dauer lived and enjoyed a text from him in early December:  "Hey Dr. Muntz, we’re doing well. My workouts are up to 50 minutes on elliptical and treadmill. I lifted light weights today and just left Taco Bell with a seven-layer burrito! Life is good!" 

And the doc said, "If the subdural didn’t kill you, the burrito will."