Joe Kennedy Was Still a Major League Pitcher. Fifty-Five Days Later, He Was Gone.

Joe Kennedy threw the final pitch of his Major League career on September 29, 2007.

Nobody knew it was the final pitch.

There was no standing ovation. No announcement. No slow walk from the mound while teammates waited at the dugout rail.

Kennedy was 28 years old.

He was a left-handed reliever for the Toronto Blue Jays, pitching the ninth inning against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at Rogers Centre. He walked Brendan Harris, struck out Carlos Peña and retired Delmon Young on a fly ball.

Then manager John Gibbons came out and replaced him.

That was it.

Two-thirds of an inning. No hits. No runs. One strikeout.

Toronto won 5-3.

The next day, the season ended.

Kennedy became a free agent and prepared for whatever came next.

Fifty-five days later, he was dead.

There Was Supposed to Be a Next Team

It is easy, looking backward, to turn Kennedy's final appearance into something it wasn't.

There was nothing ceremonial about it.

Kennedy wasn't finishing a farewell season. He hadn't announced his retirement. His body hadn't forced him out of baseball.

He was simply a 28-year-old pitcher whose career had become uncertain.

That happens every winter.

Kennedy had pitched for three organizations in 2007. He began the year with the Oakland Athletics, was claimed by the Arizona Diamondbacks in August and then signed with Toronto before the end of the month.

It wasn't the trajectory he would have chosen.

But he was still getting Major League hitters out.

On September 21, eight days before his final appearance, Kennedy pitched 1 1/3 scoreless innings at Yankee Stadium and earned the victory in a 14-inning game.

A week later, he faced the Devil Rays.

That opponent gave the afternoon an accidental symmetry.

Tampa Bay was where Kennedy's Major League career had begun.

Six years earlier, on June 6, 2001, the 22-year-old Kennedy made his debut for the Devil Rays.

The opponent that night?

Toronto.

He pitched five innings and won.

Kennedy's Major League career began with Tampa Bay against Toronto.

It ended with Toronto against Tampa Bay.

There was no reason anyone should have noticed.

There was supposed to be more baseball.

He Had Already Beaten Coors Field

Kennedy was never a superstar.

He wasn't an All-Star. He never received a Cy Young vote. His Baseball-Reference page eventually settled on numbers that look like those of hundreds of pitchers who passed through the majors without becoming household names.

Seven seasons.

222 games.

139 starts.

43 wins.

61 losses.

A 4.79 ERA.

558 strikeouts.

But there is one season that deserves more attention than those career numbers suggest.

In 2004, Joe Kennedy figured out how to pitch in Colorado.

That was not a small accomplishment.

Coors Field had spent its first decade making competent pitchers look helpless. The altitude reduced pitch movement and turned routine fly balls into extra-base hits. Pitchers came to Denver knowing their statistics might never look the same again.

Kennedy arrived after three seasons with Tampa Bay and produced the best year of his career.

He went 9-7 with a 3.66 ERA in 27 starts.

At the time, no qualified pitcher in Colorado Rockies history had ever finished a season with an ERA below 4.00.

Kennedy did.

Even more remarkably, he was better at Coors Field than he was on the road.

In 14 home starts, Kennedy went 6-1 with a 3.59 ERA.

He wasn't overpowering hitters. He wasn't throwing 100 mph.

He was pitching.

Kennedy worked with a fastball, slider, curveball and changeup, and he was especially difficult on left-handed hitters. They batted just .183 against him in 2004.

It was the kind of season that changes how an organization looks at a pitcher.

A year earlier, Kennedy had gone 3-12 with a 6.13 ERA for Tampa Bay.

Now he had done something no Rockies pitcher had done before.

Baseball careers rarely move in straight lines.

Kennedy's certainly didn't.

Starter, Reliever, Whatever Kept Him in the Majors

The 2004 season never became Kennedy's permanent level.

His ERA jumped above 7.00 with Colorado in 2005. In July, the Rockies traded him with Jay Witasick to Oakland for Eric Byrnes and Omar Quintanilla.

Oakland changed his role.

By 2006, Kennedy was primarily a reliever.

It worked.

He made 39 appearances for the Athletics and finished 4-1 with a 2.31 ERA.

For a pitcher whose career had been built almost entirely as a starter, the bullpen offered another path.

Then came 2007.

Kennedy returned to Oakland's rotation but struggled. The A's eventually moved him back to relief, then designated him for assignment in August.

Arizona claimed him.

Three appearances later, the Diamondbacks released him.

Toronto signed him on August 29.

Three organizations in one season can look like decline.

For a professional baseball player, it can also mean something simpler.

Keep finding work.

Kennedy did.

Nine times in September, the Blue Jays called his name from the bullpen.

Nine times, he walked onto a Major League mound.

He wasn't pitching like a man whose career was over.

He was pitching like a man trying to make sure it continued.

The Wedding

After the season, Kennedy went to Florida.

He was there for a wedding.

A friend had asked him to be the best man.

Kennedy and his family were staying at his in-laws' home near Tampa. He went to bed early on Thanksgiving night.

At approximately 1:15 the next morning, November 23, he woke up.

Then he collapsed.

Emergency personnel took him to a hospital in Brandon, Florida.

He could not be revived.

Joe Kennedy was pronounced dead at 28.

His wife, Jami, was pregnant with their second child.

The baseball world initially didn't know why a professional athlete had suddenly died.

Neither did the people closest to him.

Months later, an autopsy provided an answer.

Kennedy had hypertensive heart disease and myxoid valvular disease, a degeneration affecting the mitral valve.

Both conditions can increase the risk of cardiac arrest.

The explanation created another question.

How could nobody have known?

The Tests Had Been Done

Professional athletes are examined constantly.

That is part of what made Kennedy's death so unsettling.

He wasn't someone who had gone years without medical care.

According to Oakland team physician Dr. Allan Pont, Kennedy had a family history of heart disease, so the Athletics had already performed extensive cardiovascular testing.

He had undergone an electrocardiogram.

He had undergone an echocardiogram.

He had blood tests designed to look for premature heart disease.

Nothing had indicated that a 28-year-old Major League pitcher was in immediate danger.

Pont later described Kennedy's cardiovascular evaluation as normal.

That doesn't mean the disease wasn't there.

The autopsy showed that it was.

It means medicine had not found it in time.

There is something especially difficult about that distinction.

Kennedy spent his professional life in an environment obsessed with measurement.

Velocity.

Heart rate.

Weight.

Strength.

Innings.

Pitch counts.

Every physical weakness that might cost a team a game could become a data point.

Yet something far more important remained hidden.

A Career Without an Ending

Baseball gives most players some warning.

The fastball loses a little life.

The phone stops ringing.

A player gets released in March instead of September.

A season in Triple-A becomes two.

Eventually, even if nobody announces it, the game begins to tell a player that it is finished with him.

Kennedy never received that message.

At 28, he was young enough that another contract was entirely plausible.

He had already reinvented himself once as a reliever.

Left-handed pitching has always had value.

And Kennedy had demonstrated that he could survive the instability of a baseball career.

Tampa Bay.

Colorado.

Oakland.

Arizona.

Toronto.

Five organizations.

Starter.

Reliever.

Coors Field success story.

Waiver claim.

Free-agent signing.

He kept finding another mound.

That is why September 29, 2007 feels different when viewed from the other side of what happened.

Not because Kennedy knew it was his last game.

Because he didn't.

Nobody did.

The Glove

There is another part of Kennedy's story that never appears in his pitching statistics.

Frank Thomas had been Kennedy's teammate in Oakland.

When Kennedy moved to Toronto late in 2007, they became teammates again.

After Kennedy died, Thomas kept Kennedy's glove.

He placed it in his locker.

And he kept it there.

A baseball glove is an intensely personal piece of equipment.

It takes time to break one in. The leather gradually changes around a player's hand. The pocket becomes shaped by thousands of catches until a mass-produced object belongs unmistakably to one person.

Kennedy no longer needed his.

Thomas kept it anyway.

It was a small act, almost invisible compared with the ceremonies professional sports usually use to remember the dead.

But perhaps it fit Kennedy.

He wasn't a Hall of Famer.

He didn't have a number that every franchise needed to retire.

Most baseball fans under 30 have probably never watched him throw a pitch.

His name now appears most often in statistical databases, old transaction logs and lists of players who died during their careers.

That can make a seven-year Major League career feel smaller than it was.

It shouldn't.

He Was Still Here

Joe Kennedy reached the majors at 22.

He won his debut.

He survived three difficult seasons with Tampa Bay.

He went to the most hostile pitching environment in baseball and produced a 3.66 ERA.

He lost his effectiveness as a starter.

He became a good reliever.

He was traded.

Designated.

Claimed.

Released.

Signed again.

And on September 29, 2007, he walked onto a Major League mound one more time.

Carlos Peña struck out.

Delmon Young flew out.

Kennedy handed the ball to his manager and walked toward the Toronto dugout.

There was no reason to watch him leave.

There would be another spring.

Another clubhouse.

Another uniform.

Another chance.

That is what everyone had the right to assume.

Fifty-five days later, Joe Kennedy was gone.

The tragedy of his final game isn't that baseball failed to give him a proper goodbye.

It is that, at 28 years old, nobody imagined he needed one.

For Baseball Dream players

A player's career rarely follows the path you imagined when you created him. Joe Kennedy went from starter to reliever, from a difficult season to a record-setting one at Coors Field, and through five Major League organizations while continuing to find a role. In Baseball Dream, don't give up on a player simply because his first role stops working. Change his assignment, develop different skills and give him another way to help the team. Sometimes adaptation is what keeps a career alive.

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