• Finished 40-21, their first 40-win season since 2018.
• Won the Horizon League’s regular-season title and the Horizon League tournament.
• Led the league in team hitting, pitching and fielding.
• Eliminated Vanderbilt, the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
• Reached the NCAA Tournament’s regional championship game for the first time in nine years.
• Had a record 16 players win All-Horizon League honors.
• Saw head coach Alex Sogard win the Horizon League Coach of the Year for the fifth time in the eight years he’s led the team.
So, what could top all that?
Well, if your measuring stick is life and death — not just home runs and earned runs — Wright State’s performance last January, a month before the season began, was a feat likely unmatched in all of college baseball last year.
It’s an effort the team hopes to equal or even better this weekend.
Last year half of the team donated blood during the now annual Bob Grote Blood Drive as a way not only to support one of the most fabled WSU athletes in school history, but more importantly to make an impact in the Miami Valley.
The Raiders’ effort helped set a one-day donation record for the Versiti Blood Center, which is located at 349 S. Main Street in Dayton but for the Grote drive also has its mobile van set up in the Nutter Center parking lot.
They’ll do the same again this year for the drive, which takes place Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Nutter Center and continues at the downtown location from January 19-30.
Various perks are being given to donors. To register visit donate.versitidayton.org or call 937-620-4953.
Last year Grote said 131 units of blood were donated. That topped the 86 units — a previous record — donated the year before when the drive in his name was launched.
To understand just what an impact this drive makes, Grote offered one story from last year.
Two weeks after the blood drive, Wright State held its annual First Pitch banquet, a gala evening that kicks off the baseball season with a dinner, a fundraising silent auction and an introduction of the team’s players to the large crowd that fills the Nutter Center floor.
As Grote was leaving the affair one of the Raiders’ players, a pitcher from Pennsylvania who had been one of the blood donors, was standing in the back with his dad.
Grote said they waved him over so the player could share a story:
“He said, ‘I got an email from the Versiti Blood Drive company and they said they used my blood to save a young kid’s life over at Children’s Medical Center.’ At this point, I’m crying. I looked at his dad and said, ‘You’ve got a hell of a son there! He’s a hero. He’s given a child the opportunity to be able to continue to tell his parents, I love you. And the parents now will be able to say the same thing back to their child!’”
Grote was choking back the tears as he recounted the story to me the other day. Finally, he was able to offer a gravely-voiced, emotion-filled: “How strong is that?”
‘She saved my life’
Grote’s reaction doesn’t just come because of that life-saving act, but because of another he knows far better than that.
He received the same gift as that child, although his took a record 34 units of blood — and nothing short of a miracle doctors in Dayton and Cincinnati have said — to save him in April 2023.
It all started one morning after he’d just finished a leisurely breakfast at home with his wife, Becky Grimes, long known as a WHIO reporter, anchor and producer.
Out of the blue, he suddenly started vomiting blood. A lot of it.
Rushed to Kettering Medical Center, he soon was hooked up to tubes and monitors, and that’s when he felt like he was going to vomit blood again.
Hindered by the tubes as he lay there, he forced himself to turn onto his side so he could reach the call button for the nurse.
The move likely saved his life.
“You had angels looking over you today,” nurses told him.
On his back, he would have drowned in his own blood.
In an instant he was engulfed in a cataclysmic medical event.
Blood began pouring out of his nose, his mouth, his rectum. His stomach filled with blood. His bed filled with blood and then spilled into puddles on the floor.
He was bleeding out at an alarming rate, so doctors tried a Hail Mary procedure. They drilled a hole in his tibia to pump blood back into him as it streamed out everywhere else.
Dr. Robert McKenzie worked three hours in the most adverse conditions — awash in Grote’s blood and other bodily fluids — until he got a stent into the liver to drain off some of the blood.
That proved to be a temporary fix. Two days later Grote began to bleed out again and this time, he said, doctors pulled Becky aside and said they’d run out of options.
He’d already been given 32 units of blood — the amount in four bodies — and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.
She was asked if her husband’s final affairs were in order. The family was called in, and last rites were administered.
That’s when Becky issued her own Hail Mary.
She got medical personnel to arrange a helicopter flight for her husband — unconscious and hooked to a ventilator — to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
Kettering doctors ran tubes into Grote’s stomach, each attached to a balloon that was inflated so it would press against the numerous bleeds there.
The pilot had no helmet for Grote, but a nurse ran and got her daughter’s softball catcher’s mask and affixed it to his face to hold the tubes in place during the flight.
At UC, Grote was met by Dr. Lulu Zhang, whom he now calls: “My Hero!”
As he was given two more units of blood, she determined varices — abnormally-dilated veins in his stomach —m had exploded, so she inserted coils in the arteries to stop the blood flow.
“She saved my life,” he said.
He said everyone in the medical field was stunned by his recovery: “They all ask the same thing, ‘How is it you’re still here?’ They say 99 percent of the people who go through what I did don’t make it.
“They die.”
‘Trying to give back’
Once he got home — still filled with fluids and weighing 258 pounds instead of the 212 he’d weighed going in — Grote began a slow recovery that became framed more and more by one pressing question:
Why me?
Why did I survive?
“I went through this thing called survivor’s remorse,” he said. “That’s all I could think about day and night. It never went away.
“I started praying: ‘Lord, what am I supposed to do? You kept me here for a reason, what is it? What’s my purpose?’”
As he was wrestling with this, a friend from Cincinnati suggested maybe he could help out with a blood drive there. He did and 50 units were collected.
That got him thinking about the Miami Valley, where he now lived; where he had starred at Wright State as a two-sport Hall of Fame athlete, raised a family and been saved at Kettering Medical Center, where he’d been given all that blood.
Grote decided to try to launch a blood drive and contacted Ken Herr, the longtime scorekeeper and clock operator for WSU basketball games.
In baseball terms, Herr is the Babe Ruth of blood donors.
Since he was a Miami University student some 55 years ago, he has donated over 150 units of blood.
Eventually, the first Bob Grote Blood Drive was launched with the Solvita Blood Center, which is now run by Versiti.
The first year was a success and before year two Grote asked WSU baseball coach Alex Sogard if he could tell his life-saving story to the team.
Grote was a star pitcher for the Raiders in the early 1970s and became the school’s first pro athlete when he was drafted by and signed with the New York Mets, where he spent four years in the minor leagues.
He just as well could have played pro basketball. He was a two-time All American, who scored 1,406 points.
Later, he served as a coach on the 1983 NCAA Division II national championship basketball team and also coached baseball. He was also a color commentator for WSU basketball broadcasts.
Grote said he talked to the baseball team about: “How you live your life and become a better person. How you can give back to someone in need. How one small act by them can save a life.”
Sogard embraced that idea: “Obviously, I can’t mandate someting like that, but I tried to encourage as many of the guys as I could last year to consider it.
“When we shared Bob’s story last year, we let them know if the blood hadn’t been there, he’d no longer be here.”
Sogard said he stressed how one day that may be one of their own family members or even them in need:
“I said, ‘We talk about the Raider Family, and this is part of that. Last year we were just trying to help a brother who had gone through something and was trying to give back.
“They are young and healthy, and they too can impact people’s lives in ways they never considered.”
Last year that’s what happened.
By a certain measuring stick, it’s the greatest thing the Raiders did.
Now — with the help of the rest of the community — they have a chance to do it again.
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