Four years ago Michael Saunders lost his mother and nearly his career. Now he’s got his eye back on the ball.

By Arden Zwelling in Castle Rock, Colo., and Dunedin, Fla.
Photography by Jamie Kripke

Michael Saunders sits in his backyard, nearly 2,000 metres above sea level, the Colorado sun blanketing everything as it drops in the sky just above the Rocky Mountains in the distance. He tips back a Coors Light—he prefers a hoppy beer, but none of the neighbours drink that stuff—and runs his hand over his head before squeezing on a brand-new Blue Jays cap, the first piece of merchandise he’s received from his new team. He’s thinking about the long, difficult road he’s taken from being an athletic but immature kid in Victoria, B.C., on the other side of those Rockies, to a 10-year baseball professional who now lives here in Castle Rock, Colo. He’s thinking about the wild ups and downs he experienced during a decade in the Seattle Mariners system; about how badly he wants to produce for his new team, the only club in his home country; about the dramatic changes he had to make to his swing just to be in the position he’s in now. He’s thinking about baseball. But then, an interruption.

“Hungry!” announces two-year-old Aria, marching out onto the back porch wearing Doc McStuffins pyjamas and nothing on her feet. She’s carrying her blankie in one hand and leans on a patio chair with the other. Suddenly, baseball drops from Saunders’s mind and he’s up and off to the kitchen—loyal brown bulldog Romeo following behind—where he makes Aria a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into bite-sized pieces. These are the priorities: family, then baseball, then everything else.

This was not always the case. There was a time not long ago when Saunders couldn’t think about anything but the game, when his obsession with performing every night ended up getting in the way of that performance. The Blue Jays’ new left-fielder, acquired in a trade this off-season with the Mariners, has come a long way. He’s failed a lot, lost a lot, learned a lot. And he thinks that now, as he changes teams for the first time in his career, he’s finally ready to put it all together. “I still want to be the best. I want to go out there and win the MVP—I do. In Toronto I’ll work so hard every day to be the best player on that field. I promise you that. But everything’s in perspective now,” Saunders says. “I used to play baseball only for myself. Now I play baseball for my family.”

The most important hit of Saunders’s life came on a brilliant, warm day in May 2010. It was Mother’s Day, and his mom, Jane, was sitting in the crowd. Saunders sent a 1-0 fastball from Ervin Santana screaming over the right-centre-field wall for his first major-league home run. It was a line drive that travelled 400 feet but didn’t even get 70 feet off the ground. He hit it so hard that the fan sitting just above where it landed couldn’t reach his glove over the railing fast enough to snag it—a nifty stroke of luck for Saunders, as the Mariners’ bullpen catcher was able to retrieve the ball, which Saunders gave to his mom after the game.

Jane Saunders had been her son’s biggest fan his entire life. She attended all his games—diligently keeping score in a small notebook and tearing out the pages for her son to keep afterward—never missing one until 1999, when Saunders went to the Little League World Series with Team Canada. She gave him some excuse for why she couldn’t make it—who can remember what? But the real reason she couldn’t go was because she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and given three months to live.

Saunders’s parents kept him blissfully unaware of how severe Jane’s disease was for years. He knew his mom was sick, but it wasn’t until she started going through some of the more serious chemotherapy treatments that Saunders could tell she was in the fight of her life. “There were times that she wasn’t the mom I remembered her being,” Saunders says. “But she lived every day to the fullest. You wouldn’t know what she was going through because she had so much fight and so much will to live.”

In the meantime, Saunders concerned himself with athletics, which were going pretty well. He went to the Little League World Series when he was 12, won a provincial high school basketball championship, played rep hockey, won the B.C. Premier Baseball League’s MVP award in 2004 and travelled with Canada’s junior national baseball team to Cuba and Florida. He graduated high school in 2004, was drafted by the Mariners in the 11th round, did a year of junior college in Tallahassee, Fla., and finally signed with Seattle a week before the 2005 draft. He flew through Seattle’s system, getting promoted to the triple-A Tacoma Rainiers in 2008 as a 21-year-old, and earned his first big-league call-up the next season, when Baseball America had him ranked as the 30th-best prospect in the game. In 2010, he hit that line-drive homer on Mother’s Day, his first of 10 in 100 games that season. His numbers weren’t terrific—he batted .211/.295/.367—but he had all the tools you’d want in a centre-fielder and showed tremendous promise. Large and muscular, with plenty of speed and a willingness to lay his body on the line to make a play, Saunders was supposed to be a big part of the Mariners’ future.

Then came the worst year of Saunders’s life. He started the 2011 season with Seattle but quickly fell into a deep slump that saw him hit .111/.164/.159 in 21 games in May. At one point, he reached base only once in 25 plate appearances, on a walk. By June, with just seven extra-base hits in 43 games, he was demoted to Tacoma, a massive disappointment for a player who thought he was in the majors to stay. While this was happening, his mother’s cancer returned, and her condition began to deteriorate. Saunders left Tacoma to be with her in Victoria. “We knew it was only a matter of time at that point,” Saunders says, “so I just wanted to spend what quality time I could with her.” It was during that leave that Saunders’s mother told him about the three-month prognosis she’d received 12 years earlier. She also told him that all she’d wanted was to reach the age of 50 and to see her son get married. Saunders and his fiancée, Jessica, were originally planning to get married after the 2011 season; they pushed up the wedding and held it that month in Victoria.

During all of this, Saunders still had a job—one he hadn’t been showing up to for more than two weeks. So he left his mother’s side and returned to Tacoma. In spite of everything, he played pretty well, including a five-for-five outing against Las Vegas when he hit two homers and drove in four. But three days later, in the middle of a game, he got the call from Victoria saying he had to come back immediately or he might never see his mother again. Saunders and Jessica raced north and got there just in time to be by Jane’s side as she passed away a month before her 51st birthday. “She went peacefully, which was good. But I took it really hard,” Saunders says. “My mom and I had a really special relationship. We were so close. She was my best friend.”

Saunders’s father, Derek, is a general practitioner in Victoria. He was hurt deeply by Jane’s death, as any husband would be, but at least had a medical understanding of what she had gone through. Initially, Saunders was worried about him and stuck around Victoria for a few days to make sure his father was processing things well. “When I left, he was on my mind a lot,” Saunders says. “But he’s got a great support system, and eventually I could see that he was progressing through it.”

Back in Tacoma, Saunders picked up where he left off with 13 hits in his first 10 games back. He strung together five straight multi-hit games and put on a brave face at the ballpark. But when he went home at night, things were different. Saunders never had a chance to properly grieve for his mother, returning to baseball before he’d had time to process her passing. He began losing his passion for the game. “I would wake up and it was like living in a black hole. I was in a bad place. A really, really dark place,” Saunders says. “I showed up to the park ready to play, but I wasn’t really there.”

When he was called back up to the Mariners in early September, a development that would have been joyous for most, it was a new emotional low point. It was tormenting for Saunders. He played atrociously, reaching base just three times on two walks and a single in 27 plate appearances spread over 12 games. “I wore every failure on my sleeve. If I struck out in my first at-bat, it was the end of the game. The rest of my night was shot,” Saunders says. “I’d see other guys having fun, playing with no worries, no fears, like they’re just kids playing a baseball game. And every night was so tough for me. I hated those guys.”

He hit the off-season in the deepest personal and professional rut of his life. He questioned whether he belonged at the major-league level. He wondered whether he should try his luck in Japan or quit the game altogether. But as all that doubt swirled within, he finally took a step back from the game, from the pressure to perform in front of 40,000 people every night, and recognized the hole that losing his mother had left in his life. “I had to come to peace with it. It was tearing me apart. I had to get my life back on track,” Saunders says. “I leaned on people. I didn’t get out of it on my own. If it wasn’t for my family and my wife, there’s no way I’d be here today.”

Slowly, he started enjoying things again. He watched movies and had long talks with those close to him about what he was going through. He stopped looking at his mother’s death as a lost battle and started viewing her 13 years of life in spite of the disease as a victory. He thought about how she fought through her illness and found strength; if she could live a happy life for more than a decade after a three-month prognosis, surely he could overcome this. Surely he could figure out baseball. He knew she had always wanted him to be a big-league ballplayer. He didn’t want to let her down.

He thought about what he had to do. He realized that a lot of what was holding him back was fear. He was scared to fail in front of all those people, scared that his window of opportunity in the big leagues was closing. That fear was getting in his way. And once he processed it, he realized he had to make some dramatic changes. “At that point, all I’d done was fail in the big leagues,” Saunders says. “I was desperate. And that desperation led me to Mike.”

Mike Bard, older brother to 10-year major-leaguer and former Saunders teammate Josh Bard, is a peculiar guy. A longtime college coach turned private hitting instructor, he’s been known to employ some unorthodox techniques at his complex, Bardo’s Diamond Sports in Parker, Colo., just outside Denver. When Saunders came to him after the 2011 season, he took one look at the lefty’s swing and wanted to change everything.

Saunders, at six-foot-five, has natural leverage, which helps him barrel up balls over the plate. But his frame was also giving him a tendency to get too long with his swing, meaning he was relying solely on his upper body for power and that he was susceptible to inside pitches. Bard told Saunders he was going to beat his body into submission, force him to be shorter to the ball and use his legs for more power. He wrapped a thick rubber band around Saunders’s knees, which stabilized his lower body and allowed him to take only a short stride in his swing. Then Bard took the sawed-off end of a foam pool noodle and stuck it under Saunders’s left armpit, securing it with another rubber band that wrapped tightly around Saunders’s chest, upper back and the outside of his right arm. This was meant to keep his left elbow from running too close to his body, and to prevent his right elbow from getting too far from it, or flying open. Then he gave Saunders a 52-oz. bat (the average major leaguer uses something in the 32–35-oz. range) and fired balls at him through a pitching machine at 93–95 mph.

For the first week or so, Saunders could barely touch the ball. But gradually he got more comfortable. Then Bard brought in a pitching machine that threw changeups and curveballs, and Saunders learned how to adjust to off-speed pitches with his new mechanics. When he showed up to Mariners spring training the next year with his bag of contraptions and stepped into the cage, people laughed. Teammates ragged on him endlessly. A Mariners coach pulled him aside and told him to take them off because he looked like a joke. But Saunders refused. “I just didn’t care what they thought. It’s my career. I don’t want to look back when my career’s over and wonder what could have been,” Saunders says. “I had done everything the Mariners had asked. Always ‘yes sir, yes sir.’ And none of it worked. So I took matters into my own hands. It was now or never.”

That 2012 season would turn out to be the best of Saunders’s career. He hit .247/.306/.432 in 139 games and set career highs with 19 homers, 31 doubles and 21 stolen bases. He worked with Bard again the next off-season and returned a more well-rounded hitter in 2013, walking more and raising his on-base percentage. He earned his first big payday since breaking into pro ball eight years earlier, signing a one-year, $2.3-million contract with the Mariners, and came into 2014 with incredibly high expectations for himself. “Belief was the biggest difference,” Saunders says. “I failed a lot. But I think you learn a lot more from failure than you do from success. I needed to go through that. I needed to learn how to give myself permission to fail.”

Saunders started 2014 seeing limited playing time in a platoon before earning regular starts in May and having a torrid month, batting .318/.357/.477. But the season would prove to be another test of his resolve. He missed time with a shoulder injury in June and shortly after he returned in July, he strained his oblique on a check swing and missed 50 games, partly due to the injury and partly due to an ailment similar to fifth disease (a rash-causing childhood ailment), which he contracted while at a hospital for the birth of his son. He lost 12 lb. and couldn’t eat for five days, which set back his oblique rehabilitation and robbed him of much of his strength. When he returned to the Mariners in September, he found himself back in a platoon and started just 11 games in the season’s final month.

It was frustrating. Saunders had done so much to right his career, and now it felt like he’d lost an entire season of his late-blooming development. He wasn’t happy with his playing time, and as he entered the winter it quickly became clear to him that he wouldn’t be a Mariner come 2015. In December, he was traded to the Blue Jays and given the chance to start over. A torn left meniscus, suffered when his foot got caught in a sprinkler divot while running in the early days of spring training, nearly ruined that chance. But he had surgery to remove the cartilage and was told he’d be good to go by mid-April, ready to seize his new opportunity and to finally, after all these years, fulfill his potential. “Nobody’s more excited than I am to be a Blue Jay and to get an opportunity to hold down the left-field job. I’m extremely elated,” Saunders says. “I don’t think I’ve shown people the player I know I can be, at least not for a full season. But I’m ready for it. I know there’s a lot more in me.”

About 15 minutes south of Saunders’s tree-lined residential Castle Rock cul-de-sac is another dead-end street just off Interstate 25. Train tracks run along one side of it, and the Rockies line the distance on the other as you wind all the way down to where road meets yellow-green grass. Just before a stretch of nothingness takes over, there is a nondescript beige building—a rectangular Lego block with a row of windows facing the road. Behind the sixth and final pane is a large, dark space with high ceilings, separated into two sections. The first is reception, complete with an unoccupied front desk sitting in front of a wall of framed pictures of ballplayers. There are purple wooden chairs, a couple of black leather sofas, some fake potted plants and a metal chain-link fence running along the back edge. Through a gap in the fence, denoted by football yardage markers, you enter a massive space lined with Astroturf. On the right, more fencing and empty space. On the left, five batting cages sitting side-by-side, separated by tall, black netting. This is where Saunders hits.

Monday through Friday during the off-season, Saunders wakes up, makes breakfast for his daughter, loads her into his black Cadillac Escalade and takes her to preschool at a Methodist church nestled into a scenic Castle Rock subdivision. He spends the rest of the morning lifting weights and working out, building the strength and durability he’ll need to carry him through the season. When the doctors operated on his meniscus during spring training, they remarked on what good shape his knee ligaments were in. He heads to the cages.

Around noon, Saunders meets his training partner, Jason Bates, a former Colorado Rockies middle infielder who now sells real estate and works as the director of the DC Dolphins Baseball Academy, which trains out of the same warehouse in which Saunders is about to hit. Bates tosses Saunders a Red Bull, wedges some chewing tobacco in his lower lip and promptly gets to work, placing balls on a tee while sitting in a folding chair on the other side of the plate. Bates gradually works up from the tee to flipping balls and eventually to throwing them. Saunders works quickly and deliberately in a blue T-shirt and black shorts while loud hip hop plays over the sound system.

They work on Saunders’s swing for about an hour, focusing on driving the ball to left-centre, before jogging outside to play long toss in the parking lot under the blazing Colorado sun. Saunders and Bates talk the entire time, about baseball, family, life. Saunders uses Bates as a sounding board for what he’s going through in his career. They talk about the psychology of the game, the minor nuances in a hitter’s mentality that fans can’t see. “He’s incredibly knowledgeable,” Saunders says. “We spend a lot of time going over what pitchers are thinking in certain situations; what hitters are thinking. How a little change around the infield can tell you how you’re going to get pitched. He definitely helps me get physically prepared for spring training, but maybe more so mentally. He really keeps my mind sharp.”

But regardless of how deep their conversations go, there’s always a time limit. At 2:30 p.m., Saunders returns to the pre-school to pick up his daughter. He goes into the church and emerges a few moments later with a tiny pink backpack over his shoulder and Aria’s hand in his as he walks her back to the car, asking questions about her day. Still wearing his workout clothes, Saunders drives home, where Jessica greets him holding their six-month-old son, Declan. The family then sits out on the back porch and enjoys what’s left of a mild afternoon, mom holding Declan, Aria giggling in a pink playhouse, Romeo lying under the table chewing on a blue dog toy. These are the moments Saunders enjoys most. Being a father and a husband, building bonds with his family as strong as the one he had with his mother. He still has her little-league scorecards stashed away. He thinks about them a lot. “Playing baseball for a living is an absolute blessing. I love it. It’s what I do. It’s my livelihood. But it’ll never be more important than my family,” Saunders says. “An 0-for-4 isn’t so bad when I get to come home to this.”