Major League Baseball

Monahan started with Yankees as bat boy

Published May. 11, 2011 1:00 a.m. ET

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After a frightening bout with throat cancer in 2009 and 2010, Yankees head trainer Gene Monahan, the team's longest-tenured employee, announced Wednesday that he will step down after this season.

"I need to have a dog. I need to have a house. I need to have a yard and a garden. And to get me a pickup truck," Monahan said. "So I'm moving down south, and that's where I'm going to live. But the Yankees will always be my family. They have been since I've been 17."

Monahan left his seven siblings and his Ft. Lauderdale home 49 years ago to join the Yankees, first as a bat boy, then in various jobs, becoming head trainer in 1973.

When he started, players ''toughed out'' injuries, lived harder lives, and the training staff's job was to keep them on the field no matter what. They traveled with two small trunks and one bag.

"Now we have six big trunks, a whole bunch of bags, and everything else we can carry. It's become so much more sophisticated," said Monahan, considered baseball's dean of trainers.

They rarely worked with the team doctors — the docs were in one caste, the trainers another. But as baseball players became highly paid commodities, that changed. Teams began to think long-term about injuries, and doctors and trainers began working together.

"The teams of doctors have gotten together, and have taken us under their wing and made us equals," Monahan said.

Many of the old-time trainers fell by the wayside as athletic training evolved. But Monahan was always willing to adapt and learn, and he thrived, melding traditional medicine with training techniques.

Monahan returned too soon from his throat cancer and was weak and tired on the job. He got old faster than he expected, he said.

So after this season he is moving to North Carolina.

"It sounds trite to say thank you. But I mean it," Monahan said. "Until that last pitch is thrown this year ... I'll be there being the biggest fan these players ever had, each inning that I'm out there."

Read more here.

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