MILWAUKEE — This picture had to be perfect. Just like the one before it and the one before that and all of the pictures that will follow. Ben Rouse would take the pictures himself, if he weren't the subject. But without the camera in his hands, his instructions are that of a perfectionist, of someone who plans on taking the same picture many more times.
One hundred and sixty-two times, in all.
Rouse relishes being in control — this much is obvious, as he holds a sign emblazoned with a plain, black "19" on Miller Park's upper deck, adjusting specific subtleties to make this photo just as perfect as the previous 18. For someone who's been through what Rouse has, being in control — even over something as meager as a photograph — is something he values.
When it comes to baseball, Rouse has always been in control. Almost like a reflex, he recounts the number of baseball games he's been to in his 25 years of life — 300, as of the end of April. He has a ticket stub for all of them, except the first Milwaukee Brewers game he attended in the fifth grade. And his frustration over missing that first piece in his grand baseball puzzle is glaringly apparent. He is meticulous, to say the least.
He has come to this park as many times as he could each year, ever since he could drive — saving up all of his money to do so — despite that his parents weren't particularly avid sports fans. He has fallen in love with the game and its complexities, finding comfort in the most minute details and statistics.
The summer after his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, Rouse went to 43 games, including 14 at stadiums outside of Milwaukee. That summer left him wondering whether there was a grander experiment when it came to watching baseball games. So he dreamed big.
Was it possible for someone to see all 162 of his favorite team's games in one season? Rouse imagined the possibilities of traveling the country to watch the game he loved so much, taking in the sights and the sounds and the smells of America's pastime.
It was a pipe dream at best, he reasoned. Rouse still had three years of college left and nowhere near enough money to pull off something that required such dedication. The most financially stable of baseball fans would struggle to achieve that level of devotion. He filed the idea away.
That was almost six years ago, before picture No. 19, before he felt what it was like to cede control, before Ben Rouse was diagnosed with leukemia.
The odds were against him
Rouse had been chasing a routine Prince Fielder home run in the right field bleachers at Miller Park in 2007 during Brewers On Deck when he bumped his left knee. It didn't bleed much, leaving only a little gash, and Rouse thought nothing of it. He was more concerned about the following day, the first day of the baseball season.
The next day, former Brewers ace Ben Sheets pitched a gem to make Milwaukee 1-0. After the game, Rouse's knee reddened and began to swell. Soon, he couldn't keep anything down. He sustained a fever that shot up to almost 106 degrees. Assuming his knee must have gotten infected, he had blood drawn the next day.
Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia, the doctor told him. Blood cancer.
Rouse spent the next five weeks in the hospital, receiving chemotherapy treatment and looking up statistics, researching everything the doctors told him. A disciple of baseball statistics, Rouse was, for the first time in his life, at the mercy of the numbers he had so thoroughly studied. He lost 35 pounds in the hospital.
"He was searching all the time," his mother, Sue Mckechnie, said. "The doctors would tell him things and he would search and look things up. He'd tell me the amount of people who would survive this or the chances of him surviving that. That was a little scary to have him so aware."
When chemotherapy didn't work, Rouse began to undergo arsenic trioxide treatments meant to kill the extra white blood cells produced by his leukemia. He also took it upon himself to search on his own for a suitable match in the bone marrow registry. But despite the 10 million or so entries in the registry, Rouse's search proved unsuccessful.
He talks calmly now about the uncertain time in his life, recalling much more fervently a road trip he took just a few weeks after leaving the hospital. He and his friends had decided to drive to Texas and Detroit to watch the Brewers in interleague play. There, in the middle of baseball season, he could escape. Even if it was for just a brief moment, baseball could put him at peace.
The arsenic trioxide treatment sent Rouse into remission in 2008. But the remission was brief. A year later, he relapsed and began searching the bone marrow registry again. Still, with 500,000 more entries than when he last looked, there were no matches.
"I thought, ‘Certainly, there's millions of people, we're going to find somebody. Certainly there's somebody,' " his mother said. "And when he called me and told me there's no one, I just thought, ‘How could this possibly be? Your choice is to do nothing and that's it?' "
At the mercy of his diagnosis, Rouse would take solace in the small things he could still control. He refused after a while to rely on friends to drive him to the clinic for his treatments. Once, he even opted to receive just local anesthesia while having bone marrow extracted — a highly painful procedure — just so he wouldn't need to rely on someone to drive him home afterward.
In fall 2009, after searching the umbilical cord registry, Rouse found two matches that could potentially get rid of the cancer. And with some further treatment, a successful transplant gave him a new lease on life.
"Once I was diagnosed and went through all that, I realized that if you want to do something, you should do it now," Rouse said. "I may never make it to retirement age. My chances of developing any other type of cancer are probably five or 10 times more likely than your average person."
With a new sense of the fragility of life, the dream that had been planted in his head so long ago began to creep back to the surface: 162 games in 181 days — a marathon of baseball and travel.
Friends had told him it was impossible. But he had always been frugal, saving as much money as he could as a support associate at Tetra Tech, a survey research company he began working in Madison for after graduating from Wisconsin.
And deep down, he treasured their skepticism. He had already overcome one challenge over which he had no control. This time, he could name his own rules.
"I like a challenge, and I wanted to make my own challenge and not have to do all of these treatments and stuff that I had no choice in doing," Rouse said. "It's not like I had decided to do that. It's something I had to do. This, though, this is something that I decided to do myself, that I want to do myself, and I want to follow through with it."
His parents attended the final Brewers game of the regular season last year, and in the car on the way home, he told them about his grandiose plan. He was going to quit his job to watch every baseball game the Brewers would play next season. It was going to cost him somewhere in the ballpark of $12,000 to $15,000. And they weren't going to convince him otherwise. Life was too short, he said.
"I could tell that he felt strongly about it," his mother said. "By the time he told us, he had already done quite a bit of groundwork. He already knew financially he could do it. He was ready to go. So I thought, who am I to dash his dreams?"
And his boss at Tetra Tech felt the same way. Bonnie Brandreth could sense Rouse was nervous as he came to her office with something to tell her, but as he explained his plan, she just smiled.
"That's the best excuse I've ever heard for leaving a job," she said. She had always admired Rouse for his character in overcoming a life-threatening diagnosis at such a young age. And this gutsy choice had impressed her even further.
"Here's the kid who faced the ultimate scare, and it kind of changed him," Brandreth said. "He's just doing things now that he wants to do in his life … finding something he really could be passionate about and making it something bigger than just seeing baseball games. That's just an amazing thing."
After what he had gone through, his dream now included a slight addendum. Rouse knew how fortunate he was to even have the chance to do this despite not finding a match on the bone marrow registry. He decided, if it was possible, he would try to raise money with Be the Match, the donor registry that has helped so many others find bone marrow donors. That organization happily consented.
He also contacted the Brewers in January and, a few months later, they, too, were on board, offering to pay for his tickets to every game, along with providing food stipends and team gear. Rouse's dream, which had seemed like such a distant hope just a few years ago, was slowly coming to fruition.
A frequent flyer with a purpose
Three cities with nine games in 10 days. Seventeen total flights. Twenty-four takeoffs and landings. Connection in Las Vegas. Flight to San Diego. Direct flight to San Francisco. Layover in Chicago. Flight to St. Louis.
Rouse is a broken record of travel plans, spouting dates and arrival times and layover lengths on cue. He is his own travel secretary, he jokes.
But the endless logistics and complicated planning seem to put Rouse at ease — a reminder that his life is now in his own hands.
And maybe it won't always remain that way. Rouse, more than most, understands the fragility of life. He understands the potential future complications that come with the treatments he underwent to overcome his leukemia. And always, there remains a chance of another relapse.
On April 29 — the fourth day of an nine-game, 11-day road trip — Rouse received news that he has a bone infarction in his knee, blocking blood supply to the bone and causing tissue to die. There was no visible damage yet, but left untreated, the ailment could require a knee replacement.
It's ailments like these Rouse will have to continue to deal with, possibly for the rest of his life. But there's no turning back on his goal this season. He'll put off a meeting with his orthopedic doctor until Monday — that's when the Brewers return from their trip. He'll take as many escalators as he can till then, he says.
For now, however, in Section 221, Row 6, Seat 14, Rouse no longer needs to escape with baseball. He's at home.
He will see every moment of all 162 games the Brewers play this season, but he still gets frustrated if ushers block his view, even for one play. He wants to soak in every bit of this once-in-a-lifetime dream, while he still can, he says. He wants to see every pitch.
"He wants to be perfect," Brandreth said. "He wants to see 100 percent of the pitches, not just 99.99 percent. I think that says something about him."
It's clear that Rouse won't settle for less than perfection in pursuing this dream, recording every mile spent in a car, every minute spent in every park and every bratwurst eaten along the way. It's the same reason each photograph before each game has to be perfect and why that missing ticket stub from his first Brewers game still irks him.
Because Rouse knows how tentative control of our own lives can be. Just like in the sport he loves so much, he knows how quickly one's fate can change.
"Without being diagnosed, I don't know if this would've ever happened," Rouse said. "But I'm a really stubborn person. … Being an adult, you're given so many different paths you want to take, and I want to take the path that I choose."
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