'I'm fine now': Curve's Negrych battles back from scary internal injury

Jim Negrych dove for the ball, like he had done hundreds of times before, but this time it set off a chain of events that resulted in a scary health situation for the Curve second baseman.

Negrych collided with a teammate during a game at Blair County Ballpark on July 27, suffered a hematoma and needed immediate surgery. Then he caught not one, but two infections while recovering, causing him to lose 40 pounds.

Negrych lost 30 pounds in 10 days.

"People obviously worried about me because I looked like a skeleton," he said. "My body changed from being a short, stocky little guy to being short and 145 pounds."

Four months later, however, Negrych says just about everything is back to normal.

"I'm fine now," he said. "My health is good. I'm back. But it definitely scared me for a while."

The Curve were playing Binghamton on July 27, and the game was tied at 5 in the ninth inning. The B-Mets had the go-ahead run at second base when Jose Coronado hit a bouncing ball up the middle.

Negrych and shortstop Brian Friday both went after the ball and dove for it, colliding in the grass in short center field. Both players lay on the ground for a minute or so before getting up and resuming play.

Negrych finished the inning on defense, then batted in the bottom of the ninth and grounded out.

The situation worsened after the game as Negrych was in a lot of pain. Friday's knee had hit him two inches above his belly button, causing a hematoma, which is a mass of blood that forms in a tissue, organ or body space.

"When I got hit in the stomach, it caused one of the blood vessels in my stomach to start spraying blood in there," Negrych said. "It's an absolute freak accident. It will never happen again probably. I could probably get hit in the same spot 99 more times and nothing would happen."

He had two options: He could either wait it out and hope the bleeding would stop on its own, or he could have surgery to stop the bleeding. He did the latter, and it turned out the bleeding already had stopped.

Negrych underwent surgery July 28 at Altoona Hospital, becoming the first Curve player ever to require surgery immediately after suffering an injury on the field.

The surgery went well, he said, but he caught an infection at Altoona Hospital. He later was moved to a Pittsburgh hospital and caught a potentially dangerous infection called clostridium difficile, which causes problems with the colon and bowels.

"I was pretty sick, and I had to recheck back into the hospital in Buffalo because I had that disease, that infection, and it just wasn't going away," Negrych said.

The infection eventually did go away with treatment, but Negrych had dropped all the way down to 145 pounds. He weighed 195 at the start of spring training last season and was 185 when he got injured.

"Once the bacteria got out of me, the weight came back on fairly quick," Negrych said. "Just eating normally and basically just eating anything at all was going to put natural weight on me."

Eating allowed him to regain his strength, which enabled him to start working out again.

"Ever since then I've been doing pretty good," Negrych said. "My weight's back up to 180, 185 pounds, back where I normally am. It was a grind there for a while, but right now I'm doing all right."

He was doing so well that he attended the Pirates' instructional league workouts in November in Florida, where he was able to get back into his old baseball routine.

Now, despite his health scare, Negrych said he is "right on pace to where I'd want to be if I had never gotten hurt."

"It did change my life for a while, but it's nothing that I wasn't going to be able to get over and affect my life in the long run," he said.

Negrych likely will start the 2010 season with the Curve, though he's hoping to do well enough in spring training to earn a promotion to Triple-A Indianapolis. He's a .307 career hitter and enjoyed a monster 2008 season as he batted .359 between the Curve and Single-A Lynchburg.

Negrych battled some ups and downs last year and batted .272 for the Curve with three homers and 30 RBIs in 93 games.

"I had to figure out what happened to me in Altoona last year because I struggled there for a little bit," said Negrych, who added he made strides toward that goal during the instructional league.

The injury ordeal gave Negrych a new perspective on things, and he doesn't plan to let it affect his mental approach to the game going forward.

"I got a little bit of a different outlook on life from everything that happened," he said. "You can't dwell on anything like that. What's going to happen is going to happen.

"It's nothing I'm going to think about again because the odds of it happening again are sooo slim."

Cory Giger can be reached at 949-7031 and cgsports12@aol.com.