Baseball, ADHD link two Braves

Three years ago, everybody, it seemed, felt free to poke around Adam LaRoche’s mind, to get in the Braves’ first baseman’s attic and claw at the cobwebs.

He had spaced out after gathering in a ground ball, appearing to loaf while the base runner beat him to the bag.

Fans booed him. Manager Bobby Cox benched him for a game. And just like that, LaRoche’s Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was tinder for public outrage.

LaRoche, taking no medication for a condition, never blamed the lapse on his ADHD. But everyone else seemed to. And everyone shared an opinion: Just take the medication and cover the bag.

In a quieter way, another player whose ADHD is far less commonly known chipped in his own thoughts.

Yeah, if you need it, take the medication. It can help.

A daily regimen

Every morning, shortly after he wakes, Braves pitcher Derek Lowe swallows 20 milligrams of the prescription drug Adderall— a combination of stimulants used to control ADHD and to improve concentration.

The 36-year-old Lowe is one of 106 Major League players who, at last count, received a Therapeutic Use Exemption to take some form of ADHD medication, usually banned out of concern that the stimulants offer an unfair boost during competition.

Growing up, Lowe was a hyper kid who struggled with school. Doctors told his parents he simply was overactive.

He found somewhere to belong in sports. Struggling with academics, the ADHD child often gravitates to athletics, said Dr. Eric Morse, president of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry.

The doctor finds that there are a disproportionate number of youth athletes who have ADHD. But he doubts the estimates of an ADDitude Magazine story that said 8 to 10 percent of pro athletes have ADHD, twice the percentage of the general population.

“Each level you go up, from youth to high school to college to pro, I think you see less ADHD because it’s hard to advance to the next level if you have it,” he said. “You’re told you’re not very coachable; you tend not to know the plays or pay attention to the finer points of technique in practice.”

Baseball, with all its down time, with all the opportunity “to un-focus and then have to get refocused,” is particularly difficult for the athlete with ADHD, Morse said.

Lowe played with his ADHD undiagnosed through high school and into the first 11 years of his minor and major league career.

With Boston in his first four full major league seasons (1998-2001), Lowe made his greatest impact as a relief pitcher. That included 42 saves in 2000.

Truth was, he said, he couldn’t maintain his concentration long enough to be an effective starter.

Others could see it. Lowe was always fidgeting, always restless. Guys constantly were on him: Dude, you got ADD or what?

Finally, in 2001, he picked up a pamphlet on the subject.

“There were like 10 things to check to see if you have it. And I was 10 for 10, no doubt about it,” Lowe said.

So, he began a regular regimen of medication in 2002, won 21 games for the Red Sox in his first season as a full-time starter, and an ace was born.

Quietly, each season that followed, Lowe filled out his papers to get his drug policy exemption from Major League Baseball. He was nobody’s spokesman; he was just a guy trying to get by. In fact, Lowe said he had never before talked about his ADHD at any length to a reporter.

Still, when he read a story in 2006 about this first baseman in Atlanta who had lost track of a game and whose ADHD had become a sticking point, he felt the need to reach out.

In town with the Los Angeles Dodgers only weeks after LaRoche’s gaffe, Lowe found then Braves GM John Schuerholz .

They didn’t know each other, but the pitcher had a story to tell Schuerholz.

Dealing with it

LaRoche already had begun the process of stripping away the thought that he could handle his ADHD on his own. What he heard from Lowe, through Schuerholz, reinforced his decision to get serious.

“Obviously, I had a lot of respect for him after that for going out of his way to tell our GM something, where a lot of guys would have cared less,” LaRoche said.

The two are teammates now. Lowe signed a free-agent contract this season; LaRoche, 29, was re-acquired last month after being traded away following the 2006 season.

The two underscore the differences in the forms of ADHD and the ways people choose to deal with it.

Where Lowe has been mostly silent about his ADHD, LaRoche has talked about it for years. “Actually,” said LaRoche, citing all the letters he has gotten from children with the condition and their parents, “it has been a blessing.”

Where Lowe takes his Adderall daily, LaRoche is more likely to take his Concerta only on game days. LaRoche said he takes no medication during the off-season. He needs a break because the drug dampens his appetite, making it difficult to keep up his weight.

Lowe’s ADHD manifested itself as hyperactivity. LaRoche was at the other extreme: low-key and often disconnected. “I’d be sitting around and it would hit me, ‘Oh, great, I was supposed to be somewhere 30 minutes ago,’” he said.

LaRoche said his personality is essentially the same, even though he’s medicated. His friends agree. “He’s still the same guy. He’s just learned to deal with what he has to deal with ADD a lot better,” said his good buddy and teammate Chipper Jones.

A no-win situation

The subject of ADHD is thorny on its own, dealing with the decision of whether to drug children.

Now add to that controversy the raging drug issues around baseball.

LaRoche has first-hand knowledge of the no-win nature of being a player taking ADHD drugs.

On the one hand, fans ripped him for not taking medication when his play suffered. Then, as he began using the drug, and his numbers improved at the end of ’06, LaRoche found himself the subject of an ESPN report. It concluded his big second half of the season was almost solely a byproduct of the drug.

Last season, baseball granted drug exemptions to around 8 percent of its workforce. In 2006, baseball issued only 28 exemptions. Two years later, the number had jumped to 106 out of about 1,350 players.

By contrast, the NFL said it issued approximately 50 exemptions for ADHD medication last season.

Critics howled that players were using the exemption to get stimulants in an era of more rigorous drug testing. Dr. Gary Wadler of the World Anti-Doping Agency weighed in: “To say that close to 10 percent of major league baseball players have attention deficit disorder is crying out for an explanation.”

Lowe and LaRoche offer no big-picture explanations. What they offer are individual testimonies.

At first, LaRoche thought the drug helped his hitting, but since has concluded the impact is minimal. “It’s in the field (it helps), throughout the game keeping track of the score, the amount of outs, what’s going on in the ballgame, where I need to be on certain plays,” he said.

Lowe said taking the drug never was about looking for some edge in baseball as much as it was gaining control over his life.

He won’t say his career was saved by meds. But he does know that now he can sit down and work a Sudoku puzzle where before treatment the thought of that was almost laughable.

“I look at the difference in the off-season, the time away from the park,” he said. “That’s where I think it has helped me more than anything.