His speech isn’t all the way back. But the excitement in his voice was palpable, practically bursting through the phone.
“Awesome,” Jonah Rosenthal kept saying this week when asked about New York Mets right-hander Justin Hagenman. “Really awesome.”
Rosenthal, 35, is an area scouting supervisor for the Los Angeles Dodgers who suffered a large stroke on Dec. 10. Doctors initially told his wife, Lindsey, that in the best-case scenario, he would never regain mobility on his right side, never speak or understand speech again.
“They didn’t think he would make it through the day,” Lindsey said.
Rosenthal (no relation to a co-writer of this story) continues to defy his doctors’ expectations. And on Wednesday, he experienced the kind of thrill amateur scouts relish like none other. The thrill of watching a player he signed overcome the odds to make his major-league debut.
Hagenman, 28, was the Dodgers’ 23rd-round pick out of Penn State in 2018. His $75,000 signing bonus was a relative pittance compared to what top picks command. But after seven years in the minors, he struck out three of his first four hitters in his first appearance for the Mets and held down 3 1/3 innings as a bulk reliever. The only run charged to him in a 4-3, extra-innings loss to the Minnesota…
