Last night the Washington Nationals selected shortstop Brady House out of Winder-Barrow-High School with the number 11 section in the 20211 First Player Draft. Baseball America ranks the 6-foot-4, 215-pound shortstop as the №7 draft prospect (№4 shortstop) and MLBPipeline.com as the №8 draft prospect (№4 shortstop). House is ranked by Perfect Game as the top high school prospect in the 2021 First-Year Player Draft.
Despite all these amazing accomplishments on the field, Brady has had his share of challenges off the field. Back in June of 2011, the House family experienced something that would change their lives forever.
Growing up, both Brady and his brother Brook spent many days playing baseball, and one day according to Dana House, their mother, she noticed a mysterious bump on Brook’s jaw, and the world changed.
On June 17, 2011, Brooks House was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer found in about 200 children and young adults in the United States each year, according to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital after their mom Dana House realized that the mysterious bump on Brook’s jaw wasn’t something that was caused by a baseball and was growing by a horrible rate.
In an interview conducted by the Detroit Free Press, Dana said: “It literally grew before our eyes,” his mother said. “It was amazing how big this thing got, like in two weeks, and then I started to realize, hey, something isn’t right.” Dana took the youngest child and underwent a CT scan all while juggling sending Brady off to travel baseball games. The diagnosis even changed the way the new diet that Dana set to include, organic and sugar free diet.
Above all Brook’s diagnoses not only formed the basis of how Brooks but also Brady would approach everything from baseball to his relationship with God.
“I really feel like what happened to Brooks has a lot to do with who Brady is,” Dana said. “Number one: it shaped him. Number two: it brought him all the way closer to the Lord.”
Ten years later, Brady House was drafted at number 11 by the Washington Nationals and was taken right after power pitcher
“Brady has said, ‘Whatever I’m going through, it’s not hard,’” Dana said. “What Brooks has been through has been tough. Brady often says that. He says Brooks is his hero. In our family, we know what’s hard, and we know what sucks, and we know what’s a bad day.”
Since’s Brooks found out about the cancer, he has had a dozen surgeries and chemotherapy. “We spent more than 100 nights in the hospital,” Dana said. “It was madness. It was so traumatic.”
Brady remembers the hardship that his brother and his whole entire family had to go through ““It was hard,” Brady said. “I just remember going back and forth to the hospital and watching him go through all the surgeries.”
According to the Detroit Free Press “Surgeons attempted to reconstruct Brooks’ jaw twice, once using bone from his ribs and another time from his fibula. Then, in between all this, he had to have his gallbladder removed,” Dana said. According to the article, Brooks had his last surgery in December 2012. The cancer was gone, but they feared it would return, leaving years of uncertainty. So Brooks went through a series of tests and scans. Each time, the fears and questions came back: Was the cancer back? Would their lives be turned upside down again? It was a persistent fear that loomed over the entire family….” The article went on to say: “He [Brooks] had scans every three months, then every six months, and then we went every year,” Dana said. “And thank goodness we now have a plan where he only needs to go to the survival clinic every two years.”
Thankfully, according to the article, Brooks is considered cancer-free now, however the impact of his brothers diagnosis impacted how Brady plays the sport of baseball.
According to Dana, while Brooks was battling cancer, Brady turned his focus towards baseball saying: “He needed it,” Dana said.
For us Nats Fans, Brady might be making the pages of various sports outlets around DC, however, Brady has been in the national spotlight for years as he was a member of the Team USA 2015 12-U National Team that won gold at the World Championships in Taiwan. Additionally, Brady was a viral sensation when he was 15 years old, hitting a home run on the roof of a parking garage while playing for the US against Panama.
Brady will be playing college baseball at the University of Tennessee, and hopefully us Nats Fans will see him in a curly W soon. One thing is for sure, he knows how to deal with some real life obstacles, and we know that Bumpy Roads do Lead to Beautiful places, and it looks like the newest Nationals prospect is all too familiar with that.
