Finding Hope: How a Royals prospect fought through addiction and returned to baseball ·

14 Jun 2024, 00:00

It is a fall afternoon in 2016, and 21-year-old Carter Hope steers his Audi to a used-car dealership near Bixby, Okla. He is, in this moment, many things: A former professional baseball player who represents wasted talent; a son who can not hide his guilt and shame; a heroin addict fixated on his next high.

It has been two years since his life began to crumble, and just 12 months since the Kansas City Royals washed their hands of him. His body is frail, his skin a pale shade of white. He pulls the luxury car into a parking lot and walks inside.

For Carter, the Audi represents the final vestige of his previous life. He purchased it three years earlier, not long after receiving a $560,900 signing bonus from the Royals, the standard rate for a third-round pick. He would drive it for two seasons as a minor-league pitcher and a year as a junkie back home in Bixby. Now, he tells the men at the dealership that he needs a different car. Something cheaper.

He settles on a white Nissan Altima, leaving the Audi in the dealership parking lot. He’ll use the extra cash from the transaction to buy more heroin because, as he would say later, “My flesh just craved it.”

Like so many others in America, Carter followed a harrowing route to that point: An addiction to prescription opiates led to heroin and a devastating drug habit that siphoned hope from his life.

He would endure cravings so intense his skin crawled, the dry-heaves and cold sweats of withdrawal, the anger and shame from all those days spent getting high in rundown drug houses and gas station bathrooms. He would blow close to $500,000 on the drugs and lose a career in baseball.

In the darkest moments, he wished for sobriety, for the life he once had. He thought of his family, and the relationships ruined. He wondered if anyone could still love him.

His mother has tried to save him, taking him to a church near their home and finding him a mentor. That didn’t work. Neither did an injection of Vivitrol, a brand name of Naltrexone, which was supposed to curb the cravings. He just kept using, disappearing for days at a time.

Then he traded his Audi for a Nissan, and two weeks later, on a dark Oklahoma night, with heroin coursing through his veins and two friends in the car and nobody wearing seatbelts, he fell asleep at the wheel and slammed his Altima into a light pole at 75 mph. The car was totaled. Somehow, everyone walked away without a scratch.

“It was the last thing that happened before I knew I needed to change,” Carter says. “That was the moment that woke me up.”

It is a summer morning in 2018, and Carter is sitting in a quiet hotel room in Lynchburg, Va. He has to be at the field in a few hours; the monotony of minor-league baseball continues.

The Wilmington Blue Rocks, the Royals’ high-A affiliate, are visiting the Lynchburg Hillcats for a five-game series, and Carter pitched the previous night, throwing three scoreless innings in relief. And for the last hour, he has talked about his new life, the one that does not include drugs or nice cars or too much pressure.

Sometimes he’ll tell a minor-league teammate that he used to be a heroin addict, explaining why baseball feels less important now. But he is unsure how much of this he wants to share publicly. The details come out only after many meetings and only after he settles on the reasons why now is the time to share it all.

He wants people to know how his relationship with God came to save his life. He wants people to know a baseball organization offered a gift when he needed it most. And he believes that if people learn how dark his life got, perhaps they can find their own hope.

So how does it happen? Isn’t that the first question? How does a Texas high school student with a solid GPA and a 90-mph fastball come to need heroin so badly that his family locked up every valuable possession in a safe, lest they get pawned for more drugs?

If you start at the beginning, you will find a childhood like so many others. Baseball family in the heartland. Practices in the backyard. Mom and dad both giving baseball and softball lessons to supplement the family income.

“The boys played baseball 24-7,” says Barb Hope-Rea, Carter’s mother.

Photo courtesy of the Hope family

The boys, in this instance, are Carter and his two older brothers, Mason and Garrett. They grew up learning the game on a small field that sits adjacent to a water-retention pond not 150 feet from the family’s back door. That is where they practiced and hit and collected strawberries on hot summer afternoons.

The home was modest — 1,100 square feet in a suburb of Tulsa — yet the upbringing felt safely middle class. The public schools were good, the neighborhood safe. Money was tight at times as Carter’s father, Pat, a former Division I pitcher at Oklahoma State, bounced from job to job, finding work in carpet cleaning and coaching. Yet they always had enough for the exorbitant costs of travel baseball (even after Pat and Barb divorced).

“Thousands of dollars each year,” says Barb, who once earned a softball scholarship to Oklahoma State.

One summer, the family spent 32 straight days on the road, attending tournaments in Texas and Louisiana before heading straight to Colorado Springs. It felt like a worthy investment. Mason, the oldest, was a gifted athlete who would star at Broken Arrow High School in Oklahoma and get drafted by the Marlins in 2011. Garrett, the middle son, played football at West Virginia before returning to baseball and landing with the Dodgers. And then there was Carter, quiet and reserved, one year younger than Garrett, forced to play up a grade each summer so the Hope clan could follow just two teams.

“My shy one,” Barb says. “He didn’t realize he was as good as he was, because he was always in Garrett’s shadow.”

Carter came into his own at The Woodlands High School near Houston, after Barb remarried and his stepfather took a job at the University of Houston. He started at third base for a nationally ranked program, one that produced major leaguers Paul Goldschmidt and Jameson Taillon.

On a visit to Stillwater before his senior year, Oklahoma State pitching coach Rob Walton witnessed Carter’s strong arm and recommend a return to the mound. Carter obliged, and when he returned to The Woodlands for his final season, he tossed a no-hitter in his first high school start.

“With pitching,” Carter says, “everything kind of happened all at once.”

He was 6-foot-3 and growing into his body and could touch 90 mph. The scouts that flocked to The Woodlands saw the potential for more.

“The classic projectable high school arm,” says Royals assistant general manager J.J. Picollo. “There was reason to believe there were better days ahead.”

Still, Carter figured college would be fun. He pictured a return to Oklahoma. He liked the Oklahoma State program and its proximity to family. Then one day in June 2013, he was on a bus on the way to a Texas state playoff game, and his cell phone buzzed. The Royals had selected him in the third round; scouting director Lonnie Goldberg offered him $560,900 to join the organization.

He took the deal. The next day, he pitched The Woodlands to a 2013 Class 5A state championship.

Said Barb: “He finally found out he was pretty good.”

Photo courtesy of the Hope family

It’s the summer of 2013, just weeks after the draft, and Carter is in Arizona preparing for his first taste of professional baseball. He will pitch for the Royals’ rookie-level affiliate in Surprise, Ariz., and begin his march to the major leagues. Then a club official calls. Carter has failed a drug test. It’s marijuana.

The Royals are concerned, yet they chalk it up to youthful indiscretion, immaturity left over from high school. And then it happens again. And again. Carter is 18 years old and has a car and money and freedom. He struggles to focus on baseball.

He scuffles in rookie ball, then returns to Arizona the next year. He keeps failing drug tests, and the Royals intervene. They recommend a rehab program. Carter agrees. He always agrees. He sits in front of a team official or somebody enlisted to help. He nods his head and says he’ll change. But he doesn’t.

“The Royals did everything they could to help me out and work with me at becoming a better man,” Carter says. “I was just immature and not ready for what I was thrown into.”

He carried a 3.71 ERA at rookie-level Burlington that summer in 2014. It felt like a breakthrough. Then the wheels fell off. He returned home in the offseason and began experimenting with more drugs. One day that winter, a close friend introduced him to OxyContin, a brand-name version of Oxycodone, a prescription opioid used to treat pain. He had never abused prescription pills before, but he found pleasure in the drug, in the euphoric state that greets first-time users. He’d smoked marijuana for years and never felt physically addicted, he says. He didn’t realize how addictive the painkiller could be.

The habit started slowly, a recreational diversion. Then it exploded. He found a drug supplier in Arizona and ramped up his usage. He showed up to extended spring training workouts still high on prescription opiates. At the peak of his habit, he spent $300 per day on the pills.

One day, back in Texas, Barb opened her son’s Wells Fargo bank statement. She saw thousands of dollars in withdrawals from his account. She believed Carter was gambling, one of two vices, along with alcohol, that once troubled his father. She called her son to make sure he was OK. Carter concealed the habit.

“It was just money,” Barb says. “I couldn’t do anything about it. He was of age.”

Carter made just 14 appearances that summer, never advancing beyond rookie-level stints in Arizona and Idaho. He recorded a 6.04 ERA while the drugs ravaged his body, stunting his development. The Royals tried a rehab program. They waited three seasons for habits to change. Then they waited a few more months, sending a club official to evaluate Carter in early 2016. He was still in horrible shape, abusing opiates regularly.

“I was not in the right state to talk,” Carter says. “I had been doing the opiates. I didn’t look right. I wasn’t ready to be in a spring-training situation. And I think they saw that.”

The Royals released Carter about 10 days later. Club officials told him it was time to focus on his life. He agreed, of course. He always did. He returned to Oklahoma, 21 years old and addicted to opiates and hemorrhaging hundreds of dollars each day.

Photo courtesy of the Hope family

One summer day in 2016, Barb sits down at her computer and reads another story on American’s opioid epidemic. She can’t understand any of it. How can so many young people be addicted? How can so many lives be ruined? And why isn’t more being done to help?

She studies the numbers: more than 33,000 dead from opioid overdoses in 2015; nearly a million people out of work. She has learned more about drugs than she ever wanted to. She wonders why there are so many prescriptions for drugs like OxyContin and so few clinics to help people get clean.

She logs onto her Facebook account and reads story after story of kids living on the street. She used to judge those people, thought they’d given up on life. That they didn’t care.

“I never had compassion for people that lived on the streets,” she says. And then she thinks about the son in the other room of the house. “There’s nothing like watching your kid slowly kill himself and not be able to do anything about that.”

Earlier that year, Barb and her husband, Mike, moved back to Oklahoma from Texas. She wanted to be closer to her grandparents and around old friends. But she also had another objective: She wanted her son to remember who he was.

Unbeknownst to her, Carter had started using heroin. His preferred method was smoking — he would use a lighter and a tube of foil, sucking up the fumes. It was harder and cheaper, yet provided the same high. His addiction was worsening. His anger intense. His eyes, the ones Barb describes as “wild eyes,” had lost their spark. He put holes in walls and spewed profanities. He rarely smiled or laughed or showed any emotion. He moved in and out of his mother’s house.

Barb and Mike had a fourth son, Jett, in the home, and they worried about letting Carter hang around him. One day in 2016, Carter and a friend called Barb and Mike, who were at a youth baseball tournament in Florida. Carter said he wanted to get clean, that he needed Barb to come home. There was an urgency in his voice. Barb knew her son just needed money.

“They feel like they’re going to die if they don’t have (drugs),” Barb says. “That’s when it gets really frightening.”

As summer turned to fall in 2016, Barb crafted an unofficial plan. She took away Carter’s cell phone and discouraged him from driving. She stopped leaving her purse out. She worried he would pawn any valuable item in the home, so she rid the home of valuable items and stored personal possessions in a safe. She would later say it was like “living in prison” in her own home.

And yet, the drugs still found a way inside. Deliveries landed in the mailbox. They were placed inside the gas tank cover of a car out front.

Barb dragged Carter to Sunday services at the Assembly of God Church in nearby Broken Arrow, Okla. She brought him to small group dinners on Sunday evening with other members from the church. She introduced him to a man named Paul Hodgson, the husband of an old friend who had mentored troubled kids before.

One morning that fall, Paul asked Carter to breakfast. They met at an Einstein Bros. Bagels not far from their home. They talked for close to an hour, about life and drugs and what Paul called “God’s grace.” And then Paul asked Carter three questions.

Are you happy with what you’ve lost?

Are you happy with where you are?

What would you give to get back to before?

Carter knew the answer to all three. He started meeting Paul for breakfast each week and was intrigued by the idea of redemption and forgiveness. Sometimes they talked for an hour about God. Sometimes they shed tears.

“Nobody likes to be accountable for choices that they’ve made,” Paul told Carter. “But if you’re OK with that, I will jump into trenches with you.”

One morning at breakfast, Paul told Carter he was not alone. Paul shared his own story of recovery, how an addiction to pornography crippled his life for close to two decades. It was only after he had started sharing the story with friends that he felt healed. Carter listened and felt something he hadn’t in years: hope.

Carter now had an ally in the fight, but the drugs were still winning. His body couldn’t stave off the cravings. His mind couldn’t focus on anything else. “If I wasn’t high, then I felt sick.” His bank account was dwindling, and he needed more money, so he traded in the Audi.

The crash came next. He spent the holidays in a fog. He wondered: How did one choice lead to another? How did he end up here?

He turned up at Assembly of God Church on New Year’s Day, slipping into a pew with his family, sobbing as he walked up to the front of the service.

“I was exhausted, and I was tired,” Carter says. “I broke down.”

It is a winter morning in 2017, and Carter sits in his bedroom. He pulls up a video of a sermon on his computer. He spends the morning reading the Bible.

It is easy to say you want to be sober — it is harder to follow through. He takes what he calls a “pause on my life.” He stays in the house. He rids himself of a phone. He spends his days reading scripture, watching sermons and bettering his relationships with his mother and stepdad.

He eschews a traditional in-patient rehab program. He takes only Suboxone, a prescription medication used to treat opioid withdrawal symptoms. He finds strength in the idea of forgiveness.

“I built up a lot of guilt and shame from everything that I was doing,” he says. “And just to know that I was forgiven and God loved me right there where I was — that’s kind of the thought that I fall back on.”

When he was not at home, he joined his brother, Garrett, still in the Dodgers’ system, for workouts at nearby Broken Arrow High School. He started throwing again, and day by day his arm strength returned.

He wasn’t worried about his lost career.

“I was more concerned about being a man of God and living a pure life,” he says.

Still, Garrett asked a Dodgers scout to come by and watch Carter throw a bullpen in the weeks before spring training. Two months later, a Brewers scout dropped by to watch. Both workouts went fine, but neither team was interested.

In early June, Carter, still clean, told his mother he wanted to return to the Royals. Barb wondered if he was getting his hopes up. He began working out with the baseball team at Broken Arrow High.

“He was a guy that was really humble and trying to get his life on track,” says Shannon Dobson, the team’s coach. “He was just really relishing the opportunity to get another chance.”

That chance seemed unlikely, but then one day in June, Carter received a text from Scott Sharp, an assistant general manager with the Royals. Sharp was in some clubhouse and heard a player utter Carter’s name. It was out of the blue, but he wondered how his life was going.

Carter told him about his changes, how his life was different. A few days later, Sharp was driving home from Arkansas and decided to call.

“He sounded awesome,” Sharp says. “He sounded like a changed human being. And he wanted to play.”

Two days later, Sharp was in Wilmington, Del., visiting a minor-league affiliate, and ran into J.J. Picollo, another assistant GM. They talked about Carter, and Picollo realized he was about to head to Oklahoma for another trip.

“The timing of it just worked perfectly,” Sharp says. “If J.J.’s not flying to Oklahoma … if I hadn’t talked to Carter just two days before.”

That kismet resulted in a meeting at Broken Arrow High, where Carter threw a bullpen to a high school catcher. Picollo listened to his story, and Dobson pulled the executive off to the side and said: “If it makes any difference, I’ll vouch for this kid.”

One week later, Carter was back at home. His mother and stepfather were grilling burgers out back on a warm summer night in Oklahoma. His phone rang. He was seven months sober. He was winning the battle. He was in tears as he rushed outside to deliver the news to his mother.

“I’m going back to play for the Royals.”

Photo courtesy of the Hope family

It is a morning in early August, and Carter, 23, is back in Wilmington, having just completed a disappointing stretch for the Blue Rocks. He has allowed 12 earned runs in his last three outings, including a season-high seven in two innings on July 19. It’s the kind of performance that doesn’t bother him like it once did.

Sure, he’s competitive. The losses sting. But one year after finding sobriety and signing back as a minor-league free agent, baseball feels different now.

“I didn’t turn my life around in order to play baseball again,” he says.

Carter lost two years to his addiction, but he is sanguine, hopeful. He has embraced proper nutrition and a detailed workout regimen. He’s organized chapel sessions in the minor leagues. He encourages teammates to stay off social media, to be more present during the season. Royals officials marvel at the transformation.

“He believes he’s got bigger things to do beyond baseball when it’s over,” Barb says.

Last winter, one year after being devastated by addiction, Carter took part in the Royals’ academic program at Glendale Community College outside Phoenix, finishing with some of the best grades in the session. A few months later, he survived his first spring training in three years and earned a promotion from low-A Lexington to Wilmington after starting the season with six promising appearances.

“Some would say that’s not that big of a deal,” he says of his status in Class A ball. “But just looking back a year ago, it’s pretty miraculous.”

Sometimes, friends will lament what he lost: Every penny of the signing bonus, the Audi, the years of baseball, his health. He has a different perspective.

“If I could have done it quicker, I would have,” he says. “Because I’m so much happier now.”

He still dreams of pitching in the majors, but he has a different perspective now, a different purpose and vision. When the Royals invited him back into the organization last year, Picollo and Sharp hoped his story could serve as a positive influence for the rest of their players. They are an organization that believes in second chances, and Carter fit the mold.

Maybe his two years of hell can help others. Maybe he can reach just one. Maybe this is the start of something.

That’s Carter’s hope.

(Top illustration: Mitchell MacNaughton)

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Finding Hope: How a Royals prospect fought through addiction and returned to baseball

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