“It’s time.”
Brian Walters knew exactly what that text message meant.
It was from his older brother Andrew. A text that was years in the making.
“It didn’t feel real,” said Brian, a redshirt junior for the Hurricanes who was sitting in his Wednesday evening kinesiology class when he received that fateful message. “I was shellshocked.”
Since they were little kids, the two brothers fantasized of making it to the major leagues.
Now, Andrew was about to live out that childhood dream.
“When my Triple-A manager Andy Tracy told me, I had a little flashback to when I was a little kid,” he said. “All the things I watched on TV, all the guys I looked up to, it was finally going to happen to me. It was just an overwhelming amount of emotion. I didn’t really know how to think. I froze up.”
After collecting himself, Walters was congratulated by surrounding teammates and staff.
But he had to share the news with two more people. His parents.
Mere minutes before the Columbus Clippers — the Triple-A affiliate of the Cleveland Guardians — were supposed to take the field, Andrew called his dad.
“I saw the phone ring and I told my wife, ‘This is the call,’” Kyle Walters said. “He asked me what I thought about going to Cleveland tomorrow. We celebrated and I just told him how proud I was of him.”
While Andrew packed up his belongings in Columbus, his family worked on the quickest way to fly across the country.
With his bags stuffed and his parents’ plane tickets booked, Andrew hit the road.
As he approached downtown Cleveland, he couldn’t help but picture what the following day would entail.
“When I first saw the stadium lights on from outside the city, it was pretty cool,” Andrew said. “I didn’t get a great night’s sleep. I was too amped up. I showed up to the field the next day. Adrenaline took me through that day.”
That day — Sept. 12, 2024 — turned into one the Walters family will remember forever.
With the Guardians in a close game with the Tampa Bay Rays, Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt turned to Walters to make his MLB Debut.
He had seen it countless times on TV. But now, he was about to run through that bullpen door himself.
“My body was fully ready to throw, but I was nervous. Maybe I didn’t show it, but I was nervous. My heart was beating fast. I couldn’t feel the ball. I was definitely really amped. I just had to figure out…
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