My Memory of a Miracle at Midnight

I recently wrote about a supernatural event that occurred at the exact moment the Florida Marlins stunned the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series. At the time, I was a young baseball writer sent by the Tampa Tribune to cover the game. There, I found myself elbow-to-elbow between two seasoned baseball writers from New York and Kansas City. As the scoreboard clock inched toward midnight, the overstuffed Pro Player Stadium press box had become a tinderbox of worried writers. The looming deadline weighed on the shoulders of the more than 300 reporters. Yet, amid the tension, everyone knew they were witnessing something extraordinary—a four-hour, nine-minute masterpiece of nearly flawless baseball, now entering the bottom of the eleventh inning, where the bases were loaded with two outs.

At exactly 11:59pm, veteran Indians pitcher Charles Nagy delivered an off-speed pitch to an emerging star from Barranquilla, Colombia. Edgar Renteria, the free-swinging Marlins infielder, was known for chasing pitches outside the strike zone, and Nagy anticipated he would go after his curveball he intended to break just off the plate. Sure enough, Renteria lunged at the pitch, reaching down to flick his bat at the tailing curve.

He made contact. The ball sailed softly back toward the mound, heading straight for Nagy. In that moment, time seemed to stop for both the city of Miami and the 67,204 fans in attendance.

On any other night, Nagy may have reacted just a fraction faster, gloved the liner, and casually dropped the ball onto the mound for the final out. The bases-loaded drama would have ended, and the 12th inning would have begun minutes later. But this night was different. On this night, the ball skimmed the top of Nagy’s glove, slipping past him.

And on any other night, if Indians second baseman Tony Fernandez had shaded just a step or two to his right, he would have snared the soft liner on a hop and flicked it to shortstop Omar Vizquel for the force out.

But baseball is a game of margins, fractions, and inches, where baseballs that graze gloves and infielders who are a half-step away, in the grand scheme, means nothing.

In the supernatural realm, Renteria’s hit had to find a hole. Nagy had to be a half beat slow reacting with his glove hand. And Fernandez needed to be shaded a step away from making the play.

Because the chicken had to run at midnight.

As the ball rolled like a killing grenade to Indians center fielder Marquis Grissom, Marlins infielder Craig Counsell raced for home. The Marlins had done the unthinkable; they took down the favored and cocksure Indians in a World Series classic that Miamians still bring to mind in Cuban sandwich shops and Little Havana coffee houses. 

But only a few of those baseball fans know of the miracle that emerged when both hands of the clock pointed to heaven, when a dead girl spoke into the riot of noise—when Counsell, the “chicken-man”—came home to score the winning run.

In the architecture of miracles—and their confluence with incomprehensibility, meaningfulness, and arrangement in time—the deceased teenager, Amy Donnelly, broke every record that October night. At the exact moment Counsell leapt into the air and into the arms of celebratory Marlins teammates, Amy seemed to have traveled through the mysteries of time and dimension to drop a two-sentence postcard that landed onto Pro Player Stadium like a lazy infield fly: Attaboy dad. Don’t stop.

Donnelly was in the midst of turning from a life of sin.

The miracle story came to mind last week when someone told me the movie Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition was going to be re-released and make its world premiere on EWTN just in time for the upcoming baseball season. In the film, Rich Donnelly tells the incomprehensible story of how his daughter managed to speak to him four years after dying from brain cancer.

Even though Champions of Faith debuted seventeen years ago, I can still remember nearly every frame. It was the “go-to” movie for my son, Sean, and me—our repeated viewing of it became a ritual. We watched as some of the best players in Major League Baseball spoke honestly about their devotion to Jesus Christ and their Catholic faith. There was nothing overly sentimental or preachy about it; in fact, there’s a fistfight, high drama, and even a death in the hour-long film. But to a man, the players came across as well-formed catechists, sharing their faith with clarity and conviction.

Although journalists are taught to never insert themselves into the stories they’re assigned to cover, I’m going to break the rule here. Catholicism, baseball, and writing, which I began to love since just after leaving the crib, intersect in this mystifying story. That game was among the most thrilling and challenging I had covered as a sports writer, where my 1A front-page story made it to the night desk a minute or two minutes before deadline.

These years later, I’ve kept the story I wrote that night. I didn’t write of the miracle, though. Who could have known Donnelly’s tears—the tears that fell until dawn—were not those of a happy victor? Who could have known what happened to Rich Donnelly out there by second base amid the Miamians’ cacophony?

“I was praying no one would ask me to speak afterward in the clubhouse,” he said. “We had won it all, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t stop crying.”

This is what I recall about the remarkable day, and some of what led up to it.

Before dawn on October 26, 1997, I left my home in St. Pete Beach, Florida, and steered my Toyota southward, where I would merge onto a long stretch of highway, the lonesome streak of bleached asphalt known as Alligator Alley that would take me eighteen hours later to a miracle.

In my 20s, a single man, I had already given my heart to the Florida girl who would one day be my wife. Just down the road was the Harp & Thistle, a low-ceilinged pub where most nights the sounds of fiddles, tin whistles, and old emigration songs filled the skies and made Irish incense of the salt air on the other side of the door of the waterside pub. The neighborhood bar was a stone’s throw from St. John Vianney, the parish that had welcomed me—an outsider—like family. Irish-born Pastor Fr. Murphy and his congregation invited me to bull roasts, potlucks, and evenings of Adoration. Before long, I was teaching a CCD class and joining a men’s group, where we sometimes discussed our faith over a Guinness down the road.

What more could I ask for? This: I got paid to cover Major League Baseball, the game I’d always loved.

When newspapers still mattered in America, I found myself packed shoulder-to-shoulder in sardine-tight press boxes with a few hundred other beat writers, covering some of the greatest games in history. I spoke with Ken Griffey Jr. in the bowels of a stadium, asking him what it felt like to hit three home runs before the end of the fifth inning. I’ve covered Michael Jordan as a baseball and basketball player, and wrote of the night Cal Ripken pulled off his uniform for the last time, the night when it seemed all of Baltimore cried. I sat directly behind the basket and baseline and listened to the crashing of bodies—like water buffaloes at war—when two extraordinarily muscled 7-foot-1 men, Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon, warred like gladiators in the NBA Finals. I ended up covering some of the baseball games of my aging hero, Eddie Murray.

And I saw the chicken run at midnight.

Shortly before her death in 1993, when Amy Donnelly was a senior in high school and dying from brain cancer, she tried to cheer her father up after his Pittsburgh Pirates—where he served as third base coach—lost to the Atlanta Braves in the NLCS.

Weakened by chemotherapy, Amy strangely asked, “Hey dad, when you get down in the crouch and there’s a runner on second, and you have your hands cupped and you’re screaming at him,” as Donnelly retells it. “What are you telling those guys, ‘The chicken runs at midnight or what’?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Where’d you come up with that one?’ But that was Amy. That phrase became like a family motto, and when she died, we wrote it down on her grave.”

Four years later, Counsell took off for home at the stroke of midnight. The unheralded, wiry bit-part player strangely held his bat high in the air, moving it up and down—while often flapping his left arm—while settling into his stance. Batters often use peculiar habits to find their rhythm before a pitch. As it regards Counsell’s odd batting idiosyncrasy, that chicken-flapping arm means everything in this story. Without it, this story wouldn’t be.

Moments after Counsell scored—when both hands of the scoreboard clock pointed to heaven—Donnelly heard his son Tim scream, “Dad … Dad … look,” as he pointed to the scoreboard, tears streaming down his face.

Donnelly stood perplexed.

“Dad … Behind you. … Look at the clock!”

He turned. It was midnight.

My God, Donnelly thought, a rush of memory flooding his mind, Craig Counsel—“the chicken-man”! He’d run at midnight!

Donnelly collapsed in a heap onto the field. Amy’s prophecy had come true. He credits his daughter’s intervention with helping to turn a life of selfishness and sin around.

“How did she know?” Donnelly asked last week. “How could she have known the chicken would run at midnight?”

Ten years later the story behind the miracle was revealed to me in Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition, where Donnelly joined with star players and future Hall of Famers—Tom Glavine, Carlos Beltran, Mike Piazza, Mike Sweeney, Jeff Suppan, Ivan Rodriguez, Mark Pryor, and many others—to speak with candor and ease on aspects of their Catholic faith.

When I reached out to Rich Donnelly last week to discuss the revival of the film this many years later, he was brought to tears when I brought up Amy. “There were times, I know, when she hated me for my mistakes and wrong choices, but all she ever did was forgive me,” he said. “Do you want to know why Amy is a miracle worker? Because she worked to change every single thing about me. She was the one who put me on the right path—and I thank her every day for it.”

When I told him I was at Game 7, he asked if I saw him sprawled out on the field, weeping. I told him, “No, I was just writing to make a deadline.” I wanted to talk about the game that night, but he just wanted to talk about how Amy saved him from a life of sin. Today he is a daily communicant and keeps close to the sacraments at his parish in Ohio.

I’ve thought about the trajectory of my own life since that game 28 years ago. I was a quiet Catholic then, reluctant to openly share my faith. But then the miracle was revealed to me for the first time as I watched Champions of Faith. My son Sean was just six then, sitting next to me on a couch. I was shocked speechless by what I had not known that night out on the field. The power and beauty of the real story was so overwhelming that I just sat speechless as tears flowed. We didn’t know, of course, that I would have a brain aneurysm two years later and be made to face my own supernatural adventure.

Like Donnelly, I, too, was given a second chance after a failed brain surgery. My miracle went like this: A priest named Fr. Jim Stack prayed over me in my neuro-ICU and the arteriovenous malformation and blood and fluids that had been drowning my brain suddenly disappeared.

Since being blessed with a chance to glimpse the eternal, nothing has been the same for Donnelly and me. We’ve grown closer to God through our respective supernatural events. We’ve surrendered to Him, and our lives have been turned around and enhanced. We have fallen fully into the Father’s embrace, where we hope one day he’ll wave us home. And there we expect to find Amy, reminding us of how, on a humid Miami night, Heaven’s window opened and the chicken ran at midnight.

Editor’s Note: Tune into EWTN’s first-ever broadcast of Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition this Saturday, March 29th, at 8pm ET, or Monday, March 31st, at 10:30pm PST on the EWTN television network, via its streaming platform, or on the EWTN app.

To purchase Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition DVDs for friends and family, visit Sophia’s religious catalogue, or own the movie on Amazon Prime.

Photo from MLB.com