BURLINGTON, Vt. — Having coached college baseball for 30 years, Pete Wilk seemed a good choice to manage the Vermont Lake Monsters in their inaugural 2021 season in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League.
It’s a summer league, baseball played the way it was meant to be, on warm nights, with wooden bats.
Wilk delivered immediately. The Lake Monsters, composed of college players from all over the country, finished first in 2021 and won the playoffs. Last year, they finished first again, before losing in the playoff finals.
Wilk and the Lake Monsters were looking forward to continuing their winning ways this season but in January, after experiencing some vision problems, Wilk went for an MRI.
The doctor called him with the results.
“We found something,” the doctor told him. “It’s a tumor.”
The diagnosis was glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer.
“Hearing those words will change your life in an instant,” Wilk said.
His first thought was not of himself, but of Erin, his wife, and their daughters, 12-year-old Reese and 8-year-old Casey.
As news of his illness spread, a circle of friends that began in Barrington, R.I., where he grew up, to Virginia where he has lived most of his life while coaching at Georgetown, and to so many stops in New England and elsewhere along the way, was determined to help.
A friend told him about Dr. Henry Friedman, a neuro-oncologist at the Duke Cancer Center Brain Tumor Clinic in North Carolina.
Friedman and Wilk hit it off immediately.
“Dr. Friedman had done some background research on me,” Wilk said. “He shook my hand, gave me a hug, and said, ‘Guys like you beat this.’ Other doctors had told me, ‘We can treat this.’ Friedman said, ‘We can beat this.’ What a difference a consonant makes.”
As Wilk, 58, was about to begin his grueling treatment at Duke, a group of high school buddies took it upon themselves to accompany him. They took turns, ferrying Wilk to and from Duke, staying at a local hotel with him.
“There were more volunteers than we needed,” Erin Wilk said.
Bill Gorman, one of those Barrington High School buddies, was best man at Erin and Pete Wilk’s wedding. He wasn’t surprised so many friends stepped up.
“If you knew Pete,” he said, “you’d understand why everybody wants to help.”
Gorman said Wilk has an uncanny ability to stay in contact with, and care deeply about, the people he’s met at every stage of his life.
The life of a baseball coach is a nomadic one. But Wilk made meaningful, lasting relationships at every stop. And, now, in his greatest time of need, everybody’s showing up, for him.
Wilk played baseball at Rollins College under coach Boyd Coffie, and considers Coffie the greatest influence in his life.
Coffie saw baseball as a metaphor for life.
“He taught us life lessons, through a game,” Wilk said. “You had to work hard. Be resilient. Be a good teammate. Life’s a team game. And remember this is supposed to be fun.”
His years as an assistant coach at Boston University and Harvard, then 20 years as head coach at Georgetown, only strengthened Wilk’s belief that his job is not to produce good ballplayers as much as it is to produce good young men.
“Baseball is a game based on failure. Even the very best fail more often than they succeed,” he said. “How you react to failure is what defines you. It is the same with life. Something goes wrong every day. How do you react?”
The reaction of the Lake Monsters organization, their fans, and the wider baseball community in New England to Wilk’s illness has been overwhelming. The team is selling “Dig In For Pete” wristbands and hosting a tribute game for Wilk, to raise money for his family. The Wilks plan to donate half of the proceeds to cancer research. A Go Fund Me page has raised some $90,000 for the Wilk family.
Pete Wilk got emotional reading through the list of donors. It included umpires and other coaches, host families who house the out-of-state players, guys who played for him at BU and Harvard.
There are seven players on this year’s team who played for Wilk here in 2021 and 2022. They learned of his situation a few months ago when he sent them a group text, explaining he had cancer and that he was determined to beat it.
Tyler Favretto, a catcher from Quebec, said the veteran players were shaken.
“Pete does more than coach baseball. He teaches us about life, how to handle setbacks, how to pick each other up,” Favretto said. “If we come out of this experience a better person, that’s what matters to him.”
Last week, when Wilk returned to the dugout for the first time this season for a game here against the New Britain Bees, Favretto and the other players tried to keep their emotions in check, because they wanted more than anything to win it for him.
With the Lake Monsters up 7-3, first baseman Antonio Perrotta gobbled up a ground ball and stepped on first to end the game. Favretto approached Perrotta to retrieve the game ball, and was horrified when Perrotta wheeled toward the stands and tossed it to a fan.
Favretto raced into the dugout and grabbed two balls. Then he jumped into the stands and found the fan who caught the ball. That guy said he had given it to a boy. Favretto tracked down the boy, who gladly traded the ball for two others.
The stadium was nearly empty when the players gathered around Wilk.
“He told us, ‘This game could be taken away from you in a heartbeat.’ He told us to appreciate life,” Favretto said. “It got pretty emotional.”
It got even more emotional when Favretto stepped forward and handed Wilk the game ball.
On Wednesday, Pete Wilk got to the ballpark five hours before the first pitch. A group of players was practicing bunts.
“We can’t buy a run lately,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
This is what he loves. The smell of the grass. The snap of a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. The crack of wood during batting practice.
“Don’t Stop Believing,” the song by Journey, played over the stadium loudspeaker, and Wilk nodded and smiled knowingly.
“I think of Lou Gehrig,” he said, referring to the New York Yankees great who died young of a disease, ALS, that now bears Gehrig’s name. Forced to retire because of his illness, Gehrig gave an iconic speech at Yankee Stadium, saying he felt like the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
“I know it’s a cliche,” Pete Wilk said, his arms folded, watching his players go through their pregame routine, “but I do feel like one of the luckiest people on earth. I never would have gained the perspective I have in the last few months if I didn’t have this thing in my head. Guys from 30 years ago, telling me the impact I had on their lives. People I don’t even know trying to help my family. To experience such love is a gift.
“I said to Erin, this is an opportunity to show our girls what toughness, resilience, compassion, empathy and love mean. All the things you need in life. I feel blessed.”
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.