Mike Celizic

It is a death in the family, except in this case the Angels can’t take a week off from work to grieve. They will take one day off to try to cope with the loss of a young and talented teammate, and then they must somehow carry on.

I have no idea how anyone does that. The loss of a parent is traumatic enough. This is the loss of more than a teammate and friend. It is the loss of a brother.

When players talk about a team as a family, it’s not just a metaphor. Players spend more of their waking hours with each other than with their real families. From February through September, they live together, work together, party together, travel together, laugh together.

And today, cry together.

Young men like Nick Adenhart aren’t supposed to die, not at the age of 22, not in the first bloom of what everyone expected would be a long and brilliant career. We know that such things happen, but we never expect death to snatch from our midst those whom we think to be invincible.

And when the unthinkable happens, when a man who reportedly had a history of drunken driving runs a red light and snuffs out the lives of two young men and a woman, we recoil in shock and horror. It is impossible to process at first, the burden of grief clinging to us like a giant leech sucking at our souls.

The Angels have had all too much experience with tragedy. Adenhart is the fourth member of the team to die in a traffic incident since 1972: utility infielder Chico Ruiz in '72, pitching prospect Bruce Heinbechner in 1974, and star outfielder Lymon Bostock, who was shot and killed in 1978 while sitting in his car at a traffic light.

And there have been other Angel tragedies. In 1989, Donnie Moore, who gave up the home run that denied the 1986 team a trip to the World Series, shot and wounded his wife and killed himself. And in 1992, the team bus crashed in New Jersey, seriously injuring a number of players.

Slideshow   Remembering Nick Adenhart A look at some of the events occuring after the tragic death of the Angels pitcher and two others.

And now another team of Angels must cope with another loss. Adenhart had been a great talent coming out of high school, but he had elbow problems and underwent Tommy John surgery before his professional career began. Four years later, he had won a spot in the Angels’ rotation. Wednesday, he pitches six scoreless innings in his first start of 2009. Within hours, he would be dead.

The Angels have canceled tonight’s game, but they can not cancel a week or a month or the season. They must return to work almost immediately and somehow find a way to make a mere game meaningful in the face of death.

These Angels are still one of the best teams in baseball. Eventually their thoughts will — and must — focus on winning their division, the ALCS and the World Series.

“This is real life,” team leader and center fielder Torii Hunter said in a statement. “This isn’t about baseball. That could have been any baseball player out there. That could have been any of us.”

That’s a sobering thought. Somehow the team must fight through it with it comes time to go back to work. They can begin to cope by dedicating this season to their fallen teammate, as they surely will. But whatever they do, at some level, they have no choice in the matter. They must play on. The season is still at stake.

It may not seem to mean that much right now, not in the face of death. And it is at times like these that we always say this puts life in perspective and shows us what really matters.

Fortunately, these realizations don’t last, because what matter most in life is life itself. That means dealing with success and failure, joy and sorry, life and death. It means picking ourselves up and carrying on with all those things we tell ourselves don’t really matter but which also make up the bulk of our lives.

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For the Angels, that is playing baseball. It is the job they dreamed of when they were kids, the pursuit they have built their lives around, the thing that defines who they are. What makes it so extraordinarily difficult is that they do not work at a job where they can go to work and ease themselves back into their routine and function at half capacity while they fight to come to grips with their loss. There are no half measures in sports. They must somehow absorb the loss of Nick Adenhart, friend, teammate and family member, and while they do that, they must play an exceedingly difficult and uncompromising game at the very limit of their skills.

Good luck to them. They’re going to need it in the coming days and weeks and months.

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