Mark Hamilton had been around long enough to learn that on struggling affiliates, the minor league free agents are usually the first to go. The Gwinnett Braves, Atlanta’s Triple-A farm team, languished through most of the summer in 2014. Hamilton joined them over the offseason, three years after earning a World Series ring as an occasional backup first baseman on the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals. Hamilton was holding his own, but wasn’t playing often enough. As July came and his 30th birthday neared, he began to sense the end was near. When Braves manager Brian Snitker called him into his office, Hamilton knew it was over.
Snitker assured him that everything would be OK.
Hamilton told him he would go to medical school.
“Looking back on it, I’m not sure if he knew how serious I was about that,” Hamilton said recently in a phone conversation. “But we can see how it all turned out.”
Nearly six years later, Hamilton has a medical degree from the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and will soon enter the field of interventional radiology. In June, he will begin a six-year residency program that begins with Hamilton serving as a resident physician working the in-patient floors at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and North Shore University Hospital in New York, which sits at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. At least one of his first 12 months will be dedicated exclusively to the intensive care unit.
“The timing,” Hamilton said, “is very interesting.”
Hamilton’s grandfather, Ralph, played for the Fort Wayne Pistons right before they joined the NBA. His father, Stanley, is a renowned pathologist whose work has taken him from John Hopkins University in Baltimore to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to, now, City of Hope in Los Angeles. Hamilton grew up with the dream of becoming a professional baseball player and then a doctor. He was inspired by Bobby Brown, the former New York Yankees third baseman who played on five World Series champions and also became a successful cardiologist.
Hamilton vowed that he would pivot to medicine if he wasn’t an established major league player at age 30. After being informed of his release on July 26 — three days before turning 30 — he gathered up his belongings, said his goodbyes and drove home. The first call went to his wife. The second went to a woman named Sue Bower, who at the time was the assistant athletic director at Tulane University, where Hamilton spent three years studying cell and molecular biology. He asked about finishing his undergraduate studies and was told that classes would resume in six days. The next phase of his life was suddenly in motion.
Had his release come only a few days later, Hamilton would have been heading into his final year of medical school at this moment, which means his first few months in the field probably wouldn’t have coincided with a worldwide pandemic.
“I look back and I have no regrets,” Hamilton said. “It all worked out for a reason.”
Hamilton’s wife, Lauren, was born and raised in New York City. They met during his sophomore year at Tulane and often talked about the possibility of moving to New York so that she could be close to family. The couple now has two daughters, ages 9 and 6.
“For me, the anxiety is more about maintaining safety at home,” Hamilton said. “This isn’t something you want to bring home with you.”
Nearly 3 million coronavirus cases have sprung up worldwide, resulting in nearly 190,000 deaths. Since spreading to the United States, the virus has forced businesses to close, sports to shut down and hundreds of millions of Americans to remain home. Of the near-50,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S., nearly a quarter have taken place in New York City. Cases are finally starting to drop there; the curve is flattening. But Hamilton still expects to be treating mostly COVID-positive patients when he begins his residency program in a few weeks — with experts fearing another, perhaps stronger, outbreak this winter.
“In the United States, we are very sheltered from infectious disease in general,” Hamilton said. “I think we’ve been fortunate to not have any major outbreaks, major pandemics. I guess the most recent one that we can point to is the swine flu in 2009, so we’re a little bit sheltered in thinking that these are problems that the rest of the world experiences and we don’t as much. Obviously we found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of it this time.
“It’s been very eye-opening. But I wanted to go into medicine because I really enjoyed caring for people. I enjoy being able to help others when they’re in their darkest hour, when they need somebody to both support them from a medical side and an emotional side. And I’m definitely going to be able to do that in my first year.”
The two hospitals where Hamilton, 35, will serve his residency program were exceedingly busy before the COVID-19 outbreak. Other illnesses don’t magically disappear in the midst of a pandemic. A major present-day challenge, Hamilton said, is managing two distinct patient populations amid a crisis that has at times overwhelmed America’s health care system. The initial concerns of overcrowding hospitals and running out of ventilators and having to decide which patients to treat have started to dissipate.
Now difficult decisions must be made to balance the need to limit the spread of this virus and the desire to return to normalcy amid economic concerns that have sent some out into the streets in protest.
Hamilton, like many of his colleagues, warns against the latter thought.
“What we’ve seen in New York here is very different than what people have seen in other parts of the country,” he said. “It’s understandable for people to be frustrated. There’s this kind of cognitive dissonance where what they’re seeing on the news does not match what they’re seeing in their own communities. What I would say is people should feel really thankful that that’s the case. And if anything, that shows the steps and the measures that we took worked; it doesn’t show that it’s not necessary.”
Hamilton resides in the Whitestone section of Queens, where empty streets and bustling ambulances are now embedded into the fabric of the community. Hamilton, listed at 6-foot-5 and 215 pounds during his playing days, was a high-school All-American who helped Tulane reach the College World Series in 2005. He was drafted 76th overall the following summer and ultimately amassed more than 100 home runs in the minor leagues, but his big league career spanned only 66 plate appearances.
Hamilton entered medical school looking to be an orthopedic surgeon. He switched to interventional radiology — a minimally invasive surgical field that utilizes medical imaging to guide procedures — in part because it would allow him to follow in his father’s footsteps and work with cancer patients. He graduated April 10 and was matched for residency — on a Zoom conference call because of social-distancing orders — in New York City. It meant that he wouldn’t have to move, but it also meant that he would be thrust into one of the hardest-hit areas of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bittersweet?
“Not at all,” Hamilton said. “I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”