TAMPA – Andy Pettitte’s name surfaced in the Mitchell Report on Dec. 13. Two days later he admitted using human growth hormone. Ten days beyond, Pettitte’s world was invaded by something far worse: Being confronted by the question if his son was going to live or die.
The day after Christmas, Pettitte and his family were on their ranch 1½ hours outside San Antonio when his wife Laura, sitting on the porch, heard a loud noise. What she found was their oldest son, 13-year-old Josh, had crashed his four-wheel vehicle into his female cousin’s ATV.
“[Laura] called me and was so hysterical that I just hung up on her,” said Pettitte, who was hunting on the property with his son Jared and two nephews.
Pettitte put the teenagers in the car and raced them to the closest hospital. Josh with a severely slashed head, a deep thigh wound and what turned out to be two broken bones in the left arm. His cousin had a broken hip.
“From there they flew him to a hospital in San Antonio,” Pettitte said.
Eventually, Pettitte was comforted by the fact that Josh could talk to him, that he didn’t have a concussion. But in the immediate minutes of arriving at the scene, Pettitte didn’t know if his son, who wasn’t wearing a helmet, was going to make it.
“It just scalped him. When I came up on him lying in the front lawn, I was like, ‘Is my son alive?’ He is lying on my sister-in-law’s lap and was bleeding so bad,” Pettitte said.
Josh, who suffered a growth plate injury in his hip during football season, required 50 stitches in the leg, 50 more in the scalp in addition to staples.
“I was holding his hair and he had a cast on his arm and stitches in the leg, and I am holding his scalp up while they are injecting his head,” Pettitte said. “He was in shock. When he really realized what is going on, with all the people around him, that’s when he went into shock.”
Fortunately, Josh recovered. He had to miss a trip to spring training this weekend because his eighth-grade basketball team is playing in a tournament.