To Craig Hansen, Coney Island’s MCU Park is Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field rolled into one.
The former St. John’s star and Red Sox 2005 first-round pick is in his second go-around as a professional baseball player, starting over in the Mets organization with the short season Class-A Brooklyn Cyclones after a 16-month absence from the sport.
And Hansen’s cherishing every minute of it, back pitching and trying to work his way back to the major leagues one pitch at a time. Though he has just an 0-1 record and an 11.25 ERA in his five outings with the Cyclones, Hansen is just glad to be back in baseball.
“I’m grateful just to have an opportunity,” he said. “A lot of people don’t even get one chance.”
The 6-foot-6 Hansen, now 28, was thought of as a high-ceiling prospect while at St. John’s, a hard-throwing right-hander who threw in the upper 90s and was a first-team All-American selection by Baseball America his junior year.
The Red Sox took him with the 26th overall pick in the 2005 draft and made him the first player in the organization’s history at the time to make his debut the same year he was drafted.
Success was fleeting, however, the result of health issues and ineffectiveness.
Following the 2006 season, Hansen was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea while with Boston, and in 2009, doctors found he had Parsonage-Turner syndrome, a rare condition causing pain, weakness and numbness in the upper body, after being traded to the Pirates.
Frustrated with the condition, which can take up to five years to fully heal, Hansen met with Pirates brass in spring training and asked to be released.
He started a new life for himself, creating a real estate agency in Connecticut. During that time, Hansen avoided baseball completely.
“That was the best therapy I could give to my arm,” the Glen Cove, N.Y. ,product said. “I took the whole out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach.”
One day last fall he had no choice but to pay attention. He was at the home of his then girlfriend’s grandfather, a big baseball fan. A Yankees-Red Sox game came on and Hansen was transfixed.
“I knew I could still get those guys out,” he recalled.
He began throwing and working out on his own, then in March started working with noted baseball trainer Eric Cressey of Cressey Performance. The Mets picked him up in late July after a workout at Citi Field and sent him to Brooklyn for a rehabilitation assignment that is ongoing.
Manager Rich Donnelly, who had Hansen in Pittsburgh, has been impressed. Hansen’s control isn’t where it needs to be yet, Donnelly said, but the stuff is the same.
“He’s always had a great arm,” Donnelly said. “What he has to do is command it.”
When the idea of getting back to the major leagues is broached, Hansen shrugs his shoulders and smiles. In the past, that would have concerned him, what he had to do to advance to the next level.
For now, he isn’t thinking about the future. He’s fixated on his next pitch, thrilled to be back playing the sport he loves, given another opportunity to put the lessons he learned the first time around to good use.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “I’ll still be happy as long as I have a glove on and a ball in my hand.”