As far as I know, Piersall’s the only one on the list who actually spent time in a mental institute. His battle with bipolar disorder played out quite publicly at a time when mental health was not discussed. In fact, his story was turned into the movie, “Fear Strikes Out,” starring Anthony Perkins. That said, he had some episodes that can’t go unmentioned. He threw an orange at the Comiskey Park exploding scoreboard, circled the bases backward on his 100th career home run, and rode fans, opponents and umpires like Northern Dancer in the ’64 Kentucky Derby.
While Piersall’s behavior can be described as erratic at best, he got the treatment he needed and even wrote a few books about the experience. “Mr. Piersall’s courageous description of his struggles with manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, helped bring the disease and its treatments out of the shadows,” Dr. Barron H. Lerner, professor of medicine and population health at the New York University Langone Medical Center, wrote in The New York Times in 2015. “It was really a big deal 60 years ago.”
