Shawn O’Malley’s first professional home run was a near comedy of errors.
Playing for the Princeton Rays in West Virginia, he hit the ball, which then hit the wall and next the net that covered the scoreboard before coming back onto the field.
“I looked up and saw it on the ground and I kept running. It hadn’t been signaled a home run yet and I ran around third, slipped, got in a pickle and got tagged out. Then they said it was a home run and I scored,” O’Malley said with a laugh.
Since that minor league moment in 2006, O’Malley has hit multiple home runs for the Seattle Mariners as a utility player. He became a major leaguer in 2014 for the Los Angeles Angels after a trade from Tampa Bay, where he started his pro career. He also was a Pacific Coast League and MILB organizational all-star with Salt Lake in 2014.
He played for the Montgomery Biscuits from 2010 to 2013, and former Biscuits manager Billy Gardner Jr. said O’Malley plays hard. “He is a guy that you want on your club because he is going to go out there and give everything he has,” he said.
Defense and speed
When it comes to baseball, the stats show that O’Malley’s strength is his defense combined with his speed. He was a Pacific Coast League and MiLB organizational all-star in 2014.
He may have played all over, but his most life-changing baseball moment happened off the field in 2008 while rehabbing an injury in Florida. Ben Zobrist, then a shortstop for Tampa Bay, also was rehabbing an injury and he invited O’Malley to lunch.
“We got on the topic of Christ and my life,” O’Malley said. “The more I got in-depth with my life, the more responses he had, the more answers he had.”
Zobrist, the 2016 World Series MVP with the Chicago Cubs, backed his answers with Scripture and that impressed O’Malley.
“Ben Zobrist led me to Christ. I actually call him ‘The Walking Bible’ because anytime I have a problem or a question, if I bring it up to him, he will give me a way to solve it or a way to deal with it through Scripture,” O’Malley said.
Finding answers
Growing up Catholic, O’Malley said he was “religious but I wasn’t into it. I knew there was a God and I believed in God but I didn’t really expand much further than that.”
During shoulder recovery from November 2007 through May 2008 he had time to try to find answers to faith questions. He had seen a difference in the lives of an ex-girlfriend and her parents.
“She was really big into it and her family was pretty devoted Christians,” O’Malley said. “I saw the way her parents lived and I knew it was something different. Seeing Ben, he had something different. I knew it was something that I wanted but I couldn’t figure out what it was. After that lunch I realized that was the part of my life that was missing.”
And now, he said, Jesus means everything to him.
“He is my strength. He is my courage. He is my shoulder when I am down or when I need somebody there. He is the one person that I know in this world, like He says in the Scripture, He will never forsake me. He is always that one person that I know that I can count on,” O’Malley said.
He freely shares that faith with others. “If someone asks me for help or someone approaches me about my faith, I am not afraid to let people know where I stand with God,” O’Malley said.
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