Prayer Request - P - Mike Cuellar

Mike Cuellar sleeps in the unsettling silence of an 11th floor hospital room at Orlando Regional Medical Center. He is hooked up to an IV, in isolation, because of bacteria in his stomach. Visitors have to wear gloves and a surgical gown before entering.

The only certainty he will face is that he is going to die.

His medical chart is cluttered with awful news, etched in a steady decline of health since mid-January: A brain aneurism, followed by the removal of his gall bladder, which preceded the death blow — cancer in the stomach.

He takes a sip of water offered by his best friend, José Vargas, and mumbles a few incoherent words.

Dying has a cruel way of stealing the person you know, long before they draw their last breath. That medical chart on Cuellar is bogus, in so many ways. For Vargas — and for a legion of baseball fans stretching from Havana to Baltimore to Clermont — the legacy of Miguel Angel Cuellar Santana is in the living, not the dying.

I feel it myself, as I pull out his 1972 baseball card from my collection in my office. The card documents another 20-victory season for Cuellar with the Baltimore Orioles. A left-handed master of the screwball, Cuellar is winding up and smiling as he poses for the camera. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was among the best in the game.

He won 20 or more games four times between 1969 and 1974. Cuellar a k a "Crazy Horse" captured the Cy Young award in 1969, and was selected to the All-Star Game four times in his career. He was part of one of the greatest staffs in baseball history that featured four 20-game winners in 1971 _ Cuellar, Jim Palmer, Dave McNally and Pat Dobson.




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