To boy whose life Jim Rice helped save, baseball immortality too long in coming

To one family, Rice a hero long before Hall called

BOSTON — The best thing Jim Rice did in a Red Sox uniform probably won’t be mentioned on his Hall of Fame plaque.

It doesn’t show up in his statistics, or support his stature as one of the dominant hitters of his era.

Twenty-seven years ago, the Red Sox slugger climbed out of the dugout and into the stands at Fenway Park to help get an injured boy the urgent medical care he needed. Rice’s quick actions saved the 4-year-old boy’s life, his family and doctors believe, and belied the surly persona that kept Rice waiting for the call from Cooperstown for 15 years.

“In times like that, you really see the quality of the character of the people involved,” Tom Keane, the boy’s father, said. “Jim Rice is a really humble guy. He doesn’t want to take credit for doing anything out of the ordinary. He said he did anything anyone would have done.

“I think that’s an understatement of what he did that day. He did something that nobody else did. He may very well have saved my son’s life.”

It was Aug. 7, 1982, and Tom Keane had gotten tickets from a friend of the Red Sox owner to see Boston play the Chicago White Sox. He brought his sons: Jonathan, 4, and Matthew, 2. In an era when sellouts were not the rule, the place was packed. The game was on national TV, back when that meant something. It was warm and sunny.

“It was a horrific day,” Tom Keane said in a telephone interview this week.

“We had been given some really great seats, right next to the dugout in the second row. We were really excited to be at the ballpark, close to the players and close to the action.”

Jonathan, who was learning to play second base, had latched onto Dave Stapleton as his favorite player. The Red Sox infielder was up in the fourth inning when he hit a hard line drive foul of first base.

“I saw the ball hit the bat and heard the crack and thought it hit the side of the dugout. I turned, and there was my son with blood gushing out of his head,” Tom Keane recalled.

“The next thing I remembered was Jim Rice picking him up. I picked Matthew up and we ran through the dugout. I was kind of chasing Jim Rice; he was carrying Jonathan. There was an ambulance waiting. When we got to the hospital they were set up for neurosurgery.”

Doctors relieved the pressure on Jonathan’s brain and gave him medicine to guard against seizures. Tom Keane estimated that the whole thing, from the crack of the bat to his son laying on an operating table at Children’s Hospital, took about 30 minutes.

Jonathan was in the hospital for five days.

“It was serious. I was in critical condition. An inch from my temple, and if it hits me in the temple I might have been killed,” Jonathan Keane said. “The fact that I was able to stay alive was due in large part to the fact that Jim Rice was quick to react.”

Many players donate their time or money to charities that help millions. Others routinely visit sick children in the hospital to lift their spirits and, perhaps, aid their recovery.

Rice acted.

He saw the panic on Tom Keane’s face, and the blood on Jonathan’s, and one of baseball’s most productive hitters produced.

“My kids could have been in the same situation,” he said this week in a conference call to discuss his induction. “I would want someone to feel free to help my kid.”

The picture of Rice carrying Keane, crying and covered in blood, has become a part of Boston sports lore, like Bobby Orr flying through the air or Red Auerbach lighting a victory cigar. This spring, when Rice took the Hall of Fame’s traditional pre-induction tour, he said saving Keane might be his greatest accomplishment.

“I’ve hit home runs. I’ve driven in runs. But as far as something that stands out, it’s probably the picture when I went up into the stands and took the kid out of the stands who was hit by a foul ball,” he said.

“After the first at-bat (in the major leagues), that’s it. Just to do something that people recognize for years and years — his dad said it and even he said it — I probably saved his life. That’s one of the most important things I’ve accomplished in the game of baseball.”

It was a different era, before players going into the stands conjured images of Ron Artest at the Palace of Auburn Hills. It was before YouTube, when the NBC Game of the Week was appointment television.

“That’s the game everybody watched back then. I got mail from all over the country,” Jonathan Keane said. “Hank Aaron called. My mom talked to him. I think she liked it. But, honestly, I think she was a lot more worried about me than she was about hearing from anybody.”

Tony La Russa, then the White Sox manager, checked in on Keane in the hospital. The Red Sox brought him back to Fenway to throw out the first pitch at the 1983 home opener. More importantly, when he went back to the doctor for a follow-up CT scan, the dark spot on his brain had disappeared.

“The doctors were really at a loss to explain why that was,” Tom Keane said. “But he thrived as a young kid and he’s thriving as a young adult.”

Keane graduated from North Carolina State with honors, majoring in business, and sent Rice a letter to let him know he was doing OK. He went to work in the marketing department of a Raleigh, N.C., Internet company.

Although he cannot remember the accident, he’s heard the story enough to commit it to memory. He has a small scar just above his left eye as proof.

“It’s a small, little line. Barely noticeable,” he said. “I have to point it out if anybody asks.”

Keane cannot make it to Cooperstown next weekend; he will be playing in a golf tournament that honors his grandfather, who was the golf coach at Dartmouth College for 45 years. (”It was the only weekend I couldn’t do it,” he said. “It was a real tough decision.”) He still goes to the ballpark, making it to Fenway about once a year.

“It’s one of my favorite places in the world, being at Fenway Park,” he said.

But he prefers to sit farther back.

Recently, when he was interviewed from the seats he was sitting in more than 25 years ago, and another time when he and his fiance moved up front at a spring training game, he found himself thinking about the accident. “It actually gives me kind of a funny feeling now, if I get that close,” he said.

Rice was in the middle of his career in ‘82. It was neither his best year — that would be his MVP year of 1978, when he had 406 total bases — nor his worst, which came at the end of his career in 1989, and left the lingering perception that he hadn’t played long enough to qualify for the Hall of Fame.

He finished with a .298 batting average and 382 home runs. With 12 more hits — less than one per season — he is a .300 hitter; with 18 more homers he reaches 400, and it probably doesn’t take him all 15 ballots to make the Hall. But another problem with his candidacy was his sometimes testy relationship with the reporters who vote on the honor.

“In my eyes, it had to be one of the reasons,” Jonathan Keane said. “It was just something I didn’t really understand, because to us … I’ve never heard anybody say anything bad about him. It seemed like there were a couple of reporters that didn’t like him and had loud voices.”

Aug. 7, 1982, was neither Rice’s best game nor his worst. He went 1-for-4, with a two-run double; he also hit into a pair of double plays. Boston lost the game 7-3 to fall to .500, 54-54. Bob Stanley went 3 2-3 innings in relief of John Tudor. Rich Dotson went 8 2-3 innings to improve to 5-11.

On retrosheet.org, the fourth inning play-by-play notes, “Foul off Stapleton’s bat injures 4-year-old boy,” right before Stapleton grounded into a double play.

But some things don’t show up in the box score.

“In our view, Jim Rice is not only one of the greatest baseball players that Boston has ever seen, but he is one of the greatest human beings that I know of,” Tom Keane said. “Because from my perspective, he saved my son’s life.”