Beavers' new outfielder has a heart for the game

Doctors once told Brett Warren not to exercise, but surgery helped him stay with baseball

By Kerry Eggers

The Portland Tribune, Feb 14, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

LAURA SCHMITT / THE GAZETTE

Brent Warren, shown in his bedroom in Robins, Iowa, while a junior at Xavier High in Cedar Rapids, went to the Mayo Clinic for open-heart surgery that enabled him to continue playing baseball. Now he's a freshman on the Oregon State team.

CORVALLIS – Watch a few minutes of an Oregon State baseball practice and you might notice an extra strut to the step of a certain freshman outfielder.

And why not? Brent Warren’s joie de vivre is perfectly understandable, given his recent life path.

Little more than two years ago, the Robins, Iowa, native wasn’t thinking about a future in baseball.

“Baseball wasn’t even on my mind,” says Warren, who underwent open-heart surgery at age 16 in December 2006. “I just wanted to be able to live a normal life.”

Warren was born with a heart missing a valve and a “pinch” that, by his junior year in high school, had produced a 95 percent blockage of blood flow to his lower extremities.

When he visited a doctor that fall, “I was about to have an aortic aneurysm,” Warren says. “The (artery) walls were like 3 millimeters from bursting. It was pretty bad.”

Warren had experienced high blood pressure from an early age, but there were no real symptoms until he began to notice a strong resting heartbeat early in his junior year.

“One day, I had a Gatorade bottle on my chest, and my heart beat so hard it popped the bottle off my chest,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mom and Dad, something’s wrong.’”

Warren made visits to several doctors, “and each time they found something new and worse,” he says.

“The first couple of doctors told me I needed to take blood-pressure pills and not exercise the rest of my life,” he says. “One doctor told me not to go to my homecoming dance. Another one told me if I’d have tried to play basketball that season, I probably would have died.”

Already a highly regarded baseball prospect, Warren had just begun the recruiting process with Division-I schools, “so I was on top of the world,” he says.

Then his world collapsed. University of Iowa medical experts suggested two separate heart surgeries “that they thought were a solution for me to live a normal life but not play sports, which at that point was perfectly fine with me,” Warren says. “Sports was the last thing on my mind.”

Warren’s parents, Tracy and Chris Warren, made connections with a world-renowned surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., named Thor Sundt, who outlined a single surgical procedure he believed could take care of the problem.

“The moment I got to Mayo, I knew it was the right place,” Warren says. “Everything was very professional. They were very confident they could get it taken care of.”

Warren’s open-heart surgery lasted 4 1/2 hours. His body was chilled to 32 degrees.

“I was dead for like 14 seconds,” he says. “It’s crazy to think about.”

Warren was told full recovery would take two years.

“I was playing baseball within six months,” he says. “I lost about 30 pounds, but I’m back to (185) now, which is really good.”

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