Baldelli adjusts to ordeal

Even that, though, wasn't the final word. Not only did this offseason bring Rocco from Florida to Boston, closer to his Rhode Island roots, as the free agent outfielder signed with the Red Sox, it brought him a new name for the disease that kept him out of baseball for 14 months. It brought him channelopathy.

"We were waiting for the taxi outside of the Cleveland Clinic, waiting to go back to the airport," Dan Baldelli said. "I was jumping for joy. I was slapping high-fives. As a parent, that was the best news I could have got ten, that it wasn't a debilitating, progressive disease.

"From the doom and gloom that I was reading, that [mitochondrial disease] was progressive and could shorten your life span, who knows how many years you have?

"To me it wasn't about the baseball. It wasn't about you can go play again. I was saying, 'Wow, I'm going to get to go to bed tonight and probably sleep past 1 o'clock [a.m.]."

'My legs felt tired' It had started in 2006, a season Baldelli characterized as perhaps the best of his career. He hit .302, with 16 home runs and 57 RBIs in just 92 games. He had missed the first part of the season and part of 2005 with a torn ACL and Tommy John surgery, just a few of the setbacks in a career seemingly constantly marred by injury.

"It was muscle fatigue," Baldelli said. "A lot of people think I'm tired all the time. They think that I'm just tired, that I'm sleepy. That's not necessarily what it is that I've been going through.

"Back when I wasn't feeling as well, it probably felt like I had just run 5 miles and I wasn't doing much, probably doing a normal baseball workout. My legs felt tired."

While Baldelli has shared his diagnosis of channelopathy, that doesn't explain everything. Channelopathy does not describe just one disease. Instead, there are six or seven types of channelopathy in muscles caused by abnormalities in the tiny pores called channels. There are four channels - for sodium, potassium, chloride, and calcium.