Houston Astros' Trey Mancini Has Already Won

The newest member of the Astros beat stage 3 colon cancer in 2021.

Back in spring of 2020, future Houston Astros player Trey Mancini was preparing for another season with the Baltimore Orioles. The outfielder and first baseman was 27 years old when he started to feel off.

"I'd just get tired after a few swings. So I knew something was up, but I chalked it up to just getting older," Mancini wrote for The Players' Tribune. "I didn't think for even one second that anything was seriously wrong."

When his annual team physical showed that his iron levels were low, doctors thought he might have an ulcer or celiac disease. But a colonoscopy revealed something far worse: a cancerous tumor in his colon.

And the bad news kept coming. When Mancini woke up from surgery to remove the tumor he found out that Major League Baseball had shut down due to Covid-19 pandemic. Six days later, on his 28th birthday, his doctors informed him that the cancer was stage 3 and had spread to his lymph nodes. He would need chemotherapy.

Six months of chemotherapy did the trick, and Mancini returned the next season.

"Obviously nothing can truly prepare you for a cancer diagnosis when you're in your 20s, but I tried to use lessons I learned from baseball," the Florida native said in a video he shared on Twitter. "As cliche as the saying is, 'taking it day by day' really is huge. I couldn't control that I had cancer. I couldn't control the fact that I needed to do chemotherapy. You've just got to wear it sometimes. Get up every day and attack it."

Mancini was traded to the Astros in August 2022. He made his first career grand slam just a few days after he joined the team. And now, at 30 years old and with a cancer battle behind him, Mancini is competing in his first World Series.

"There were times I wasn't sure I was going to live very long," he told USA Today. "To be back playing and much less be playing in a postseason like I dreamed about as a kid is pretty incredible. There's definitely life after chemo and treatment. It hasn't quite hit me yet."

"I'll have time to go over the last two or three years and think of the proper words to say what the journey means," Mancini continued. "But I'm just so happy."

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