LOWELL — Much of the time the press releases the media gets from the Red Sox merely make official what the media already knows or at least expects. The press release the Red Sox issued on Friday evening was both unexpected, disturbing, and disheartening.

“Boston Red Sox minor league outfielder Ryan Westmoreland today underwent surgery for a complication of a cavernous malformation in his brain,” read the first line of the release.

I was watching a Lowell Spinners game when the release arrived in my email, and my first instinct was to check the date of the release and see if it wasn’t the same one from March 16, 2010, that had been retransmitted by mistake.

It was no mistake. Westmoreland, once the brightest prospect in the Red Sox organization, had just undergone delicate brain surgery again, less than 2 1/2 years after the same surgery by the same neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, may have saved his life.

“Dr. Spetzler’s handling of this dangerous and delicate procedure not only gave Ryan a chance at a normal life, but in fact, saved his life,” the Westmoreland family said in a statement issued 3 1/2 weeks after Ryan’s first surgery.

The hope was always that Westmoreland would be able to resume his baseball career. But just to have a semblance of a normal, long, and healthy life would have been sufficient. Now it appears even that is not guaranteed.

The dream of so many millions of American boys to be a major-league ballplayer someday, a dream that was so close he could almost touch it, has become even more of a nightmare for Ryan Westmoreland now.

As recently as a few days ago Westmoreland, who had begun swinging a bat in a scrimmage in the Dominican Republic this past winter, was sending bright, optimistic tweets. There was no hint anything was amiss.

“Fishing at Ashby Resevoir (sic)!” was his tweet, linked to a photo, on Tuesday this past week, although a quote from the Bible he retweeted two days later, the day before his latest operation, may have been a clue to what was about to happen.

“I can do all this through him (sic) who gives me strength. — Phillippians 4:13,” was the retweet.

It’s likely now that the dream is entirely gone and the rest of what Westmoreland hopes will become a somewhat normal life begins. It’s not a tragedy, because the 22-year-old Westmoreland may yet have a long and ordinary life. But the latest news is sad because he could have been so special as an athlete.

Parallels to Tony C

What’s happened to Ryan Westmoreland can’t help but remind me of Tony Conigliaro’s ill-fated career. Like Tony C., Westmoreland is a native New Englander who grew up in Rhode Island as a Red Sox fan. A five-tool player, Westmoreland was given a $2 million signing bonus, a record for a fifth-round draft pick, by the Red Sox in 2008.

Tony C., at least, got to play in the majors for several years, even though the beaning that nearly blinded him in 1967 shortened his career.

The only season Westmoreland has ever gotten to play as a pro was in Lowell with the Spinners in 2009, and what a glorious summer it was!

He quickly established himself as one of the most popular players in Spinners history, both with the fans and his teammates. Westmoreland hit .296 for the Stedler Division champion Spinners with a .401 on-base percentage, belting seven homers in 60 games while driving in 35 runs, scoring 38, and stealing 19 bases without being thrown out even once.

Baseball America tabbed him as the top prospect in the New York-Penn League and the top prospect in the Red Sox organization after that season. He seemed to be on the fast track to Fenway.

But while he was in spring training in Fort Myers the following year, Westmoreland felt some numbness in the thumb and pinky of his right hand. He mentioned it to his girlfriend, Charlene Colameta, a UMass Lowell student from Ashby he had met during a Spinners game the previous summer. Her mother had suffered a stroke at the age of 29, and she encouraged Ryan to have it checked out.

The Red Sox training staff sent him to Boston to consult specialists, and a brain scan revealed he had a significant growth on his brain stem, which controls all of the body’s motor functions. Known as a cavernous malformation, it was a tangle of blood vessels that had begun to leak. A single drop of blood had caused the numbness.

The doctors told Westmoreland there was an 80 percent chance the episode would never reoccur. But a few days later the growth began leaking blood again, and this time the effects were frightening.

He went blind and deaf in his right ear. He couldn’t stand up without falling down.

“It went from something wasn’t right to something was really wrong,” Westmoreland recalled six months later. “We determined that surgery would be the best option because we saw how bad the second bleed was and we didn’t want to see how bad a third bleed could be, regardless of what the statistics say.”

Success was fleeting

Dr. Spetzler was selected to perform the surgery, an operation that could have killed Westmoreland, and afterward it was pronounced a success.

The success, apparently, was fleeting.

I met with Westmoreland later that summer when he was doing some rehab at UMass Lowell’s campus rec center across the street from LeLacheur Park. We shook hands, and I could tell from his grip he didn’t have much strength yet. The right side of his face drooped, and his words were a bit slurred. It was as if he had suffered a stroke.

He wasn’t discouraged, though.

“To see where I am now is amazing,” he told me. “I’m not where I want to be. But six months out I’m happy where I am.”

During the next two years he continued to work at resuming his baseball career.

“We knew he would have some adversity, but the adversity we were thinking of was a long slump or something like that,” Theo Epstein, then the GM of the Red Sox, said a few months after Westmoreland’s first neurosurgery. “You never imagine one of your players having to go through something like this.”

“If you’re betting on any one person to make it back, it’s him,” said Mike Hazen, who was the director of player development at that time. “You’d be amazed at the drive this kid has, given all the setbacks and everything he’s been through.

“It’s inspiring is what it is. And you hope he’ll be able to take the field again one day, because you know how much he wants it.”

And then, without warning, Westmoreland was back in Arizona undergoing more surgery.

The medical community believes only one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population has cavernous malformations on their brains, and the chances of a malformation beginning to bleed in any given year is no higher than two percent.

This is at least the third time Westmoreland’s cavernous malformation has leaked and threatened his life.

Baseball scouts and the Red Sox may have thought at one time that Ryan Westmoreland was one in a million.

This isn’t what they, or he, ever imagined that meant.

Follow Chaz Scoggins on Twitter.com/ChazScog