Zach Buchanan

zbuchanan@enquirer.com

LA JOLLA, Calif. – The moment was so indelible, Michael Lorenzen will soon have a sculpture of it. On a recent Saturday in his rented home just north of San Diego, he shared some photos of the work in progress, a gift from his wife’s uncle. The pose is immediately recognizable to any Cincinnati Reds fan.

It's a statuette-sized Lorenzen, currently carved out of clay but destined for bronze. His bat and left arm are flying open behind his shoulder, at the peak of his follow-through. He stares off into the distance toward right-center field, watching his first career home run sail over the fence.

The emotions surrounding that August home run made it by far the most memorable event of the 2016 Reds season. The 25-year-old reliever had been away from the team for several days, attending to his dying father before he eventually succumbed to a months-long illness. This game was the pitcher's first since returning to the club. It was a cathartic moment for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one.

But Clif Lorenzen wasn't just a dad to Michael. He was the dad who habitually lied and stole, a lifelong alcoholic whose booze-fueled battles with Michael's mother caused plenty of rancor in their Anaheim, California, home. He was a man who ditched his family when Michael was 12 in order to avoid arrest on grand theft and forgery charges.

Michael doesn't hate his father, despite the man's many failings. Michael had many of them himself before finding his faith, enabling him to transcend the broken environment in which he was raised and embark on what looks to be a promising major-league career.

He loved and forgave his dad, and told him so many times before his death. Michael also worried about his father, who never sobered up and drank himself into an early grave.

He worries about him still.

Michael Lorenzen was born Jan. 4, 1992, the youngest of Clif and Cheryl Lorenzen’s four sons. His childhood memories are mostly happy. His father encouraged his love of baseball, but always gently. He was never the overbearing Little League parent.

Michael was his own taskmaster when it came to baseball, walking around the house squeezing a tennis ball to increase his arm strength because someone told him that’s how Rafael Palmeiro did it. Clif derived joy from his son's dedication. He was a congenial father, the one Michael went to when he wanted permission for something. His mother was the disciplinarian.

"Her nickname was 'Sarge' on the block," Michael said.

But things were not tranquil in their house on Elder Street in Anaheim. Both parents struggled with substance abuse issues, especially alcohol. The story of their romance did not begin with a meet-cute. Clif sold Cheryl cocaine.

Michael remembers loud, raucous arguments between his parents, drunken fights that occasionally ended in wrestling matches and visits from police.

He also remembers being told to take a nap on the way to his youth baseball games. Michael knew that was so his dad could drink as he drove. Michael would comply and close his eyes, “but you’d always hear the bottle creak open.”

Pretending to sleep was not an uncommon avoidance tactic for Michael. He’d feign slumber often when his dad would come into his room at night, usually to steal a couple bucks from his youngest son.

“I’d pretend like I had no idea what’s going on, just because he’s my dad,” he said. “How am I going to confront my dad? I love him.”

Clif’s issues extended beyond the domestic realm. Warrants were issued for his arrest three times in the early 2000s, and he was convicted of theft in 2002. The records from that case have been destroyed, including his sentencing information, but Michael remembers his dad spending three months in jail at one point during his childhood.

Still, Michael had little reason at the time to believe his childhood was anything but normal. Plenty of families on his block had similar issues. It was only when he stayed over at the houses of his travel ball teammates, many of whom hailed from upscale Laguna Niguel, did it seem like anyone else lived differently. They all ate together as a family. There were leftovers.

“That was something that I really cherished,” he said. “You’d eat good food and the mom would cook us food because the mom would be there.”

Michael was always motivated when it came to baseball, his passion energized when he was 8 when scouts came to watch his oldest brother, Jonathan, play. Jonathan was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2000, and the entire Lorenzen family traveled to Great Falls, Montana, to watch him play a year later.

But things changed in 2004 when Clif was charged with the two misdemeanor counts and skipped town. Michael remembers it being Christmas Eve. Michael lost his biggest baseball cheerleader.

He also gained an independence that threatened his devotion to the game and his chances at a brighter future.

Michael didn't know it at the time, but Clif Lorenzen had left for good. Many jurisdictions won't bother with extradition when it comes to misdemeanors, so Clif moved to Nevada. Five months after his death, the warrant was still active.

Life without his dad didn't feel much different to Michael. If anything, it was quieter.

“My mom would kick him out of the house all the time,” he said. “He’d be gone, he’d been in jail. I’d already been kind of conditioned to him not being there at times. When he left, there were no more cops showing up to the house every other weekend.”

With Clif out of the picture, Michael was afforded more freedom than the 12-year-old was equipped to handle. In order to make rent every month, his mom took a job working nights in a restaurant at the Disneyland Resort. Michael knew he only had to be home by the time his mother returned around one in the morning.

He exercised that freedom like many rebellious teenagers do. He skateboarded with friends, he drank, he smoked a lot of marijuana.

“Just being a punk, I guess,” Michael said. “Me and one of my friends across the street used to shoot kids walking home from school with our BB gun from his roof and just laugh. Just little brat kid things like that. (That guy) is actually in jail now for shooting someone. Those are like the type of people that we grew up with. It was normal to us.”

Michael doesn’t think his life would have veered off the tracks that badly, but he thinks he could have wandered adrift and wasted his baseball potential, which is what happened to his oldest brother. Two years into his professional career, the Dodgers released Jonathan Lorenzen, then 20, after he was arrested for allegedly having sexual intercourse with a 15-year-old girl in his dorm at the team’s spring training complex in Vero Beach, Florida.

Jonathan and the girl both told police she’d led him to believe she was 18, according to the arrest affidavit. It didn't matter. He was charged with lewd and lascivious battery of a minor but eventually pleaded down to the lesser offense of felony child abuse. He entered a plea of nolo contendere and the case was not adjudicated – sparing him the label of convicted felon – but he was sentenced to six months in county jail and 30 months of probation as part of his plea deal.

In 2005, Jonathan violated his probation after he stopped paying his court fees, with more than $500 still owed, to Indian River County. There’s been an active warrant for his arrest in Florida the last 12 years, the same amount of time his dad lived as a fugitive. Like with his father, it’s unlikely law enforcement will ever push for extradition.

That incident is in the past for Jonathan. He currently works as a contractor and is married with a daughter and stepdaughter, and his wife is pregnant with twin girls due in March. But it derailed his baseball career and he never played again.

Michael never ran into legal trouble of his own growing up. But, in retrospect, the more he drank and smoked and shirked responsibility, the more he saw his own shot at a baseball career also coming to an unfulfilling end.

“It’s something that was probably that was leading to something worse and worse and worse,” Michael said.

The night when things changed for Michael wasn’t all that much different than any other night, except it was his high school's homecoming. He was 17 and, after the dance, his friends and their dates had gone to Huntington Beach for some food. As the girls headed in to eat, the guys wandered below a pier to smoke.

When they came back up, a man asked if he could talk to them about God. The group mockingly said yes, and proceeded to laugh throughout the man’s testimony.

But Michael was silent. He’d generally believed in God, but this man was telling him that wasn’t enough. Michael's intoxicated mind kept replaying scenes from the movie "The Passion of the Christ," which he’d watched in theaters earlier in the year. It was the first time he’d given any thought to the sins he’d committed.

“It was the perfect time to be confronted,” he said.

Michael doesn’t remember much about the man who talked to him that night. He was an older white guy. He was wearing a raincoat because it was a little chilly. He had a gentle nature about him and didn’t seem bothered by the fact that he was being ridiculed to his face.

After the man left, the high schoolers went inside to eat. Michael didn’t bring up the revelatory moment to any of his friends. He still partied and drank that night. But change was taking root.

That next week, he went to church with his brother, Matthew. It was the first time Michael says he seemed to understand the sermon. He quit drinking and began studying his Bible, changes that raised eyebrows in his house and among his friends. His mom and oldest brothers were skeptical, jumping on his occasional slip-ups as proof that he wasn’t sincere. Eventually, they were won over by Michael’s consistency.

He began to view his athletic achievement through a different lens. If his talent for baseball was a God-given gift, it was his Christian duty to maximize it in order to glorify God. The childhood dedication to his craft returned and Lorenzen earned a baseball scholarship to Cal State Fullerton as a two-way player.

In 2013, the Reds selected him with the 38th overall pick in the draft and he made his major-league debut two years later.

Baseball achievement has followed him everywhere, but Michael is careful to avoid letting it change the type of person he is. He often returns to one of a thousand notes scribbled in his Bible that reads: ‘My sport isn’t an idol.’

It's the megaphone. It's why he treats his body like a luxury car, giving it only the best fuel and carefully maintaining its parts. It's why he's had only one soda since his junior year of high school – it was a Sprite – and why he's transitioning away from a bodybuilder's physique. He's going for something a bit leaner so that his joints aren't carrying around too much extra weight. Everything to make the most of his gift.

"I’m doing it to glorify Him," he said. "You should never do anything half-effort."

That's the Michael known to his wife Cassi, whom he met just more than a year ago and married this offseason. She's been familiar with his life story since their first date when they bonded over their shared faith at a coffee shop after being set up by a mutual friend.

But even now can be surprised by the dramatic juxtaposition between Old and New Michael.

“We call them his B.C. days," she said, "his Before Christ days.”

Michael got a call that his dad was sick in June, while he was working back from an elbow injury with Triple-A Louisville. At the time, it didn't seem too serious. Clif's alcohol abuse was catching up to his body, but Michael was told his dad would be fine with medication.

With a return to the majors just around the corner, Michael put off a visit. They'd reconciled long ago and Michael had flown Clif out to watch him pitch on Father's Day a year prior. He got the win.

His dad never beat his alcohol issues, though, and Michael learned to accept Clif's faults. He forgave him for the years they'd gone without seeing each other when he was growing up, forgave him for the occasional phone calls during which Clif would boast of his sobriety, slurring every word.

“We used to tell him all the time, ‘No hard feelings. We all forgive you,’" Michael said, a small quiver evident in his voice. "We understood the struggle.”

Michael wishes he could have told his dad that one more time, been able to spend just a few more minutes talking about what his faith had done for him. But the next time he saw Clif, his dad was unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator in a Reno hospital.

Clif Lorenzen died on Aug. 17, just a week after his 61st birthday. His final moments remain a mystery to Michael. He hopes he'll see him again, but he isn't sure.

One Sunday in January, Michael and Cassi attended church. The sermon concerned a subject that had been weighing on Michael since his father's death. It was a biblical proof of the existence and nature of hell.

The pastor set out to prove his point with a rapid-fire review of the Bible, bouncing between the Old and New Testaments faster than anyone could flip the pages to find them –Revelation to 2 Chronicles to Isaiah, then to Matthew, Jude and back to Revelation. Each book offered some reference or description of eternal damnation.

Hell is real, the pastor insisted, and it’s terrible.

Michael isn't afraid of hell. He's certain that he will avoid it thanks to his faith. But he grapples with the uncertainty of his father's fate.

"If I knew he was spending eternity in heaven, it wouldn’t be as tough," he said, occasionally dabbing at tears forming in the corner of his eyes. "It really wouldn’t. Because I know I would see him again.

“‘He’s in a better place.’ People say that to me to try to make me feel better. In my mind, I don’t know. How do you know? If I die, you can say that to my family – ‘he’s in a better place.’ They can rejoice in that. With me, I can’t really rejoice in that for my dad, or that his suffering on this planet is done.

"Maybe it’s not done, and that scares me.”

Michael may be scared for his father, but his faith remains firm as bedrock.

“I believe in the validity of Scripture and I believe it proves itself over and over again," he said, his words coming faster and more confident than before. "It’s proved itself in my life. I don’t struggle with that."

So what does he make of his inspirational home run, the one that seemed to affirm that we'll see our loved ones again? Could a man so wracked with doubt about the fate of his father's soul have done that?

Yes, Michael says. No matter the type of man his father was, no matter where he is now, Michael believes his death served a purpose. Through one swing of a bat in a baseball game, Michael Lorenzen was able to touch thousands who may have been hurting too.

"I think a lot of people found inspiration in that," he said. "I got tons of messages.

"It was nice to see that his life did mean something in the end, and still could."