Ted Bishop is Senior Director of Revenue Partnerships at ESPN.

As the father of three young boys who are begging to play football, the recent deaths of a trio of high school players hit me hard. These three young men were taken way too soon from their families simply playing a game they loved. The news also got me thinking that, while the deaths grab headlines, the safety issue in sports cuts much deeper. I learned that firsthand on May 30, 2015 when I suffered a life-threatening injury under extremely fluky circumstances while coaching my son's baseball team.

For a guy who prided himself on teaching the mental preparation side of the game, the accident was ironic. I never saw it coming. It was the third inning of my son's youth game in Seattle and I was walking back into our first-base dugout while reading our scorebook. While the opposing pitcher warmed up, the infielders took grounders from the first baseman. And then it happened. My life became a game of inches, and those inches were not in my favor.

The shortstop, one of the top players in the league, gunned to first and went wide with the throw. I was walking into our dugout and the ball hit me on the right side of the head, cracking my skull and knocking me out cold. I fell to my left where the left side of my head smacked into the very small patch of concrete near the entrance to our dugout. My son, on his way back from the restroom, said he didn't see me fall but heard "this disgusting noise." I'm told the sound was enough to cause one woman to scream and several parents to dial 911. I was soon in the emergency room at Harborview Medical Center with a breathing tube and a surgeon looking at my CT scan.

The dugout where the accident happened. Courtesy of Ted Bishop.

The season started innocently enough when my friend reached out to tell me the North Seattle Pony 11-12 Bronco league had such a good turnout that the league would be adding two teams. He asked whether I might be interested in coaching one of the expansion teams. I jumped at the opportunity and had a great time drafting my "Mariners" squad after watching all the kids try out. We got off to a rough 1-7 start, but soon turned things around and we got to .500 after we took a page from "Major League" and added a concrete statue, which we nicknamed "Jobu," with some burning incense to the dugout. Most of the team would rub his head before going to bat or taking the field.

On the day of my accident, I had picked up tickets to take my family to watch the Seattle Mariners play because it was bat night. It is a family tradition dating to when my father took me to the games, which included an incredible ninth inning game-winning home run by Tom "Wimpy" Paciorek on bat night in 1981 against the Yankees. I thought about missing our game and putting the team in the hands of my assistant coach Dave so that I could build my own memories with my three sons, but decided that missing the first game of the playoffs wasn't an option.

My wife didn't panic when the phone call came: "Dee, listen, Ted got hit by a pitch." She asked if the caller was referring to our son, who led the team in hit-by-pitch last year. But no, it was me, it wasn't a pitch, and I wasn't moving.

I had been knocked out playing basketball a few years before and taken to Harborview Hospital in Seattle, but drove myself home later that night. She was more irritated because she had just parked downtown for the Mariners game with our two younger boys. My wife's emotional trauma began when the ER nurse brought me back from a CT scan with a tube down my throat and started talking about bleeding on the brain and saying the surgeon would be right in to perform surgery on the left side of my brain. The Traumatic Brain Injury support group information posted on the wall in the Neuro ICU was terrifying. A support group? What? I had another emergency surgery two days later on the other side of my brain after my pupils stopped responding in tandem. I emerged from anesthesia without a large chunk of skull.

I was delirious, and decidedly hostile, for three weeks. Deanna said I looked only vaguely human, as if someone had put a Ted-like face on a hugely swollen and morbid horror movie mask, complete with bloody incisions, big staples and potato-sack stitching.

She soon understood all too well why support groups are so necessary. She told me about one incident late at night when she was visiting. I wormed out of my restraints and was trying to walk out of the hospital completely naked. It might sound like a funny drunk-guy story, but consider that I had no judgment, I had poor balance, and I was swaying around the room with nothing between my brain and another potential injury but a flap of skin. As my wife cried, screamed for help, and begged me to get back in bed, I yelled at her that it was ridiculous and I needed to go home. The staff had to call security to get me back in that bed, and tied down. She sat in the car for an hour in the parking garage screaming and crying before she could drive home and pretend for the boys that everything was fine.

She told the kids only that my head was sore and I needed to stay at the hospital. She spent every minute between the hospital and their activities, making sure one parent was present for every baseball playoff game, the end of school picnics, and elementary school graduation. I missed all those things. Didn't even know they were happening. After two weeks, my oldest son insisted on seeing me. He lasted 60 seconds in the room before he took off down the hall in tears. And my wife said it went as well as it could have because I was drugged out. But he shook his head savagely and said, "That didn't look like my dad."