WASHINGTON, D.C. – Danny Graves knew how he ended up on the side of the road, but he couldn’t answer why.

Graves was only four years removed from signing a three-year, $17.25 million contract extension with the Cincinnati Reds. Three years earlier, he had made his second All-Star team.

Now, none of the 30 Major League Baseball teams would give him a spot in their organizations.

Here he was: 30 pounds overweight and living paycheck to paycheck making $2,000 a month in an independent league. He was recently divorced. He was drinking heavily after games, doing recreational drugs and addicted to sleeping pills. He was battling depression and anxiety.

The money he had made from his playing days was long gone. He once owned an 11,000-square-foot house, eight cars and a couple of motorcycles. But by the time he waspitching for the Long Island Ducks in 2007, Graves had hit rock bottom.

So, during one of the summer nights in Long Island, he was drinking at the house he was renting with a few teammates. He walked out of the house at 3 a.m., went across the street and lay next to the side of the road.

“I just walked there,” he said. “I was hammered. I just walked out. It was at our house that we rented. I walked out, walked across the street and was like, I’m going to lie down. That was it. I just didn’t care.

“I was just tired of being me. I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. By all means, I have never tried to commit suicide. But I was OK with not living.”

One of his teammates, a catcher from Idaho named Jared Price, saw Graves on the side of the road. Price picked up Graves and carried him back into the house. Price questioned Graves, “What are you doing?”

Graves said he didn’t know.

“I didn’t care about anything,” Graves said. “I know that’s very selfish, but when you have issues, selfish is the last thing you think of. People always say, well, those that commit suicide are very selfish and they don’t think about others. Well, that’s the problem. You can’t think about others when you’re mentally ill.”

Graves, now a part-time radio broadcaster for the Reds, is unashamed about the lowest period of his life.

It was a lifetime ago.

“He had everything. He was on top of the world,” said Tom Hume, one of Graves’ former coaches. “When you go like that, most people just lie down and you give up.

"He didn’t give up.”

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Graves, the only Vietnamese-born player in MLB history, was a reliable closer for the Reds for several seasons. He owns the franchise record for saves (182) and he made the National League All-Star team in 2000 and 2004.

He spent nine seasons with the Reds. In his final outing with the team on May 22, 2005, Graves recorded just one out while giving up five runs on four hits and a walk against the Cleveland Indians.

Graves was booed when he walked off the field that day. After grabbing a cup of water in the dugout, he walked toward the bat rack when he said a fan leaned into the dugout, looked at him and said, “Take your ass back to (expletive) Vietnam.”

Graves responded with an expletive and flipped his middle fingers to the fan.

Graves, who was born in Saigon, was called into Dave Miley’s office the next day and then-general manager Dan O’Brien told him over speakerphone that his time with the Reds was over. He was being put on waivers.Graves asked if it was because of the incident with his fan, but O’Brien told him it wasn’t.

“I’m still living with that,” Graves said. “I’ve apologized for it and I regret doing it, but it’s over. I just want people to know the truth. It wasn’t (disrespect) to the fans. It was to one person. … That’s what I try to relay to everybody is, of course, I shouldn’t have done it but, to me, I was racially attacked, so I responded.”

It was a highly-publicized moment, but Graves says his slide had begun years earlier.

In 2003, after pitching well as a closer for four seasons, the Reds moved him into the starting rotation before the team’s first year at Great American Ball Park. Graves says he didn’t want to do it, but he felt it was something he had to do after agreeing to that hefty $17.25 million contract.

The move to starter went poorly. He had a 7.81 ERA after his first month, allowing 24 earned runs and 39 hits in 27 2/3 innings. At the same time, marital issues surfaced. He may have dealt with some depression beforehand, he said, but the 2003 season was the first time he noticed it.

“Every fifth day, I was the most miserable person ever,” he said.

Things weren’t going well on the field and things weren’t going well at home. The clubhouse was his safe zone. He hid his problems from teammates, but once he left the ballpark, that’s when he began to lose control.

“As soon as I would go home, I’d be drunk or high or staying up all night,” Graves said. “The only way I could sleep is if I was taking Ambien. Of course, got hooked on Ambien. It was just a spiral.”

Graves finished the ‘03 season with a 4-15 record and a 5.33 ERA. It was the worst season of his career. He didn’t pitch in the final month of the season.

He was referred to a sports psychologist, who recognizedthat his depression and anxiety went beyond how he pitched. He started taking medication, a prescription provided to him, but his off-the-field problems were a secret he still kept to himself.

“I didn’t tell anybody, but at that time it was like 'who am I going to tell' because they are going to think I’m an idiot,” Graves said. “They are going to think, 'what are you depressed about? You just signed a three-year deal. You’re loaded.' Yeah, I was loaded, and I got to buy anything I wanted, and I got to do anything I wanted, but it was temporary.”

When his teammates saw he was having a tough time, the response was usually taking him to a bar.

"Back then it was different," Graves said. "That was the way we covered it up. Take each other out and get hammered."

Graves moved back to the bullpen in 2004. On the surface, things looked great. He was pitching well again. He made the All-Star team. Then he went on the disabled list in August with lower back spasms and his problems resurfaced.

He returned for a few weeks in September and pitched OK, but he knew he wasn’t doing well. He requested to be sent home for the final two weeks of the year.

“We were way out of the race and I just talked to the doctors and trainers and said, ‘I can’t do this,’” Graves said. “I got the OK to go home. Reset is a great word because going into 2005, I’m, like, I’m starting over from scratch. This is going to be great. I can’t wait.”

He pitched well throughout the first month of the 2005 season, but his battle with depression never left him. He was in a toxic relationship, he said. He was still drinking heavily after games and his three kids from his first marriage saw a lot of it.

"They saw me being drunk a lot," Graves said of his kids. "I wasn’t like a bad drunk or a mean drunk, but they knew that I wasn’t normal. They saw me and their mother fighting a lot. ... It was me screaming at my wife or her screaming at me."

He could only hide his problems for so long.

“Next thing you know, boom, it just all hit,” he said. “I couldn’t get anybody out. I didn’t know how to adjust. I just mentally couldn’t adjust.”

The Reds released him after he posted an 11.00 ERA in his final month. A few weeks later, he signed with the New York Mets. He didn’t pitch well for the rest of the year.

The money that was supposed to last a lifetime didn't.

“That was just even worse because it was New York,” he said. “More alcohol. More getting high. More doing whatever I wanted to do.”

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Graves said he felt like a zombie before the 2006 season. He went through a divorce and stopped taking medication because he had not looked for a new psychiatrist after leaving Cincinnati.

He was miserable walking around his home, he said. He talked regularly to former teammate Pete Harnisch who had gone through some similar issues after quitting chewing tobacco, but Graves was still depressed. He couldn’t shake it.

“I’d just sit on the back porch crying, talking to him,” Graves said. “I mean, he tried to help me through it, but there’s only so much you can do, so much you can say. I thank him for it all the time, but it’s just one of those things.”

Graves later signed with Cleveland, but he spent most of the year in the minor leagues.

“It was hard for me to get my medicine,” he said. “I just didn’t want to go to anybody and start over. 'Hey, guess what, I’ve been crazy for like three years, can you give me some more medicine?' So, I stopped taking it, and definitely not the right thing to do.”

Graves didn’t want to give up on his baseball career, but the velocity on his pitches was way down. Preparing to play in the independent league, he lived with his mom for a few months in the off-season to try to save money. He went from making $6 million per season with the Reds to $2,000 a month.

The $24 million he made throughout his MLB career, before taxes, was gone. After a messy divorce, and all the financial confusion that entailed, he was paying for a giant house that he didn't live in, cars he no longer drove and child support.

"I know that sounds like a lot of money, but that goes quick," he said. "You have a lot of assets that belong to the both of you and you’re trying to get rid of it."

He reached his lowest point when he lay down on the side of the street.

“You can’t think about others when you’re mentally ill,” Graves said. “You can’t think about the downside of you hurting yourself. I wouldn’t think about what you care about me at that time, you know what I’m saying? I get it that it’s very selfish, but who cares? When you need help and nobody is helping you, you don’t care what they think.”

About a week after the road incident, a former teammate introduced Graves to Sonny, a woman in Texas, because he thought they would hit it off.

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Graves was playing in Long Island and Sonny lived in Texas with a young daughter, so they didn’t immediately meet each other. But there was something about her that was different for Graves.

For the first time, he felt like he could openly discuss his depression.

“I was still drinking a little bit, but I wasn’t getting hammered because I wanted to talk to her on the phone every night,” he said.

Graves told Sonny about how depressed he'd been and she encouraged him to seek a doctor. Graves could talk with Sonny, trust her,because she had experience dealing with mental health issues in her own family.

He started taking daily medication again. He says she helped him become a better Christian. He moved to Texas after his season in independent ball and they’ve remained together ever since, marrying in 2009.

“I actually had somebody that cared about me, cared about my issues, cared about me being healthy,” Graves said. “The whole thing, in my opinion, if you don’t have somebody that understands, they are not going to get it.”

There was no magical moment when Graves suddenly felt cured. Taking anti-depressants, it took a few weeks before he felt like his head was balanced. He says there is a noticeable difference when he forgets to take his daily prescription. He will become anti-social, even with family members.

“As a player, I don’t feel like I held a lot of emotions in," he said. “With her, I could say what I wanted to say and if I teared up, I teared up. She was still going to be there to listen.”

It wasn't like others hadn't tried to reach him.

Hume, an All-Star pitcher for the Reds in 1982, was the club’s bullpen coach throughout Graves’ years in Cincinnati. He was like a second father to Graves after Graves’ dad died in 1999. Hume, whom Graves called, “Pops,” didn’t know the full extent of Graves’ off-the-field issues, but he tried to convince Graves to curtail the heavy drinking and other bad habits.

Hume shared his own problems with anxiety when he pitched with Graves, hoping it would help Graves open up.

“It helps the people that are younger to be able to see that they are not the only one who had problems,” Hume said. “I think that’s what I tried to relay to him. You’re not the only one and it’s not a bad thing to come out and say I have a problem."

Graves didn't listen.

“Everything is not so great at the top when you feel like you are at the top," said Hume. "I’ve always said a lot of people have everything in the world, but they have nothing. That’s the way I felt. He had all the toys. He had all the cars. He had all the motorcycles, riding around and being crazy.”

Still, even when Graves was at his worst in his playing days, a mix of drinking and drugs, he attended chapel on Sundays. Yet his faith was challenged during those years.

“I always believed in God, but I just didn’t know why he would let me go through stuff like that,” Graves said. “I really believe that it’s not a coincidence that my wife was introduced to me at that time.”

Graves, who spent the 2008 season playing in the minor leagues for the Minnesota Twins, says he never felt any regrets about retirement. He was in a better place.

“With my medicine working the right way and her walking with me with God, that’s the only way I can explain it,” he said. “I don’t even know. I’d love to try to explain step-by-step with people but it’s so hard because unless you’re walking through it and going through it, it’s so hard to believe that it could happen. But I’m telling you, it was night and day. If you were around me daily at that time, you would see, like, ‘Wow, this is a totally different person.’”

Things aren’t perfect. There are still tough days. He wishes he had a better relationship with his three kids from his first marriage.

“We’ll text and call occasionally,” he said. “If I go to Florida, we’ll see each other and act like things are normal, but they’re not. They’re not normal. I just hope that when they get a little bit older that they understand why I was the way that I was.”

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Out of baseball for a few years, Graves looked for a way to stay connected to the sport. He had played since he was 5.

He received a few broadcasting gigs like calling the Little League World Series on ESPN and some college games.

One of those college games was the University of North Carolina at an NCAA regional tournament. Graves was the color commentator when he received a message from Marty Brennaman, a UNC alum. Brennaman told him he was impressed and glad to listen to him.

“That was, to me, what I needed to hear,” Graves said. “Somebody like Marty to tell me that this was something I could do and have success at. There is no sugarcoating with him. If you suck, you suck and you don’t need to be doing it. But he told me it was something I should really consider.”

Six years later, the Reds called and asked if he would be interested in joining some radio broadcasts. He’s had the chance to work several games with Brennaman.

“Quite honestly, I hope when this season is over, the powers that be have the wisdom to bring him back and work in a capacity that he’s worked in all year because the one thing I’ve noted about him is I think he’s gotten better, better and better,” Brennaman said. “I think that’s what it’s all about.”

During a rain delay in Colorado earlier this season, Graves pulled out a math book. His broadcasting partner, Tommy Thrall, asked if he was crunching numbers for the game. No, Graves responded, he was killing time by doing his homework.

Graves is working toward a degree in general studies at Miami, on track to graduate in spring 2020. The new head baseball coach, a former teammate, told him that the school would honor his full scholarship from his playing days. He’s not sure what he will do with his degree but figures it can only help him.

After calling three games in Pittsburgh in August, he flew with the team to Miami because he had to take a final exam in finite math.

He passed.