Logan Allen remembers the last time his older brother, Philip, attended a baseball game. Logan pitched a little bit, played some first base. He might have hit a home run. That part he is a bit fuzzy on, but the image of Philip on the top steps of his high school’s baseball field, smiling under his baseball cap as family and friends crowded around his wheelchair, is burned into his memory.

“I remember crying after that game,” the 21-year-old Allen recalled. “I would kill for that (again). It would be incredible.”

One of a dozen or so Padres competing for a job in a wide-open starting rotation, Allen faces a considerable challenge as he wades through his first big league camp with just 27 innings above Double-A on his resume.

The Texas League’s pitcher of the year in 2018 and one of the game’s top-100 prospects, Allen wields formidable weapons in a late-diving “Vulcan” change-up, a 90-93 mph four-seam fastball that he can spot on either side of the plate and two effective breaking balls.


What truly sets Logan Allen apart, however, is his source of motivation as ascends the Padres system, his 31-year-old brother Philip.

“He’s one of those kids who will never have the opportunity to do what I’m doing,” Logan said. “There’s a lot of the kids in the world like that. I don’t want to be one of those guys who takes his opportunity and throws it down the drain.”

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‘The best gift’

“Head hurts. Head hurts. Head hurts.”


The complaint was repeated over and over as Dale and Norman Allen’s 2-year-old boy rubbed the side of his head. A doctor’s appointment was made. Philip began to seize, then slipped into a coma. Fifteen months later, the damage left in the wake of a traumatic episode — the equivalent of an aneurysm next to his brain stem — left him in a condition best described as severe cerebral palsy.

Philip cannot walk or talk. He has cortical blindness, which, as his mother Dale put it, is like watching a black-and-white movie out of the corner of his eyes. He breathes through a tracheostomy tube, needs a ventilator at night and requires round-the-clock care.

Doctors, in fact, told the family Philip would not survive two months outside of a hospital.

A decade later, when Norman longed for another child, Dale was fearful of how it might affect her first-born son.


“Turns out it was the best gift we could have given our sick child,” she said. “He started to open up. He started to make facial expressions, making noise, reaching out to him. … All he has to do is hear Logan’s voice and it’s all smiles. He starts flailing his arms and kicking his feet.”

The sound of a baby crying had always led Philip to hunker down into his wheelchair as if to hide from the perceived discomfort. To get him used to the idea of an infant around the house, the Allens repeatedly told Phillip the “baby goes waaaaa, the baby goes waa.”

Because he was hungry. Because he was sleepy. Because he needed a diaper change. Because he needed to be held.

Then when they brought Logan home from the hospital, they placed the newborn baby directly into their 10-year-old son’s lap.


There was never a problem.

Before long, Logan was crawling into his brother’s lap, throwing his arms around his neck and riding with his wheelchair during trips to Disney World. When he was old enough, the first family-employed nurses could not escape the critical eye of a protective younger brother whose world was upended the first time he truly understood just how delicate Philip’s condition was.

The scene — his parents attempting to resuscitate Philip after a lung collapsed — gave Logan nightmares for months.

Logan was between 10 and 12 years old at the time.


“Walking in and seeing your brother’s face turn blue and you’re not sure if he’s going to live or die, it was easily one of the hardest things I had to do,” Logan said. “From that moment on, I cherished every single moment because literally anything could happen.”

So Logan watched the nurses closely. How they cared for his brother. How they walked with him. How they talked with him.

He wanted to see compassion in everything they did. He was not shy about piping up, either, if he disapproved of their care, or strangers staring, or anyone who hadn’t washed their hands before approaching his brother.

Dale sometimes blushes with embarrassment at Logan’s brashness.


She, of course, understood, too.

“Because his brother couldn’t talk,” Dale Allen said, “Logan talked for him.”

Moving time

Dale Allen’s phone rang one Saturday morning.

Because Logan’s emerging left arm had outgrown the local baseball programs in Asheville, N.C., she and her husband Norman had enrolled him at IMG Academy, a boarding school and sports training utopia nearly 700 miles away in Bradenton, Fla.


The reasons were three-fold.

No. 1, a neighbor and former big league pitcher, Darren Holmes, had convinced the family Logan’s natural talent was legit. Second, it was going to be good for Logan, heading into his junior year of high school, to get out on his own (not that his “very good co-dependent little mother,” Dale says with a laugh, was not a regular visitor). Perhaps most of all, it was time for Logan to “cut the cord” on his attachment to Philip, now the oldest of three Allen boys.

The bond, of course, was too strong to sever.

Even Dale was not surprised when a flabbergasted adviser at IMG phoned her with news that Logan had begun volunteering his Saturday mornings to assist with a local Miracle League baseball program for children with disabilities.


“That,” Dale said, “was his way of compensating.”

Added Logan: “I just fell in love with it. I’ve done it every offseason since. Just being able to do a little something for the young kids and it reminded me of my brother at the time. I was able to feel closer to him by spending some time with some other special needs children.”

To this day, Philip is never far from Logan’s thoughts.

They’ve FaceTimed almost nightly since his baseball career blossomed, first as a draft prospect at IMG, then later as a minor leaguer in the Red Sox system and a budding prospect with the Padres, who insisted on his inclusion in the Craig Kimbrel trade in November 2015.


When Logan is home, he helps his brother pedal a special bike as they stroll through their neighborhood. When Logan’s pitching, Dale and Norman Allen pull a jersey over Philip, put a foam finger on his hand and blare the flat-screen TV loud enough for an umpire’s “steeeeerike” call to bring a smile to their oldest son’s face as it did when Logan was a Little Leaguer.

Philip’s collection of jerseys and souvenirs, to date, cover Logan’s journey from Bradenton to Lowell, Mass., to Fort Wayne, Ind., to Lake Elsinore to San Antonio and El Paso.

Although it remains to be seen if Sunday’s setback in his third Cactus League appearance impacts his push to crack the Padres’ opening day rotation, San Diego will almost assuredly pop onto Logan’s travel itinerary this year.

The Allens, no doubt, will be there, but the logistics make it difficult to plan for Philip’s inclusion.


His condition bars Philip from flying. The nature of nursing licenses make it difficult to load Philip, the family and their two full-time nurses — Miss Wanda and Miss Tommy, the “best thing that’s ever happened to our family,” as Logan says — into an RV for cross-country trips. But one locale is more doable than others — Atlanta’s SunTrust Park, a three-hour drive from Asheville.

The Padres start a four-game series there the last week of April.

Asked what it would mean to him to look up into a suite from a big league mound to see Philip smiling in his wheelchair like he did all those years ago, Logan Allen shakes his head.

There are no words.


The bond is his and Philip’s alone to understand.

“Nobody is ever going to have something like I have with him,” Logan said. “That’s how I feel about anybody I meet in my life — a girlfriend, a friend, even my mom and dad.

“I love my mom and dad, but nothing will ever come close to the bond I have with Philip.”


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jeff.sanders@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutSanders