Rob Whalen was ready to go to spring training.

Ready in the sense that he had a flight booked and his bags packed. Lately his bullpen sessions had been going well, and he was feeling healthier than he had in a long time. Plus, he had a new plan: The 25-year-old pitcher in the Seattle Mariners’ system was hoping to remake himself into a reliever after a couple successful major league relief stints.

But Whalen was not ready to go to spring training because whenever friends and family asked if he was excited — excited for the start of the season, excited to put the new plan into practice — it felt like a lie to tell them that he was.

“I couldn’t look them in the eye, and I felt like I was just telling them what they wanted to hear,” Whalen told Yahoo Sports. “I was trying to convince myself that I was excited.”

Which is how he found himself at the 11th hour, literally about to head out the door for his flight, calling Jerry Dipoto to tell Seattle’s general manager that he was retiring from baseball. Dipoto didn’t answer, so he called Andy McKay, the Mariners director of player development. McKay didn’t pick up either, but he did text back.

“Just wanted to call and let you and the organization know that I’ve decided to retire from playing and transition into a new chapter in my life,” Whalen explained over text. “This decision has been weighing on me heavily the last little while but I know that my heart is in a different place.” He thanked them for the opportunity to play baseball and for “dealing with a lot of my b.s.

“Wish I could’ve been in a better season of my life during my time with Seattle,” he concluded, which was true. But also, as Whalen later explained to Yahoo, “the situation with [the Mariners] was definitely a driving force in why I lost love for the game … they really put the nail in the coffin for me.”

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Rob Whalen was drafted in the 12th round out of high school in 2012 by the New York Mets. After multiple knee injuries and a trade to the Atlanta Braves, everything started to click in 2016. He posted a 2.49 ERA in Double-A, pitched well during a brief stint at Triple-A, and got promoted for his major league debut at 22 years old — a moment that should have been the happiest of his life.

“It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be,” Whalen said. “I didn’t get that huge rush of fulfillment. I felt like, wow I just accomplished my lifelong goal of getting to the big leagues, and all I could think about after that was how hard it was gonna be to stay there. I was panicking already, so I never got to enjoy it.”

Growing up, Whalen had been a self-described insecure kid, but he’d always assumed he’d grow out of it. Now, “everything I did was under a microscope, and the feeling that there’s always people coming after your job and you’re just trying to stay up there.”

Prior to the 2017 season, Whalen was traded to the Mariners. That offseason, he struggled to get out of bed and started the year in Triple-A feeling out of shape and unmotivated. Talking to the team’s mental skills coach helped a little, but Whalen was battling more than on-field jitters. The anxiety — the nights before his starts spent in a cold sweat, running scenarios of everything that could go wrong on the mound — started to consume him, and soon the catastrophizing spread beyond baseball.

He invited his then-girlfriend to join him for a series in Las Vegas. “That was maybe four months removed from the [Las Vegas] shooting, and that was all I could think about,” Whalen said. “There’s this huge crowd, people that could create a problem at any point in time, and I’m thinking, ‘How do I exit this? If something goes down, how do I get away from this?’”

View photos Rob Whalen worked his way back to the majors in 2018 but was sent back down to the minors after one appearance. (AP Photo) More

At a Halloween party on the streets of Orlando, he couldn’t stop thinking about how any one of those masked revelers could commit a dangerous crime, and no one would ever know who it was. “That’s just how I felt all the time,” Whalen said. “I always found a bad situation in my mind that I was trying to prepare for. I wasn’t enjoying what was happening.”

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