Faced with an ALS diagnosis, Sarah Langs MLBs research star keeps going

SAN DIEGO — Wearing a white sweater, her blonde hair tucked behind her ears, baseball stats guru Sarah Langs sits in a high-backed chair. It’s Tuesday of last week’s Winter Meetings, and the lobby of the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego is bustling. Reporters flit in and out of the media workroom behind her, but Langs rests calmly as she prepares for a short segment with MLB Network’s Lauren Shehadi. A veteran broadcaster, Shehadi has come prepared, holding a microphone in one hand and a sheaf of notes in the other. Langs, relatively new to TV but every bit as primed, holds nothing.

For five minutes, Shehadi quizzes Langs about the news of the day. Freshly minted Met Justin Verlander becomes the fourth pitcher in team history to boast at least three Cy Youngs, Langs tells viewers, and the second on the current roster alongside Max Scherzer. Together, they’ll hope to become just the eighth tandem of starting pitchers ever to make at least 30 starts at age 38 or older. And if Aaron Judge leaves the Yankees in free agency, she notes — Judge ultimately didn’t — it would mark just the second time that a reigning Cy Young winner and a reigning MVP jumped elsewhere in the same offseason.

It’s quite the information download, filled with specific dates and names and other factoids and minutiae, and it all springs from Langs’ mind. She’s researched all this, clearly, but once it enters her memory, it doesn’t leave. The many intricacies of baseball, the way things can be new and old at the same time, fascinate her endlessly, and her enthusiasm for the game is infectious. It can be found most often on Twitter, where she tweets interesting baseball nuggets to her 74,000 followers with unbounded excitement and innumerable exclamation points. It can also be found on the airwaves, a medium she is now conquering, with regular appearances on MLB Network, SNY and ESPN’s Baseball Tonight podcast.

“The passion for baseball is overwhelming,” says Cubs broadcaster Boog Sciambi, who has known Langs since 2015. “I love how excited she would get and still does get by the sport.” But more recently, viewers and tweeters learned something else. On Oct. 6, one day before the first round of the playoffs, Langs announced on Twitter that she has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS. The rapidly progressing neurological disease, often associated with Lou Gehrig, has no known cause for 90 percent of patients and no known cure for all of them. The average life expectancy from the moment of diagnosis is three to five years.

Those years can pass quickly and distressingly. Over time, patients lose all motor function — the use of their legs, their arms and eventually the ability to talk, swallow and breathe. None of them get better.

That Langs is among them makes her an outlier. As a 29-year-old woman, she does not fit the demographic of the average ALS patient, who is most often between 40 and 60 years old and male. Though she says the progression of her illness is “considered pretty slow,” it has not spared her. Since first experiencing symptoms more than two years ago, she has lost the ability to walk and now uses a wheelchair. Her speech has also slowed.

But instead of cursing what one friend calls “the twisted irony” of her situation — that she, one of baseball’s biggest enthusiasts, would contract a disease most famous for its association with a Hall of Famer — Langs chooses not to waste time on self-pity. Though friends and coworkers flock to her seat in the workroom to say hello, she is not here in San Diego to socialize. She is here to work. So, she sits in a chair, her wheelchair parked next to her, searching online databases for information that might cast a new light on the day’s baseball happenings. She regularly ducks out of the workroom, propelled by a friend, for appearances on radio and TV.

Langs chats with Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo at the Winter Meetings (Steve Gilbert / MLB.com)

This, working in baseball, is all she ever dreamed about. More, even. She never saw herself on the air, never imagined that a vast social media following would eagerly await her every observation. “I still say daily to my family and friends that I don’t understand why any of these people know who I am,” she says, “or why they care.” Her diagnosis has changed little of that. She has been blown away by the support she’s received. And she is more resolved than ever to spend every moment she has enjoying baseball, her favorite thing in the world. Watching it, researching it, talking about it, tweeting about it — just like she always has.

“We’re talking here at the Winter Meetings,” she says, taking in her surroundings. “I’m so glad to be here. I’m still able to do these things, so I don’t think I have any moment where I’m really losing that feeling.”

When a fatal diagnosis interrupts the thing you love to do, keep doing it.

In the second inning of Game 1 of the Padres-Mets Wild Card Series, a day after Langs announced her diagnosis publicly, a message appeared on the big screen at Citi Field. “We’re all rooting for you Sarah!” it said, along with a request for donations to the non-profit Project ALS. In the television booth, ESPN play-by-play man Karl Ravech updated viewers on Langs’ illness. Langs was at her home just outside the city, working the broadcast remotely as a researcher, piped into Ravech’s earpiece.

It’s impossible to explain Langs’ love affair with baseball without the Mets and without ESPN. Langs grew up in New York, the child of two baseball fans and a passionate Mets partisan at a time when such a loyalty got one teased at school. She doesn’t remember her first Mets game, but like many baseball factoids, she’s memorized the date: May 23, 1998. It was also Mike Piazza’s debut in Queens. She grew up attending games at Shea Stadium with her father, buying walk-up tickets that stuffed them on the loge level, where the overhang obscured the arc of pop-ups. At night, she’d beg to stay up to watch Baseball Tonight, hosted on ESPN by Ravech, her future coworker and advocate. Her favorite player was Óliver Pérez.

Langs graduated high school in 2011 and attended the University of Chicago with designs on a ball-writing career. It was then that she stumbled into her research niche that has carried her to prominence online and on TV. As an intern at SNY and then what is now called NBC Sports Chicago, she found herself pitching MLB stories that required historical digging in order to secure a byline and a trip to the ballpark. “I now know I was pitching research stories,” she says, and she quickly learned she was good at it. After graduating in 2015, she was hired as a researcher for ESPN’s Stats and Info division, which brought her into contact with the network’s most prominent baseball talent. Many of them became her biggest supporters.

The role was anything but public-facing. If the on-air talent were the superheroes, Langs was their archetypical sidekick at the computer. She’d be standing just off set during Baseball Tonight, scribbling notes on a card that would be handed up to the talent during commercial breaks. On game broadcasts, announcers would hear her in their ears, ready with a revealing informational nugget. “She has a really good feel for what’s interesting,” says Sciambi, who has called games for ESPN for more than a decade. She is a database whiz — call her the Baseball Savant savant — quickly scouring the internet to answer questions, often before they’re asked. It’s little surprise, then, that a few years into her ESPN tenure, she wound up on the air.

“All of the credit in the world for anyone knowing who I am,” she says, “goes to Buster Olney,” although ESPN’s longtime baseball insider says he “would strongly disagree” with that assessment. (At some point, Olney insists, someone was going to notice Langs’ talents and put her on the air.) Whatever the case, Olney was the first to do so. He’d long been impressed by her eagerness and intelligence, going so far as to suggest her to teams as a promising potential hire. In 2017, Olney emailed Langs to pitch her on creating her own segment for the Baseball Tonight podcast. Langs has appeared regularly on the The Numbers Game ever since. “Even now,” she says, “with doing MLB Network and SNY and these other things, I have people come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I listen to you on Buster’s podcast all the time.'”

She was not long for such a behind-the-scenes role. An entreaty from MLB.com in 2019 turned into her current gig, which Langs has some difficulty explaining. “I still don’t know how to describe what I do,” she says, “and I’ve been doing it for a while now.” The simplest way to put it might be that her job is to channel her infinite fascination with the sport to readers, listeners and viewers. Her seemingly limitless positivity on Twitter has turned her oft-typed declaration that “Baseball is the best” into an unintentional catchphrase and brand. The upbeat tenor of her tweets makes her quite the outlier among colleagues who profess partisanship only for games that clock in under three hours. It’s why she and Mandy Bell, another cheery young reporter for MLB.com, became such fast friends. They were both the ones who “rooted for the no-hitter to happen,” Bell says. Langs remains skilled with a database search, whether to serve her articles and TV appearances or, just as often, her coworkers. Langs has a knack for producing the perfect stat for MLB.com’s army of beat writers that brings their stories into complete focus. “I don’t know what her hours are,” says Alyson Footer, the site’s executive editor of national content, “because she’s always there to respond to you.”

Langs (left) on set for MLB Network (Courtesy of MLB Network)

Perhaps that’s because, over the past three years, Langs has rapaciously devoured any opportunity to talk or think about baseball that she can get. Even after leaving ESPN, she continued to work games for the network on a part-time basis, doing so more often after her departure than before. Langs built lasting bonds with colleagues along the way, although the diffuse nature of the baseball media landscape, only exacerbated by the pandemic, means a lot of those relationships were nurtured from afar. For two years, Footer kept “Coffee with Sarah Langs” at No. 4 on her post-COVID to-do list. They didn’t meet in person until last week in San Diego.

That also meant that for many, Langs’ health rapidly declined out of sight. Three years ago, not long into her tenure at the site, her foot started hurting. It would take more than a year to figure out why.

Langs says that the first person other than herself to notice something amiss was Sciambi.

The longtime broadcaster has been passionate about ALS awareness since 2007, when he lost a childhood friend to the disease. He’s on the board of directors of Project Main Street, a non-profit that provides direct financial assistance to people with ALS. And it was during one baseball broadcast in 2020, with play-by-play conducted from a studio in Bristol and researchers across the room in a mask, that he observed that Langs was walking with a limp. Sciambi has spent a lot of time with ALS patients, and “there was something about it that looked familiar,” he says. A dropped foot is one of the first signs of ALS, although a maddening aspect of the disease is that it’s so difficult to diagnose.

Other than for the 10 percent of patients who have genetic markers for the disease — Langs is not among that cohort — an ALS diagnosis is determined only through process of elimination. “There are no biomarkers,” Sciambi says. “There’s no ‘we stick you with this needle and take your blood.'” An avid runner, Langs simply thought she’d hurt her ankle. What was really happening was the motor neurons in her foot and leg were dying for unknown reasons, affecting her strength and mobility. Thinking it was a minor injury, Langs ran three half-marathons while experiencing symptoms of ALS.

As those symptoms worsened, Langs endured a long and frustrating process to determine what was going wrong. Her first appointment with a doctor was canceled at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and when she eventually did get in for an appointment, it was with an orthopedist. Seeing the wrong doctor is a common problem with diagnosing the disease, says ALS researcher Dr. Merit Cudkowicz. “People might go to three different doctors before they go to a neurologist,” Cudkowicz says, and that was true of Langs. From her first appointment to the ultimate diagnosis took more than a year, and Langs thinks that process took longer because she does not fit the typical profile of an ALS patient. “I think if I was a 45-year-old man, I would have gotten diagnosed in about six months,” she says. “And fewer tests.”

She cried when she was finally diagnosed last year. She was also relieved. “I had spent a really long time not knowing what was wrong with me,” she says. For more than a year, her health had deteriorated without explanation or any possible course of action. Now, she at least has an answer to what ails her, and that answer comes with treatments, although they leave much to be desired. According to the ALS Association, just six medications have been approved for treating ALS — some of which are meant for those who, unlike Langs, have the hereditary version of the disease — and the best of them is proven to extend life by only three months.

Langs immediately resolved to keep living her life. She’s ever-curious, but she specifically seeks questions that come with answers, and knows that languishing in the why-did-this-happen-to-me phase would prove unsatisfying. “No matter what was happening — I have these new pills to take, I have these new things to get used to — I still get to watch games at the end of the day,” she says. That was all she wanted before and it was all she wanted now. Langs does have her private moments “where it’s not always as positive and happy,” says Bell, but for the most part, Langs skips the existential queries. “That’s not how I operate,” Langs says. “That wouldn’t be my thought. It’s more ‘OK, it’s here, so now, what next?'”

What’s next, however, was a difficult decision that frustrated Langs for months — how, and whether, to tell people. Leaving the appointment where she got her diagnosis, her first thought was: “How am I going to tell Boog Sciambi?” It was Sciambi who would frequently ask how she was doing, who would check on the status of her leg even before Langs was diagnosed. “I would ask her more than probably was, for lack of a better word, appropriate for our relationship,” he says. Roughly a year ago, she texted and asked if he had a few minutes to talk. Sciambi’s heart sank. “I was like, ‘Here we go…'”

Even with her closest friends and colleagues, Langs revealed the news cautiously. She worried that she would be seen differently, and that “it might cramp my career in some way.” But guarding her diagnosis put her in a twisted position in which many terminally and chronically ill people find themselves — feeling deceitful for hiding private medical information to which no one else is owed. Olney knew only that she had experienced persistent pain in her feet. Ravech knew nothing beyond that Langs was having trouble walking. Bell, who would see her friend only sporadically since they first met in 2019, felt something was up when Langs told her she was considering skipping the 2021 All-Star Game in Denver due to her ankle. For Langs, the stress of holding her diagnosis back from each of them eventually outweighed the fear of letting it out.

For those who love Langs, though, the news of her diagnosis is a moment forever etched in their memories. MLB Network host Brian Kenny was in his kitchen with his wife. “We just doubled over,” he says. “It’s unfathomable and it’s wrong.” There’s a chair in Ravech’s house that will forever remind him of that day. He was sitting in it when Langs called. “I froze,” Ravech says. “And I cried.” Olney was driving over the Croton Reservoir in New York when he received what he describes as “the worst phone call I’ve ever had in my life.” Langs was cheerful, he says, but “I’ve never felt so helpless.” When Langs told Bell — having held off a few days in order to not make what had been a mildly annoying day for Bell any worse — Langs apologized to her.

All of them are still coming to grips with the news, much more than Langs seems to be. They draw strength from her clear-eyed view of things. Instead of pity and empty exhortations that she will beat a disease that is 100 percent fatal, Langs insisted that they treat her no differently. Langs wanted only to write and tweet and talk about baseball. “I might have real deep emotions about everything she’s going through,” Olney says, “but I feel like it’s my responsibility to do what she does, which is to focus on her work.”

And it worked. Certain accommodations were made — working from home more often, help getting around in her wheelchair or pulling her laptop from her bag — but Langs continued to tweet and make TV appearances and record her podcast with Bell. But one day, a podcast listener noticed her speech had slowed and raised a question, confronting Langs with another tough and unfair decision.

Whether to tell the world.

“If you’ve heard me on a pod or show lately,” Langs’ announcement began, “something might have sounded a bit off.” The statement, five paragraphs tweeted in screenshot style to circumvent Twitter’s character limit, dispatched with her diagnosis by its second stanza. The rest struck a characteristically upbeat tone, emphasizing her continued and unbroken involvement in the game. “Here’s to an epic postseason,” it concluded. “Baseball is the best.”

Despite its optimistic timbre, Langs had fretted over the decision to go public. Langs has built a sizable profile in the game, but she is unused to being the center of attention. She puts others first sometimes to a fault, to the point that friends wish she was more comfortable asking for help. No one would care about little old her, she was certain. But if listeners were picking up on her symptoms, then perhaps it was time to share her diagnosis. Typically selfless, Ravech says, Langs targeted the off day before the playoffs so as to not distract from any games.

That morning, Langs tweeted her statement, turned over her phone and took a shower. She deliberately ignored the incoming notifications as her tweet generated more than 1,300 retweets, 1,600 replies and 17,000 likes. Eventually, Langs’ irrepressible curiosity got the best of her. She asked for her phone, her eyes immediately landing on a response from Footer. “Sarah is the most beloved person at MLB.com,” it began. The magnitude of the baseball community’s support overwhelmed her. “I just started bawling,” Langs says.

Since then, Langs has found a new passion to match baseball: raising awareness and funds for ALS research. The state of the science is, at best, disappointing. Langs notes the relatively limited benefits of Riluzole, a drug she takes that buys patients months, not years. “Think about that,” she says. “We can find better drugs than that.” That’s why she asks people to donate to Project ALS, which contributes directly to ALS research. “Even if I’m long gone, even if it’s 50 years from now,” she says. “I want them to figure out a cure.” (That phrasing reveals a subtle, sober understanding of what lies in store. In 50 years, she’d be 79, which is the current average lifespan of an American woman.)

Her friends and admirers have once again followed her lead. In January, Bell will run the Walt Disney World Half Marathon in Langs’ honor. She’s raising money through a GoFundMe that has already collected $63,000 in donations. Bell wants half to go to Project ALS and half to Langs’ treatment, although Langs is insisting the non-profit receive the full amount. Rob Friedman, another baseball internet star whose @PitchingNinja account has more than 400,000 followers, organized the sale of a “Baseball is the Best” shirt through RotoWear, the proceeds of which will also benefit Project ALS.

Langs (left) with Bell. (Courtesy of Mandy Bell)

Though the outlook for any ALS patient remains grim, the state of that research is improving, according to Cudkowicz. “We have an entire world studying this illness,” she says. “There used to be 50 people, maybe, who were studying it.” Motor neurons can be made and studied in a petri dish now, speeding the hunt for biomarkers, more effective treatments and a cure. A gene therapy called Tofersen, intended for the 10 percent of patients with the genetic markers of the illness, is currently under FDA review. “I do think this is a solvable illness in our lifetime,” Cudkowicz says, although she agrees that the research effort requires more backing. “There are a lot of phenomenal ideas out there,” she says, “that are not getting funded.”

Langs wants to use her platform to spotlight those issues and to educate people on the relentless, unforgiving progression of the disease. “ALS does take away, eventually, people’s ability to express themselves,” she notes, so we don’t hear what it’s really like when even breathing requires medical intervention. She’s also workshopping another undertaking. Just as “Baseball is the best!” has taken off, and just as she’s become known to tweet “Good, more please” whenever “women get to do things they should be doing anyway,” she wants to find a way to ensure everyone experiences the outpouring of love her announcement has brought.

“We should be telling people who aren’t dying how much we appreciate them,” she says. “I don’t know how we make that a thing, but that’s really been the takeaway. I appreciate every single word, every single punctuation mark from every single person, but I look at people who I work with who are healthy and fine, and they’re just as appreciated, but no one’s telling them. I would love for us to have a way to tell those people that. That’s my next project.”

Right now, the answer eludes her. Then again, few manage to do that for long.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and three frenzied days at the Winter Meetings are over. Langs has packed her laptop and, Bell steering her from behind, is heading for the media room exit. Before she departs, several well-wishers among the throng of reporters covering the hot stove stop to pay their respects. Langs smiles and chats with each. This week, she’s made new friends and met old ones in person for the first time. It was her first Winter Meetings and it was a blast, and now it’s time to go home.

Her perspective on her disease is unshakable. Others in her corner are not so serene. “I’m pretty pissed off about it,” says Footer, who still has to choke back tears when speaking about her friend. “I don’t get it and I’m very upset and I’m angry.” It’s hard for Olney to discuss, and Ravech admits that he is “heartbroken daily.” Most of them leave unsaid the harshest reality of Langs’ disease — that no one gets better, that everyone gets worse, and that it eventually claims the life of each person it afflicts — but it’s there in the occasional tremors in their voices. It’s love.

It is human nature in these awful situations to speak in the past tense while simultaneously peering into a disheartening future, but Langs reminds them to focus on the present. It is not a spoken plea as much as it’s delivered by example. She moves forward, savoring each moment of life just as she did before. “How many of us can say we’re truly living every day?” Shehadi asks. “Sarah is living every day.” Langs loves baseball, and the feeling appears to be mutual. Her admirers are legion. “Let’s all,” says Footer, “be a little more like Sarah.”

Late Wednesday night, on the other end of a cross-country flight, Langs is still plugged in. She is due on the Baseball Tonight podcast in the morning, and though it’s past 1 a.m. on the East Coast, she is glued to events back in San Diego. The news has just broken that Xander Bogaerts has signed a massive free-agent deal with the Padres, and a tweet from Wall Street Journal reporter Lindsey Adler catches her eye. “A lone man on the waterfront is shouting ‘Let’s go Padres!’ into the night,” it reads. Delighted, Langs recognizes a kindred spirit, expressing his love for the sport to anyone who will listen. She quote-tweets it, adding four words and two exclamation points, an oft-repeated declaration of her own.

“Baseball is the best!!”

(Top photo of Langs: Courtesy of MLB Network)

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