The Pittsburgh Pirates have many hidden heroes.
There are the men who play on the field every night, whose jerseys we wear, whose names we chant, whose triumphs we celebrate, whose losses we mourn. They are a special kind of hero – the ones on the baseball cards – they are members of an elite brotherhood just 750 strong who every year captivate our minds and our hearts playing a child’s game on a very grown-up stage. But for every Major League Baseball team that takes the field each night, there is another team working behind the scenes to make sure every game goes off without a hitch – for the players and the fans. They are the Hidden Heroes of baseball – and these are their stories.
For Pittsburgh paramedic Greg Tersine and his crew, location, speed and training saves lives
There are those Pittsburgh Pirates and PNC Park heroes who people want to see – those folks who spend their days fulfilling their duties in the public eye, bringing the experience and excitement of a professional baseball game alive for players and fans alike. And then there are the heroes people don’t want to see.
Greg Tersine fits into the latter category.
That’s because if a person is seeing him, it is very likely that they (or someone they love) are having a very bad night. Tersine is a paramedic for the City of Pittsburgh and when he’s not working a regular shift, serving as a paramedic member of the Police SWAT team or diving in the rivers as part of the River Rescue Team, he is at PNC Park, caring for Pirates fans, players and occasionally employees.
About two and a half hours before every Pirates home game, a group of Pittsburgh paramedics drive to Medic Station 4 on the North Shore and pick up the special event ambulance. It’s smaller than standard ambulances because it’s not typically used for transporting patients on regular runs out on the streets. But it is as equipped as any ambulance available and well-maintained because, thankfully for baseball fans, it’s not used every day.
“This ambulance is solely for the purpose of treating players injured during the course of the baseball game,” Tersine explained. “It is required to be here by MLB. And if it leaves the stadium to transport a patient, game play cannot resume until another ambulance is here to replace it.”
On this particular evening, Tersine is manning the ambulance along with two of the men on his crew, John Leinhauser, 24, and Scott Studebaker, 29. They drive it to PNC Park, and then back it down the tunnel in right field. There it sits – hopefully – for the rest of the night, before being returned to the station and readied for the next event.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#000000″ class=”” size=””]“This is like a mini-city. But because we’re right here, so close to people, they can have a paramedic with them within sometimes 30 seconds to a minute”[/perfectpullquote]It was this ambulance that rushed pitcher Ryan Vogelsong to Allegheny General Hospital when he was hit in the face by a pitch from Rockies starter Jordan Lyles on May 23. Tersine helped treat him.
“When it happened, [Team Head Athletic Trainer] Todd Tomczyk did the initial assessment on the field and called us to come down and help him,” Tersine recalled. “My concern was head trauma, or him going unconscious because of a brain bleed and traumatic neck injury.”
He worked on the pitcher in the back of the ambulance, along with Tomczyk and Team Physician Edward Snell, who also rode along with them. “They were my second and third sets of hands back there,” he said. Studebaker drove the rig and called ahead to AGH to prepare their ER for an incoming head trauma.
Vogelsong went on to have surgery to repair several broken facial bones and is now on his way to rejoining the team, having thrown a two-inning simulated game in Oakland last week.
Fortunately, Tersine said, calls to use that ambulance are few and far between. “We may have about four a season for either Pirates players or players for the opposing teams.”
That is one of many services the paramedics provide at PNC.
After the ambulance is in place, the crew heads inside the tunnels and hallways of the stadium to the clubhouse and training room to check in with Tomczyk and assist him with any needs he may have for players and coaches.
“The training staff, they are experts in sports medicine and orthopedic-related issues. We help with the more medical-related things like GI issues, respiratory problems and dehydration,” Tersine explained.
Their services are also available to visiting teams, although they are rarely requested, he said.
With no needs to address on the team front, the three men head to the First Aid Station on the 100-level concourse. It is from here that they will treat the majority of people at PNC – either those who come knocking on the door seeking help or those in need of a little more assistance for whom they are dispatched to help out in the park. There is another station on the 300-level, which is manned by another team who do the same thing.
In total, six paramedics are covering PNC on this evening. For a park that seats over 30,000, not including the hundreds of employees and few hundred people associated with each team, that number may seem small – but in reality, people in the park couldn’t be in better hands.
“This is like a mini-city. But because we’re right here, so close to people, they can have a paramedic with them within sometimes 30 seconds to a minute,” Tersine explained. “That leads to positive outcomes in a health emergency.”
The Pirates go the extra mile to ensure the safety of their guests, he said, training ushers, security guards and any other employees who are interested in basic first aid so that they can render assistance until paramedics arrive on the scene. “It’s something that the Pirates do – they are really progressive about that – they want their people trained,” Tersine said. “It makes our jobs easier.”
Temperatures are hovering around 89-degrees on this evening, so the guys are preparing for an onslaught of heat-related illnesses.
“A lot of the calls we get from in the park are people in the outfield bleacher sections,” Studebaker, who has been a paramedic with the city for six years, said. “On a hot day like today, they sit out there, don’t hydrate properly and sort of just bake.”
Simple oral rehydration like water or Gatorade and an ice pack to the back of the neck are typical solutions that generally get most of their patients feeling better. But then there are folks who are in a more serious state that requires closer attention – like their first call of the night.
The park has just opened and there’s an older woman at the Stargell Gate who is dizzy and feeling sick. When Tersine arrives, she’s sitting in a chair near the metal detectors. He checks her vitals, asking her questions and reassuring her family, who are surrounding her, simultaneously. It turns out to be a dehydration issue complicated by blood pressure medication. With the aid of a PNC employee, he transfers her by wheelchair to the First Aid Station so that the team can further evaluate her and she can cool down in the air conditioning. After about 20 minutes there, and a cold bottle of water, her blood pressure improves and she’s able to proceed to her seats in the Club Level with her family members. It is a scene that repeats itself all summer long.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”#000000″ class=”” size=””]“When it happened, [Team Head Athletic Trainer] Todd Tomczyk did the initial assessment on the field and called us to come down and help him,” Tersine recalled. “My concern was head trauma, or him going unconscious because of a brain bleed and traumatic neck injury.”[/perfectpullquote]The heat was definitely a direct contributor to a slew of other minor injuries that came into the station this evening – open-toed shoes and toe stubs. “Flip flops are the cause of more broken toes and busted toenails than we can count,” Leinhauser, who is on his fourth year as a paramedic, said. “We have a constant stream of people asking for Band-Aids or help just for that.”
And while there were no foul ball-related injuries on this particular evening, they are also major culprits of injuries caused at PNC. League-wide the issue of protecting fans is a hot-button topic. Adding more protective netting down the baselines has been discussed as a solution. But it’s more complicated than that, Tersine explained. “People paying more attention at baseball games would solve a lot of our problems,” he said.
“Here, this park has become a tourist attraction of its own,” Studebaker, 29, and a lifelong Pirates fan, added. “A lot of people who don’t normally watch baseball come to PNC Park and want to get a picture of that view. They’re distracted taking photos and messing with their phones and don’t understand that balls and bats sometimes fly out into the seats.”
All of the paramedics who work at PNC Park, and there’s a rotating group who do, are employed by the city of Pittsburgh as part of the Special Events Division. They work games and other events in addition to their regular shifts on the streets. Park operations pay the city to have them on site. The same thing holds true for Steelers and Penguins games. It ensures that people at the events have highly-trained medical care available near-by in an emergency, and reduces the headaches each team/stadium operations staff would have in managing a private staff of medics.
“It works well for everyone involved,” said Tersine, who has been a paramedic for 14 years – 12 with the city and at PNC.
Paramedics in Pittsburgh are not affiliated with the fire department and conduct rescue operations city-wide. This means that if someone is trapped in a car, they cut the people out of it – and administer any medical care that person might need while trapped and once they’re removed, be that administering life-saving medication, running IVs or other procedures. To become a paramedic in Pittsburgh, a certification through a qualified paramedic training program is required which includes 1,400 hours of schooling and protocol training, Leinhauser said. He, Studebaker and Tersine all have four-year college degrees. Studebaker and Leinhauser through the University of Pittsburgh’s Emergency Medicine Program, the only one in the United States, and Tersine in neuroscience.
“I did the paramedic thing on the side and really enjoyed it, so that’s why I took this job,” Tersine said. “One of the greatest things about being a paramedic in the city is all of the different things we can do.”
While all paramedics in the city serve on ambulance-based crews that work shifts taking 911 calls on the streets, they also have the opportunity to train for additional special teams including the Special Events Division, Tactical Medic Team with the Police SWAT and the River Rescue Team. River Rescue actually operates out of a special office near the bullpen at PNC, the result of an agreement when the new park was built.
“We had a fantastic medic station basically right where PNC is now – so in order to build the new park, they had to tear it down. The city came to an agreement with the team that River Rescue would have an office in the park,” Tersine explained. Just a hundred yards away from the modest office sits a boathouse near the base of the Clemente Bridge where the two boats – the only boats licensed to operate as ambulances in the state of Pennsylvania – are housed, along with the equipment needed to conduct above-the-water and under-the-water rescues.
“Because of where it’s located, I can do both jobs in one day,” he said. “I can be in the First Aid Station working and literally five minutes later on a call on the river.”
According to Studebaker, that’s the best thing about the job.
“This job is different every day,” he said. “My dad does the same job every single day. From the time he walks into his building in the morning, until the time he leaves, he does the same thing. I have no idea what I’m going to be doing every day. I may be helping a kid with a fever or dealing with a patient with a gunshot wound or hanging off the side of Mount Washington because people weren’t where they should be.”
Leinhauser agreed, adding, “I would go crazy if I had to sit behind a desk all day.”
There certainly isn’t a lot of sitting to be done in PNC. Aside from the minor bumps and bruises and dehydration/overheating issues, paramedics also see their fair share of choking incidents and cardiac issues. If they can treat the patients where they are, or in the First Aid Station within a half an hour, they do. If the situation is more serious, they call for a city squad to transport the patient to the hospital.
“A lot of times people are reluctant to even ask for help. They are at the game to have a good time and they paid a lot of money to be here,” Tersine said. “We try to be sympathetic to that, but in some situations, you just have to tell them there’s really no other option and their health and safety is more important than the game.”
While the bulk of the patients they treat at PNC Park are fans, occasionally an employee will need assistance. As was the case in June 2008, when an usher, who was 45 at the time, had a stroke onsite.
“It was a fireworks night and I had just seen the last person out of my section. Then I started feeling like one of those maple-leaf helicopter things you throw up in the air,” the employee said. “I had to put my arms out to try to walk and I had the worst headache ever.”
Tersine and his team were there to help that night. “We were actually just getting ready to leave when we treated him. We have a stroke protocol we follow and went through it. He had all of the symptoms,” he said. “We got an IV going and transported him.”
It turned out that the employee had had a stroke in his brain stem, a type of stroke which can impair any and all activities associated with the central nervous system – including breathing and blood pressure, Tersine explained. He marveled that the employee, who on this night happened by the First Aid station to have a cut on his hand looked at, has made a seemingly full recovery after such a serious medical issue.
“The stadium paramedics did a wonderful job,” the employee said before heading back out to his section. “I don’t know if I’d be here if it weren’t for them.”
And that’s how most of the people who need the paramedics at PNC feel. While this dedicated group of public servants are likely the last people someone wants to see while out enjoying the “the ol’ ball game” – they are definitely the people everyone is most thankful for being there at the end of the night.
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