Balancing act - B.J. Garbe

Twins outfield prospect B.J. Garbe says he has overcome last year's spells of lightheadedness and is excited to focus on baseball again.

FORT MYERS, Fla. - He already felt queasy. A pain had developed in his side. Nothing was going according to schedule. And B.J. Garbe was thousands of miles from home with thousands more colliding thoughts.

"I got myself a little worked up about it, I guess," said the Twins' outfield prospect.

So, in the middle of a walk down a London street, he stopped and sat down on the curb.

And passed out.

"That was when it began," he said.

Panic attacks. Lightheadedness. The sinking dread of something wrong inside. Sinking deeper and deeper before clearing.

The episodes came and went for months after that December trip to Europe in 2002.

"But I didn't say anything about it," Garbe said. "I was just trying to get through it. Sometimes I felt fine."

But it was not fine by spring training last year. And when another episode struck, Garbe suddenly left the Twins' big-league camp to get tested and never returned. Team officials called it everything from vertigo to, as manager Ron Gardenhire put it, problems with his "equilarium."

Garbe is back in camp this year, and he still isn't sure what triggered last year's nightmarish health scare. But he's sure it's behind him, he said, and he's more prepared than ever to right a baseball career that seemed to derail almost as soon as it started with his selection in 1999 as the fifth overall pick in the June draft, out of Moses Lake (Wash.) High School.

"This is the biggest season that I've had so far. And I suppose it's always going to be that way from now on," said Garbe, 23, who has a career .237 batting average and 22 home runs in a 490-game minor league career. "I'm ready to be the guy they drafted me to be."

It would seem he's overdue.

Last year's issues — doctors diagnosed them as periodic anxiety attacks and prescribed Paxil for about six months — were just the latest in a series of frustrations for the Washington state prep player of the year who quickly was labeled a top prospect in the Twins' organization. Especially after hitting .316 at Class A Elizabethton (Tenn.) the summer of the draft.

Early in the 2002 season, for instance, Garbe was having enough trouble seeing the ball during games that he was sent to a specialist who discovered he had night blindness — a condition he might have played with for much longer but that went unnoticed during spring training because of a schedule consisting almost exclusively of day games.

He was given a program of eye exercises to correct the problem.

"He's been battling through a lot of things," Gardenhire said. "He hasn't moved up the ladder like everybody thought he would, but he's still a young kid, still got a chance.

"He's always moved around real well out there in the field. He just hasn't hit at a level yet to get where he needs to be. But... a lot of that's due to his eyesight and everything else."

Even last year, after opening the season on time at Class AA New Britain, misfortune struck Garbe again when he broke his wrist on a play in the outfield early in the season. He never regained full strength in the wrist even after he returned later in the season, and ended up with a career-worst .178 average in 66 games.

But he sounds full of confidence this spring. In part that's because of an aggressive offseason conditioning program that strengthened the wrist and has him feeling stronger than he has been entering spring training. Mostly, it's because the anxiety attacks are over.

"It was probably the toughest thing I've ever had to deal with," he said. "I wouldn't wish that feeling on my worst enemy.

"It took time. More so than the medication, what helped was me getting over it in my own mind, realizing when I started feeling those things come on, that there's nothing wrong."

Now he'll try to carry that newfound confidence into another season at New Britain and try to prove there's nothing wrong with him as a baseball prospect, either.

"We'd like to keep him out there for about 140 games — that's the big thing," general manager Terry Ryan said of Garbe's stock. "Remember, he's still only 23 years old."

Said Garbe: "I feel great. Everything's good. I can't wait to get going."