A year after his best friends suicide, Diamondbacks prospect Blake Walston is still reassembling

(Content warning: This story addresses suicide and other mental health issues and may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.)

Sitting on a metal chair in the bright Arizona sun, a baseball pinned between his arm and his thigh, Diamondbacks prospect Blake Walston tugs at the sleeve of his waffle-knit shirt. Underneath, on the inside of his right wrist, is a tattoo. It relates a tragedy in just 14 characters:

Riley
2001-2021

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Walston, a left-handed pitcher, is a first-round pick who is working his way toward the majors. As he does, the 20-year-old North Carolinian wants Riley Estes, his lifelong best friend, along for the ride. Riley wears his glove as much as he does. Riley catches every comebacker and snags every toss back from the catcher. It’s Walston’s way of keeping his friend alive.

Just more than a year ago, on February 7 of last year in their coastal North Carolina hometown of Wilmington, Walston’s closet friend since birth died by suicide. The loss has scarred the Diamondbacks pitcher in ways he’s only just now beginning to understand.

He lost the motivation to play baseball or even leave the house. He stopped eating, at one point carrying only 170 pounds on his 6-foot-5 frame. Every morning greeted him with a bout of nausea. Every night was sleepless, his insomnia interrupted only occasionally by a few minutes of rest. Awake or slumbering, Walston was wracked by guilt — who would have been in a better position to pick up on Riley’s intentions than his best friend? — and was unable to stop himself from thinking about Riley’s death.

“It pretty much cut me in half,” he says. 

More than a year has passed and Walston is still battling those disturbing thoughts. Riley’s death “damaged everything” about Walston, says his older brother Garrett. “It damaged his trust in people. It damaged his outlook on life.” His brother, Garrett says, “has not been the same since.”

But damaged does not mean destroyed, and Walston can sit in this chair on this day and discuss his trauma because of a crucial choice he made in the weeks following that terrible February day. Unable to calm his roiling mind, the left-hander resolved to not follow his friend into an inescapable spiral. He needed help and he asked for it. He confided in pitching coaches and worked frequently with Arizona’s mental skills staff. With their help, he slowly pulled himself back to a healthier place.

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Last year was Walston’s first full professional season. It’s a crucible for any young player, their first real exposure to the grind of the minors. That Walston got through it with a shiny 3.76 ERA across two levels of A-ball suggests that rite of passage schooled him on pitching. But, as he reeled emotionally in the wake of an unthinkable loss, he learned more than that.

He learned how to keep going.

The morning of Riley’s death, Walston woke up feeling unsettled. “I don’t know what it was,” he says. “I knew something was wrong.”

He was in Virginia on a hunting trip with a few friends, but he decided to head home. As he made the five-hour drive, word filtered back to him that something had happened with Riley. Frantic, he made phone call after phone call. Riley’s parents didn’t answer. Nor did anyone in Walston’s family. He fired off angry, urgent texts. PICK UP THE PHONE!

Finally, Riley’s older brother answered. Riley had killed himself. “His brother was bawling, crying,” Walston says. “It’s something that I probably will never get out of my head.” Walston rushed down the interstate to Wilmington, arriving at home at the same time as Garrett. They collapsed in each other’s arms, unable to manage any words through the tears.

Riley had been like a brother to both of them. The Walston and Estes families had always been close. Riley and Blake had been attached at the hip, as were Garrett and Riley’s older brother. They slept over at each other’s houses and played every sport together. When their parents had to work late during the years Blake and Garrett were young, Riley’s mom would pick them up from school instead. “It doesn’t get much tighter than how we all were,” Garrett says.

Both Walston brothers remember Riley as the ultimate goofball, the life of any party and the guy who liked to heckle opposing teams from the dugout. But Walston also recognized something darker. Riley felt no one looked past his fun-loving exterior and took him seriously. “I knew how dark his depression was,” Walston says. “I knew how deep he was in his own thoughts.” When he and Riley had last talked, just days earlier, it was clear Riley was working through something.

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Days later, Walston kept asking himself if he should have known. If he could have changed things. “I beat myself up, I gave myself guilt,” he says. He was angry at himself and angry at Riley. Why would he do something so permanent, so damaging? They’d been each other’s lifelines. In 2019, as Walston battled homesickness during his first taste of pro ball, he and Riley would FaceTime daily. “He kept me motivated to just keep going,” he says. Now, Riley had left him untethered.

He also cut off the world, his phone buzzing endlessly with unanswered calls and texts. Walston likens it to drowning. The subsequent death of his grandmother only accelerated his tailspin. “Everything around me was dying,” he says, “and I felt like I was dying with it.”

But then, after yet another morning that began not with breakfast but his stomach churning and head buried in the toilet, he grasped onto a small but crucial bit of wisdom. “I knew something had to change,” he says. Riley had taken his life because he didn’t know how to ask for help. He didn’t know that so many people, people who loved him, were prepared to provide it. Walston wasn’t going to let himself fall into the same trap.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to go down that path,” he says. “I was going to talk to people.”

Walston arrived in Arizona two weeks after Riley’s death. The distance didn’t make anything better. He felt Riley’s absence just as acutely, and he also felt cut off from his support system back in North Carolina. So, he turned to Diamondbacks pitching coach Barry Enright.

“If I didn’t have him,” Walston says, “I really don’t know what I would have done.”

Enright had instructed Walston both in 2019 and in 2020 at the alternate site, and there might not have been anyone in the organization better suited to help the young pitcher. When he was 13, Enright lost his father to heart disease. This year will mark the 23rd anniversary of his passing, and Enright says those painful memories still sneak up on him from time to time. He also knows that grief is something you live with, not overcome.

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But what can be overcome, Enright taught his young pupil, is the stubbornness and fear that makes it hard to admit vulnerability. In baseball and in life, Enright counseled, it’s important to “choose to do the tough thing all the time.” In the game, as Walston learned over the course of last season, that meant doing everything with a purpose. Instead of going through the motions in a light bullpen session, Enright told him to go into it with specific goals in mind. In life, that meant admitting when something was bothering you instead of bottling it up. And then, after acknowledging it, confronting it.

“Choose the fight instead of flight,” Enright says.

When Walston was wallowing in his grief, Enright pushed him to go on runs or play a round of golf. Be active, get out of the house. Walston took the coach’s advice and reaped its rewards quickly. When overcome by melancholy, he goes on a jog or unwinds by playing basketball for a few hours. Enright also helped Walston pierce the veil of darkness and glimpse a brighter future. “Having somebody there to motivate you and tell you that you’re worth it and that, if you stay on schedule and do what you need to do, you’ve got a bright future, Barry telling me all that kept me motivated,” Walston says.

At the same time, Walston was working with the team’s mental skills department daily, sometimes multiple times a day. The person often taking the lead in that work was Charley Jauss, one of the team’s mental skills coaches. It’s more common for Jauss and his colleagues to work with players on things more specific to baseball — dealing with a slump or being locked in for every pitch. But Jauss knows that to limit the scope of mental skills to just that misses a lot of necessary context.

“They aren’t just incredible athletes. They’re human beings,” Jauss says. “They’re brothers, they’re sons, they’re friends, they’re husbands. They have complex lives and they do an amazing job on the field and focusing on the task of what they do, but life doesn’t stop.”

So, Jauss and Walston would huddle nearly every day — sometimes alone, sometimes with another coach or mental skills coach. Jauss reminded Walston that choosing to talk about his mental battles was a sign of strength. “There’s immense power in being able to acknowledge that you’re struggling and seeking out that help,” Jauss says. They would untangle the sour memories of Riley’s death and relive the happy ones of his life. They would talk about coping strategies for when the darkness pulled at Walston.

Over time, coping got easier, if not easy. But no one ever reaches grief’s finish line, and Walston isn’t even within shouting distance. There are still times when Walston has to pull himself out of a funk. In January, another high school teammate, Bryson Furtado, also died by suicide. The anniversary of Riley’s death followed soon after. Walston found himself unwinding again, so he reached out to Jauss and Enright and others to catch himself.

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Even the smaller things can bring on those ugly thoughts. He and Riley loved to fish — so much so “Fish” is the name Riley gave his dog — and Walston occasionally finds himself wanting to call his friend to plan a fishing trip. Sometimes it’s a stray joke in the clubhouse. “One person says, ‘Oh, if they did that, I’d kill myself,’” he says. “Then it’s an immediate boom, it triggers your mind.” Food and drink tend to lose their taste when thoughts of Riley bubble up.

But recently, Garrett says, has he started to see his brother smile. That’s progress to be celebrated. Garrett’s thankful the Diamondbacks have invested so much time in helping Walston find himself again.

“I don’t know who he talked to exactly,” Garrett says, “but I know they’ve done wonders for him.”

Walston also copes by doing what he can to spread the word about suicide prevention. He talks often about the RILO Foundation — started by Riley’s dad, it bears Riley’s nickname but also stands for “Reasons I Live On” — which directs money to other suicide prevention organizations. Garrett, who just wrapped up his senior year as a tight end at the University of North Carolina, used a Name, Image and Likeness sponsorship deal to raise money for the foundation. The two brothers also are involved in an effort to build a memorial for Riley on Wrightsville Beach in Wilmington. A GoFundMe for that memorial has raised $95,000.

But Walston’s mind is still awash with all the emotions that swirl together to form grief. “The anger and the hate and the pissed-off feelings are still there,” he says. “I don’t think those will ever leave until I see him again.” They swim around in there alongside love and compassion and a need to understand. “I forgive him because I know how much pain he’s in and that he’s in a better place,” Walston says. “But then again, it’s like, why? Why wouldn’t you just see how your life would go?”

He’s unlikely to get those answers — few affected by suicide ever do — and Walston is learning to be at peace with that. He’s learning to prioritize his own wellbeing and find joy in his own improvement. His brother sees it and is proud. “If he can just stay on the track that he’s on and continue to get better mentally and keep talking to somebody about some of the depression that he’s having,” Garrett says, “the ceiling is sky-high for him.”

Walston will keep climbing toward it, step by painstaking step. And there on his right wrist, participating in every pitch he throws, will be Riley. He doesn’t understand his friend’s choice to take his life, but he’s learning that he has to “push away all the guilt” to make the most of his.

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“As long as I just tell myself that and keep moving forward,” Walston says, “we’ll see each other again.”

(Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Walston is a left-handed pitcher.)

(Photo: Zachary Lucy / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)

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