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A mental health crisis pushed baseball player Micah Johnson out of the major leagues, so he started a second career as a painter. Caitlin Shetterly visited his studio in Maine to hear his story.
CAITLIN SHETTERLY, BYLINE: Micah Johnson wanted to play baseball since he was barely out of diapers. When he was a junior at Indiana University, he was drafted to the farm team of the Chicago White Sox. Two short years later, in 2015, Johnson was playing in the big leagues as the Sox's second baseman.
MICAH JOHNSON: And so opening day, I look up, and you can't see up. Like, it's just people.
SHETTERLY: Later that year, Johnson was traded to the LA Dodgers. When he first got there, the team manager asked the players what they like to do in their free time. Johnson said paint. He made a portrait of the legendary Black Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills. His team loved it.
JOHNSON: That was, like, all the confidence I needed 'cause now I thought I was, like, a legit painter.
SHETTERLY: For the next two years, Johnson taught himself to paint when he wasn't playing baseball. And then, in 2018, after being traded once again to the Tampa Bay Rays, Johnson started feeling out of whack.
JOHNSON: It was a weird thing 'cause I was playing out of my mind. So I would not sleep at night, go into the stadium about 5 in the morning, do my workout, my lifting, and then practice all day, go to the game and get three hits and do it all again the next day. So I was not sleeping and painting.
SHETTERLY: He went to the team psychiatrist because he thought he might have ADHD.
JOHNSON: Long story short, a few other tests come out, we talk, we go through things, and they diagnosed me with bipolar disorder.
SHETTERLY: He started medication, but it made him exhausted and listless. He felt that he couldn't play baseball anymore. His lifelong dream had run afoul.
JOHNSON: That last year was brutal, and then when it got done, I knew I was done. I don't even have my baseball glove or cleats, or there was no recollection of me playing baseball because I just left it all, like, in the locker room and just left.
SHETTERLY: Johnson bounced on and off medications and struggled. But then he started to find success with his art.
JOHNSON: I started painting kids in astronaut helmets after my nephew asked if astronauts could be Black. So that's how, like, this whole art career kind of started. Very few people have ever, you know, gone to space. Very few people have also played Major League Baseball, but I did it. So that astronaut helmet became, like, this symbol.
SHETTERLY: Gallery owner Jacquelin Napal of Art Angels in Los Angeles says his work hit the cultural zeitgeist.
JACQUELIN NAPAL: The paintings resonated so strongly with collectors.
SHETTERLY: Johnson and his wife, Katie, decided to move to the beach town of York, Maine, near where Katie grew up. By then, they had their first child, a 7-month-old daughter.
JOHNSON: Things worked up here. So, like, my career really started taking off. There was no noise, so there was no influence from the outside world up here.
SHETTERLY: In Maine, Johnson created a character, a boy called Aku, who finds an enchanted astronaut helmet in his basement which lets him travel through time. Johnson began selling NFTs, or virtual assets, of Aku's world. In less than a day, he'd made $34 million in NFTs, but he lost it all in minutes due to bad contracts. He was stressed but didn't give up.
Not missing a beat, he pitched Penguin Random House on a kids book about Aku. Last spring, it became a New York Times bestseller. In the meantime, Johnson has found the right medication and gotten back to making fine art. But now he's pushing himself to go deeper.
JOHNSON: I've been in Maine for six years now. The air is very clean. It's very peaceful. So I started thinking, why can't Black people have access to this kind of life? Why not? Why can't Black people have clean air? And so I started creating these works of people in Maine, and it's, like, my own world. What would I like to see?
SHETTERLY: One wall of his studio hangs a large painting made from charcoal dust rubbed into linen. It's of a child in fishing waders, her hair blowing in the wind. Her skin is ethereal. On another, a boy's face is framed by blue sky. His bold expression affirms that he, too, deserves his place in the sun.
JOHNSON: Art's not meant to be beautiful in the sense that it's going to match this couch or beautiful in the sense that it looks like this person that this photo is taken because anybody can do that now. Now it's about, like, how can you bring your essence into that piece? And that takes forever.
SHETTERLY: Baseball is a sport known for the patience that is required of both the players and the viewers. It's a game of chance and skill and bursts of magic. Come to think of it, baseball isn't that different from making art. For NPR News, I'm Caitlin Shetterly. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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