Mets' R.A. Dickey Reveals Dark Past of Sexual Abuse and Suicidal Thoughts

R.A. Dickey has reinvented himself on the baseball field as a knuckleball pitcher, but his journey to make it to the New York Mets has been nothing short of a horror story. 

In a chilling new memoir released by Dickey, with some excerpts being released in the New York Times and appearing in Sports Illustrated, he recounts a childhood that included sexual abuse and thoughts of suicide. 

"

In the memoir, Dickey writes of repeated abuse by a female babysitter, and one instance perpetrated by a 17-year-old boy.

“I felt dirty, I felt ashamed and alone, and I felt there was something terribly wrong with me," Dickey says. He kept the secret for almost 25 years, not even telling his wife, Anne, until they were married for eight years.

Dickey, who dedicates the book to his wife and their four children, writes about how the abuse made him terrified of intimacy, of truly trusting any other human being. He writes movingly about how Anne's love and faith and forgiveness sustained him through another crisis in his life, when he had an affair — a transgression he explores with deep remorse, one that had him mulling how he might end his life during the winter of 2005-2006.

"

Just based on these few paragraphs alone, you wonder how much deeper and darker this book is going to get. The official release date is not until March 29.

Dickey's candidness is really shocking and brings you into an ugly world that he was forced to live in for so long. The kind of things that he talks about would make you cringe if they happened in a movie, let alone in real life. 

His tale of perseverance and faith in light of such a tragedy is inspiring.

Sure, his career did not go exactly the way he was planning when he was a first-round pick for the Texas Rangers in 1996, but his life has turned around thanks to his strength, will and determination.

Dickey is not perfect, to which he attests in the book with the affair, yet he has come back from all of that to become a successful pitcher and, much more importantly, husband and father of four.

@adamwells1985