newsminer.com

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A homeless man offered his stem cells. A Major League baseball player sent an autographed jersey to be auctioned. A stranger out of nowhere handed over a bunch of cash.

The three are among the hundreds who have pitched in to give Anchorage Bucs general manager Dennis Mattingly a shot at extra innings.

More than $150,000 has poured in for Mattingly, 59, who has an incurable cancer called multiple myeloma. That’s enough money to get the man who started the Bucs baseball team almost 30 years ago the stem-cell transplant he needs in order to get a chance at a few more years of life.

Donations ranged from $25 to $30,000 and came from about 500 people, including several in the Lower 48.

“I can’t believe it,” Mattingly said in a telephone interview Tuesday after his first appointment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

“There’s a ton of people I’ve never heard of. There was a lady who walked into my office and handed me 80 bucks and I said, ’What’s this for?’ and she said, ’My dad’s going through this, and I just want to help.’ “

Then there was the man who called Mattingly’s wife, Sandy, on her cell phone.

“He asked if there were stem cells or any body parts he could donate, because he was a homeless guy and had been living in a tent for 11 years,” Sandy Mattingly said. “I told him we already had the stem cells banked ... and he said, ’I’d like to come over and give you a couple dollars.’

“When somebody that desperate is willing to give, it really humbles you.”

Donations came from people who know Mattingly from baseball, bowling or his years working as a driver for the Teamsters. They came from rival teams in the Alaska Baseball League. They came from strangers touched by the story of a blue-collar man whose health insurance hit its coverage limits.

“He didn’t think that many people would rally for him,” Sandy Mattingly said.

It was one of the biggest rallies in baseball history.

About two months ago, the Mattinglys learned there would be no life-extending transplant if they couldn’t pay the clinic $127,000 up front -- the amount not covered by insurance.

Sandy was ready to cash in her retirement savings, but Dennis wouldn’t let her. Daughter Rhonda Fisher was willing to cash in her kids’ life insurance policies, but Dennis wouldn’t let her. So, with the clock ticking, Fisher started looking for ways to raise that $127,000.

Fisher and others who joined the fundraising effort had about two weeks to plan a spaghetti feed, a bowling benefit and an auction, for which they collected items like the autographed jersey from former Bucs pitcher Jeff Francis, who pitched in the 2007 World Series for the Colorado Rockies. There wasn’t an event planner or a nonprofit expert among the bunch of them, but they got the job done.

In fact, they raised close to $160,000 and money is still coming in, Sandy Mattingly said. The clinic has its $127,000 and the rest will help cover living expenses while the couple is in Seattle for the next two or three months, as well as prescription co-pays and follow-up treatment, including a required return trip to Seattle one year after the transplant.

“Everything from the transplant forward is our nickel, because the insurance is shot,” Sandy said. “We’ll be in hock for the next several years.”

But at least there is the prospect that Mattingly will be around for those several years.

Multiple myeloma has a survival rate of about five years, though a successful stem-cell transplant can add an estimated three years. Mattingly was diagnosed in 2000 and had his first transplant in 2005. Three years later, the cancer is back as advertised. A second -- and what doctors say will be a final -- transplant could gain him a few more good years.

Mattingly hopes to get the transplant before the end of the year, but a recent glitch might postpone things. Last week while the Mattinglys were driving to Seattle, Dennis discovered a bump on his head. The next morning, he work up covered with chickenpox. Recent radiation and chemotherapy treatments had weakened his immune system, allowing the virus to flourish.

That little episode will delay the transplant, because Mattingly needs to be as healthy as possible. And, it cost the Mattinglys more than $500 at the Canadian emergency room they visited to get antibiotics and painkillers.

Such expenses come out of nowhere with a disease like multiple myeloma -- which makes the Mattinglys all the more grateful to those who came to their rescue.

“I’m speechless, and Dennis is even more so,” Sandy Mattingly said. “We’re just normal folk. You don’t expect people to come out of the woodwork to help you.”