Padres Pitcher Opens Up on Scary Illness He Dealt With Early in Career

The San Diego Padres are off to a dominant start to 2025 with MLB's best record at 10-3.

This is due to existing leaders in the clubhouse and new acquisitions starting a new chapter of their baseball lives in San Diego. One man who has had a particularly turbulent professional baseball career is southpaw Kyle Hart.

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Hart played last season in Korea, winning the Cy Young-equivalent award in the Korean Baseball Organization, but the Cincinnati, OH native originally debuted with the Boston Red Sox in the summer of 2020.

That year alone was life-changing for so many, but Hart revealed to the San Diego Union-Tribune's Annie Heilbrunn that he was battling a major illness that season, and not the one that brought the world to a halt.

Hart only played four games in Boston with an ERA of 15.55. It was later revealed that he was also battling Lyme disease that resulted in him losing 20 pounds.

"Yeah, that was quite an interesting situation," said Hart. "I was just thankful that we finally got it diagnosed. The timing was just so poor, because the doctors, and rightfully so, were just assuming that I had COVID."

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One of the side effects of Lyme disease is that it can cause insomnia. Since nobody knew what was really wrong with Hart, he claimed he was awake for five straight days before the accurate diagnosis.

"They finally snowballed into the right diagnosis. But the antibiotics really helped right away, and then there was a period of me plateauing, and that’s about the time that we went back and rebooted spring training 2.0 or whatever. So the timing, like I said, wasn’t great. But it was what it was. I learned a lot, and it was just part of my journey."

The journey took him to Korea, to then a fringe spot on the roster, to then proving himself this spring and earning a role as a starting pitcher.

So far, Hart is 1-0, finally getting the elusive first MLB win pitchers dream about, with seven hits allowed, seven earned runs, and four strikeouts in his pair of outings for the Padres.

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