Lisa Pollak / The Baltimore Sun

THE BOY LOVES GAMES OF CHANCE. He loves slot machines and playing cards and instant-win lottery tickets. He learned at an early age to count coins, and to bet them. He learned in the hospital that money comes in get-well cards.

Michael Hirschbeck learned to play gin in the hospital, too. His father taught him, during the long weeks of waiting, between the chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant and seizures and pneumonia and days when he was too sick to even eat a cup of ice chips. He never asked a lot of questions, even the day his parents told him he had the same disease as his older brother, who was already dying, and that it would take his baby sister’s bone marrow to save his life. He was 5 years old.

“If you want to cry, it’s OK,” John and Denise Hirschbeck told Michael, and he did, and so did they.

They didn’t tell him he was only the 18th child with this disease to have a bone marrow transplant; or that his baby sister was a carrier of the disease; or that the doctors had anguished over whether the sister’s tainted marrow would help him.

They didn’t tell him it might be too late to save his brother.

That was 1992, the summer Michael learned to watch baseball on television like the grown-ups do, patiently and for hours, while recovering from the transplant. That was the fall he watched the World Series with his father, the American League umpire who stopped working when his sons got sick. People might think the worst thing that ever happened to John Hirschbeck was getting spit on by Orioles second baseman Roberto Alomar during a game last season. But it wasn’t, not even close. When the worst thing happened to Hirschbeck, when his children were diagnosed with a deadly neurological illness, he was thankful for baseball. Not just for the season off, or the fund-raiser where famous players sold shirts and signatures to help pay medical bills — but for that simplest of baseball pleasures: games to watch with his son.

In the hospital, the Hirschbecks also played a game called Trouble. In Trouble, you use a die to move colored pegs around a board; when your peg lands on the same space as someone else’s, it’s trouble.

The game was Michael’s favorite.

The object was to get home safe.

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