hard time

“Wow!”

The performance needed no evaluation beyond the exclamation. Kurt Suzuki bounded out of the visiting clubhouse at Angel Stadium to catch up with his friend.

In 2009, in the first start of his first full major league season, the Angels’ pitcher threw six shutout innings against Suzuki and the Oakland Athletics. On Team USA, Suzuki had been his catcher.

Suzuki congratulated the pitcher, shared the exclamation and — because this is what friends do — gave him a hard time.

Before the sun rose, Nick Adenhart was dead. He was 22.

“I woke up the next morning to 10 text messages you don’t want to hear,” Suzuki said.

A drunk driver had blown through a red light and into a minivan full of friends. He killed three of them, including Adenhart. One survived: Jon Wilhite, who played baseball at Cal State Fullerton with Suzuki.

Sixteen years later, a forever bond endures between Wilhite and Suzuki. When the Angels introduced Suzuki as their new manager last month, Wilhite was in the audience.

Their friendship is compelling. Their story is poignant. We’ll get to it, but first Suzuki ribs Wilhite for wearing long pants on a sunny autumn day in Manhattan Beach. Suzuki is wearing shorts and flip-flops.

“We’re by the beach, dude,” Suzuki laughs.

Suzuki eggs on Wilhite: Tell the story about the white suit.

In 2004, Fullerton won the College World Series, with Suzuki as the All-America catcher and Wilhite as a redshirt catcher. In 2005, the Titans visited the White House.

“I didn’t own a suit,” Wilhite said. “I went to the Men’s Wearhouse in Hawthorne, just by myself, and this guy sold me on a white suit.”

New Angels manager Kurt Suzuki, left, and general manager Perry Minasian speak to reporters at Angel Stadium last month. Jon Wilhite was in the audience.

(Greg Beacham / Associated Press)

On the day of the White House visit, his teammates thought the white suit was a joke. Dear reader, it was not.

Wilhite stood in line with his teammates, waiting to meet President George W. Bush. As the president shook Wilhite’s hand, he took a look at the suit and deadpanned: “Bold move, son.”

Fullerton has won four College World Series championships, more than any other school besides USC, Louisiana State, Texas and Arizona State — elite by any standard, but frankly amazing given the Titans’ status as a financially challenged athletic program at a commuter school. The players believed in themselves, because they could not count on anyone else to believe in them.

“It was like a brotherhood,” Suzuki said.

That drunk driver very nearly killed Wilhite, too. You can get chills just by saying out loud the medical term for what happened to him: internal decapitation.

UC Irvine surgeons put his skull back atop his spine. At the time, UCI reported, only four other people were known to have recovered from that injury.

Wilhite was in the hospital for weeks, in rehabilitation for months. Suzuki, then in his second full major league season, raised more than $50,000 for Wilhite’s recovery fund by tapping veterans for baseball memorabilia that could be sold or auctioned.

“Luckily, with the money raised, I was able to take a year and get myself physically as good as I could be,” Wilhite said, “before I went back to work.”

That money was not the most valuable contribution Suzuki made toward Wilhite’s healing.

When Wilhite finished his rehabilitation program, Suzuki was back in Southern California, in the midst of offseason workouts.

Hey, he told Wilhite, come work out with me.

“This is a guy that’s a professional athlete getting ready for his next year,” Wilhite said, “and I was struggling to walk.

“I showed up every single day, and I got stronger. That’s when I really made strides. I wasn’t just a patient. I felt like an athlete again.”

Even in those worst of times, Suzuki was not above ribbing Wilhite. For both of them, it felt, well, normal.

“He was still getting his balance back,” Suzuki said. “I’m like, come on dude, don’t go falling on me or everybody’s going to be looking at us!”

Suzuki could have made a modest donation to Wilhite’s recovery fund. That would have been a lovely gesture.

Angels manager Kurt Suzuki, left, and Jon Wilhite were teammates at Cal State Fullerton. “Would you just write your family member a check? No, you’re going to be there for him,” Suzuki said of how he’s supported Wilhite since the accident.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

For Suzuki, that would not have been enough. The Titans were family, and to this day he remembers that Wilhite’s father attended practice just about every day, sitting in the front row, wearing that trademark white bucket hat.

“Would you just write your family member a check?” Suzuki said. “No, you’re going to be there for him.”

The Angels honor their best pitcher each year with the Nick Adenhart Award. Suzuki can present it now, and share his memories of Adenhart. Perhaps Wilhite could join Suzuki.

If he were to do that, he would want to make sure to share his memories of the other victims, too: Courtney Stewart, 20, a Fullerton classmate he described as smart, fun, and not at all scared to tease her ballplayer friends about their play; and Henry Pearson, 25, a law student and aspiring sports agent who Wilhite said never took a moment for granted.

We met at Marine Park in Manhattan Beach, where Pearson and Wilhite played youth baseball, and where a memorial reads: “On April 9, 2009, Henry Pearson, Courtney Stewart and Nick Adenhart were killed by a drunk driver. Jon Wilhite miraculously survived and recovered. They remain an inspiration to us all.”

Some days more than others, Wilhite feels the miracle of survival, of prayer, of modern medicine. I asked him how he explains what happened to people who don’t already know.

“I usually don’t like to drop that bomb on people,” he said. “I usually try to be vague.”

He knows he is the lucky one. He tries to remember that every day, but his mind never drifts far from the others.

“Three of the best people I know lost their life for a senseless act,” he said, “people with such promise.”

Thanksgiving is upon us, so I asked Wilhite if anything came out of this horrific tragedy for which he can be thankful.

He paused. The grief might never fully pass. He was not about to force an answer.

But, after a minute or so, he talked of the relationships he had built with the families of Adenhart, Pearson and Stewart, and the baseball community that supported him, and the close friends who stepped up to help him in his time of need.

“Like Kurt,” he said.

JD Vance, it seems, is everywhere.

Berating Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Eulogizing Charlie Kirk. Babysitting the Middle East peace accord. Profanely defending the aquatic obliteration of (possible) drug smugglers.

He’s loud, he’s obnoxious and, in a very short time, he’s broken unprecedented ground with his smash-face, turn-it-to-11 approach to the vice presidency. Unlike most White House understudies, who effectively disappear like a protected witness, Vance has become the highest-profile, most pugnacious politician in America who is not named Donald J. Trump.

It’s quite the contrast with his predecessor.

Kamala Harris made her own kind of history, as the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to serve as vice president. As such, she entered office bearing great — and vastly unrealistic — expectations about her prominence and the public role she would play in the Biden administration. When Harris acted the way that vice presidents normally do — subservient, self-effacing, careful never to poach the spotlight from the chief executive — it was seen as a failing.

By the end of her first year in office, “whatever happened to Kamala Harris?” had become a political buzz phrase.

No one’s asking that about JD Vance.

Why is that? Because that’s how President Trump wants it.

“Rule No.1 about the vice presidency is that vice presidents are only as active as their presidents want them to be,” said Jody Baumgartner, an East Carolina University expert on the office. “They themselves are irrelevant.”

Consider Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, who had the presence and pizzazz of day-old mashed potatoes.

“He was not a very powerful vice president, but that’s because Donald Trump didn’t want him to be,” said Christopher Devine, a University of Dayton professor who’s published four books on the vice presidency. “He wanted him to have very little influence and to be more of a background figure, to kind of reassure quietly the conservatives of the party that Trump was on the right track. With JD Vance, I think he wants him to be a very active, visible figure.”

In fact, Trump seems to be grooming Vance as a successor in a way that Joe Biden never did with Harris. The 46th president practically had to be bludgeoned into standing aside after the Democratic freakout over his wretched, career-ending debate performance. (Things might be different with Vance if Trump could override the Constitution and fulfill his fantasy of seeking a third term in the White House.)

There were other circumstances that kept Harris under wraps, particularly in the early part of Biden’s presidency.

One was the COVID-19 lockdown. “It meant she wasn’t traveling. She wasn’t doing public events,” said Joel K. Goldstein, another author and expert on the vice presidency. “A lot of stuff was being done virtually and so that tended to be constraining.”

The Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate also required Harris to stick close to Washington so she could cast a number of tie-breaking votes. (Under the Constitution, the vice president provides the deciding vote when the Senate is equally divided. Harris set a record in the third year of her vice presidency for casting the most tie-breakers in history.)

The personality of their bosses also explains why Harris and Vance approached the vice presidency in different ways.

Biden had spent nearly half a century in Washington, as a senator and vice president under Barack Obama. He was, foremost, a creature of the legislative process and saw Harris, who’d served nearly two decades in elected office, as a (junior) partner in governing.

Trump came to politics through celebrity. He is, foremost, a pitchman and promoter. He saw Vance as a way to turn up the volume.

Ohio’s senator had served barely 18 months in his one and only political position when Trump chose Vance as his running mate. He’d “really made his mark as a media and cultural figure,” Devine noted, with Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” regarded as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the anger and resentment that fueled the MAGA movement.

Trump “wanted someone who was going to be aggressive in advancing the MAGA narrative,” Devine said, “being very present in media, including in some newer media spaces, on podcasts, social media. Vance was someone who could hammer home Trump’s message every day.”

The contrast continued once Harris and Vance took office.

Biden handed his vice president a portfolio of tough and weighty issues, among them addressing the root causes of illegal migration from Central America. (They were “impossible, s— jobs,” in the blunt assessment that Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, offered in her recent campaign memoir.)

Trump has treated Vance as a sort of heat-seeking rhetorical missile, turning him loose against his critics and acting as though the presidential campaign never ended.

Vance seems gladly submissive. Harris, who was her own boss for nearly two decades, had a hard time adjusting as Biden’s No. 2.

“Vance is very effective at playing the role of backup singer who gets to have a solo from time to time,” said Jamal Simmons, who spent a year as Harris’ vice presidential communications chief. “I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever as comfortable in the role as Vance has proven himself to be.”

Will Vance’s pugilistic approach pay off in 2028? It’s way too soon to say. Turning the conventions of the vice presidency to a shambles, the way Trump did with the presidency, has delighted many in the Republican base. But polls show Vance, like Trump, is deeply unpopular with a great number of voters.

As for Harris, all she can do is look on from her exile in Brentwood, pondering what might have been.