This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from the

city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Major League Baseball pitcher R. A. Dickey is one of the most

unlikely success stories in baseball, a man who rose from years of pain and heartbreak to win the

game's highest honor.

What he found along the way was something far greater than baseball.

Here's R.A. to join us with his story.

When you're sexually abused, you feel less than human.

You know, you feel like you're something that has been used and thrown away.

And you start forming these big macro kind of things about the world from this place of hurt and deception and secrets and dark and wickedness.

And if you do not deal with that, it will hurt you to your core for a very long time.

And that was the beginning of my path.

My mom got pregnant and had me when she was 17 years old.

It wasn't smooth sailing from a family life standpoint.

I started to figure out, you know, the tribulations and tragedies of life pretty early.

My parents got divorced very early in my life. A lot of it I thought was because of me or, you know,

the burden of having children and not having enough income.

Like, those were some of the motifs that I felt as a kid.

At the same time, my parents were getting divorced and moving on,

the first real trauma of my life occurred outside of just the divorce.

I went through some sexual abuse by the hands of a babysitter or someone that was supposed

...