It’s been a very good sophomore baseball season for Loyola’s Luca Golden. He’s batting .385 with 11 doubles, including a clutch walk-off two-run double last week against district rival Northwood.
Last night, he raised his pitching record to 5-0 with a nine-strikeout performance in a 6-1 win over Caldwell Parish. It’s fairly rare these days for high school pitchers to have sub-2.00 ERA’s, but Golden’s is now 1.85.
“He’s been obviously a major contributor on the mound and at the plate,” Loyola coach Morgan Brian says, “He’s been really big in all areas for us.”
As solid as he had been this season for the Flyers, no one really knew what to expect in the 2026 season. Sure, there are quite a few local high school players who have numbers like Golden’s.
But there aren’t any who have a story quite like his, which makes what he has accomplished this season that much more remarkable.
Thirteen months ago, Luca Golden was lying in a Dallas operating room for a surgery to correct a rare condition that threatened a whole lot more than just his baseball career.
So, yeah, batting .385 and going 5-0 on the mound is nice. But in that moment last March, he needed Dr. Greg Pearl, one of the few physicians in the country who could perform the procedure, to go to 1-0.
It may be a little strong to say Golden’s life depended on it, but to a 15-year-old, it sure felt like it.
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It was just one day before the start of the 2025 season when Luca Golden noticed something wasn’t right with his right arm. Even though he was about to begin his freshman year as a starter on the varsity, he knew it was an issue he couldn’t ignore.
It didn’t take long to find out that this wasn’t just another sports injury.
“It was a shock at first,” Golden says. “I definitely knew something was wrong because my arm was normal then all of a sudden it was purple. No one knew what to do.”
While his teammates began the season without him, Golden was going from one doctor to another to ultimately get a diagnosis of a condition that threatened more than just his baseball season.
Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is the catch-all term for what was going on in Golden’s right arm, but it’s actually more nuanced than that.
It was venous thoracic outlet syndrome (vTOS), but even more specifically, Paget-Schroetter syndrome. It’s got a simpler name – “effort thrombosis” – but there are even more significant words to describe it: rare and serious.
It does, however, occur with athletes from repetitive throwing motions. “Typically, you won’t see this until players get to college or pro ball who have been doing this over and over,” says Dr. John Evans, one of the local doctors who first saw Golden. “But now with travel ball, you are starting to see it with 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds because a lot of kids are dedicating themselves to one sport.”
Golden’s self-diagnosis was much more succinct: “It was the most heart-breaking thing ever,” he says.
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Here’s a quick little attention-getter – Luca Golden has one less rib than almost everyone else on the planet. Actually, he still has the rib; just not where you’d expect it to be. “I have it at my house,” he says.
Paget-Schroetter syndrome develops when a vein in the upper body is compressed between the first rib and the collarbone which leads toward a tendency for blood clotting.
“With all that repetitive motion of throwing, you can get these thick muscles that ultimately can start to narrow the artery vein and nerve,” Evans says. “It depends on which one gets narrowed. If it’s a nerve, you get kind of a loss of the sensation in the arm. If it’s the artery, you lose blood flow to the arm, and the arm gets swollen and blue.”
To alleviate the pressure, part of the procedure is to remove the first rib.
The surgery is unique and extremely specialized, but Evans knew that Pearl was one of the foremost physicians in the field. “It’s quite a niche operation,” Evans says. “Fortunately, he was able to get Luca in.”
Two NBA players – Victor Wembenyama and Damian Lilliard – were hospitalized with similar conditions a year ago. In fact, Wembenyama was on the same hospital floor as Golden last March. “I’d walk down the hall and try to peek inside his room,” Golden says.
There was a concern that Golden would never be able to play baseball again … or even worse than that. “That was certainly a concern that Dr. Pearl mentioned to me,” Evans says. “You can also lose an arm from it because the vein’s not going to drain any blood, and so it can be a limb-threatening problem. Most people don’t ever let it get to that, but certainly the biggest danger to him typically would be his inability to return to the playing field. Prior to the past 10 years ago, this was kind of a career-ending problem.”
The operation may have been a physical success, but mentally, it was a different story. Golden returned to the dugout but could only watch. It was the first time he could remember not playing baseball.
“It was tough to take,” he says.
“He hated it,” Brian says. “He knew that he could have been a big contributor for us last year and it looked like he was going to be before all that stuff happened. He was all set leading up to the season and was going to be a big piece to the puzzle.”
He couldn’t do anything with his right arm – “nothing that put pressure on my arm,” he says – but he knew he had to scratch the itch. Between innings of Loyola games, he’d grab a baseball with his left hand and throw it against the brick wall. Just to do something that seemed like a baseball activity.
He also became the team’s biggest cheerleader, even though is not the most vocal player on the Flyers’ roster. “Even if you are down,” he says, “your team still needs you to be up.”
“The kid loves baseball, and he was really looking forward to (playing) high school baseball in his first year and then he had to sit on the sidelines and be a good teammate,” Brian says. “But he was encouraging all the kids. If we had a tough loss, he’d send the coaches a text that night. That’s very mature for a 15-year-old kid.”
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As you might expect, Golden couldn’t wait to get back on the field when the ’26 season came around. (He was actually able to play on a limited basis during the summer.)
But the Flyer coaches weren’t sure how he might react to the repetitive motion of pitching this season. He only threw 68 pitches in his first start but has thrown at least 75 pitches in every start since then.
In the field, he started the season at second base (to help protect his arm) but moved to shortstop after the first two weeks and has been a regular there ever since.
“We eased him into it, and we definitely monitored it at the beginning of the year more than we normally would,” Brian says. “You always watch after all the kids with their arms, but this was a freak deal. We definitely had to keep a closer eye than we typically would.”
Golden hasn’t completely forgotten about what he has gone through, but Evans says the chances of relapse are low. “It’s unlikely for that because the offending problem is that rib (that was removed),” he says. “That’s what was obstructing that vein from draining blood back to the heart. With that rib removed, the problem should be resolved.”
It’s been a high school baseball journey that Luca Golden never expected to take. It should come as no surprise that he’s taking advantage of every opportunity he gets.
“Baseball has always been what I love,” he says. “But I think I appreciate it even more after all that has happened.”
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com