One year after battling for his life, Marco Dinges is batting cleanup for Florida State

Mark Dinges had finally reached his breaking point.

It was almost 3 a.m. Another nurse was drawing blood from his son, Marco, who had been getting sicker and sicker despite being in the hospital for weeks. His fever at that moment was 103 degrees. He was curled up in a ball on the bed.

The nurse kept sticking him with a needle. Over and over. Because, she told the father, Marco’s blood was coagulating.

And that’s when Mark started to think his son might actually die in that hospital.

So much so that at that exact moment, at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning in Gainesville, Fla., he went into full dad mode. He asked for the head nurse on call. Then he asked for the head doctor. He wasn’t going to sleep that night without trying, at all costs, to get someone to figure out — once and for all — what was wrong with his son.

That was almost exactly one year ago.

“I just said, ‘No more,'” Mark recalled this week. “They brought the head nurse down, and I told her, ‘You’re not going to touch my son anymore. I need to see the head doctor of the hospital immediately. … Because my son is not getting any better. I’m going to lose him. I can just see he’s fading away on me.'”

Marco Dinges will be batting cleanup for the Florida State baseball team this weekend in the NCAA Super Regionals against UConn. He has had a remarkable debut season with the Seminoles and is currently hitting .325 with 13 home runs and 59 RBIs.

But one year ago, he was in Shands Hospital. Not only did he not know if he would ever play baseball again, he truly didn’t know if he would ever walk out of that building.

“I had constant fevers,” Marco said. “I was constantly sick. It was a pretty brutal time.”

A few hours after those early morning meetings with top doctors and nurses, a woman walked into Marco’s hospital room and saved his life. That’s how his dad tells it anyway.

After weeks of not getting any answers as to what was destroying his son’s health — to the point that Marco could barely talk at times because the fever was so intense — Dr. Melissa Elder told Mark that she had a very good idea what was wrong with his son. And she was going to help him get better.

As Mark shares this story today, he is overcome with waves of gratitude. He pauses for a moment to collect himself as he recollects that initial conversation.

“I’m going to save your son for you,” Elder told Mark.

As the doctor suspected once she heard Marco’s symptoms, the then-19-year-old baseball player was suffering from hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a disorder in which your immune system starts attacking your own body. It’s mostly found in young children. But not always.

The mortality rate is 40 percent. Former Florida State quarterback Marcus Outzen passed away due to complications from HLH earlier this year.

Elder is a pediatric doctor who specializes in blood diseases. She had Marco transferred to the pediatric ward that morning, and she immediately put him on a treatment called Gamifant.

Within three days, Mark started to see drastic improvement in his son.

“He could actually sit up out of his bed, he was communicating with me clearly,” Mark recalled. “Every day, it was like watching baseball scores. Every day, she would bring the charts in and we’d post them on the wall. … She knew right away that this Gamifant was working for him.”

It took more than two weeks before Elder allowed Marco to finally leave the hospital. But he did, in fact, walk out of that hospital.

“A miracle,” Mark said.

It might not have been the only one.

When Marco walked out of Shands Children’s Hospital in early July of 2023, he couldn’t do a single push-up. Just months earlier, he was starring on the Tallahassee Community College baseball team.

Now, he could barely hold a bat. And because Florida State was offering him a walk-on spot for the 2023-24 school year, he wasn’t exactly in a rush to tell the coaching staff that he was weaker than he had been since elementary school.

He just went to work. And he credits TCC assistant coach Correy Figueroa with playing perhaps the most pivotal role in getting him to where he is today. Well, Figueroa and Elder, of course.

“He helped me out tremendously,” Marco said. “I credit him with everything, honestly. Because he worked with me about eight or nine hours a day to get in shape.”

Said Mark: “He’s just an amazing human being when it comes to helping other people.”

Marco and Mark also made sure to credit TCC head coach Bryan Henry (a former FSU All-American pitcher) and former Florida State assistant coach Rich Wallace (now the head coach at UCF) as being instrumental in securing him a walk-on spot on the 2024 Florida State baseball team.

By late August, after working out hours upon hours every day, Marco started to feel like himself again. And by the time fall practice started with the Seminoles, he felt better than he had.

He was suddenly hitting the ball harder and farther than he had at TCC or during his decorated high school career.

“At Alabama (in the fall) was the hardest ball I’ve ever hit,” Marco said. “It was against a big lefty, and I hit a ball 113 (miles per hour). And I’d never hit a ball above 110. So, it was like shell shock. You’re like, ‘Wow.’ And then you just keep hitting balls just as hard.”

Florida State head coach Link Jarrett certainly noticed.

A few days before the Seminoles’ season opener against Butler back in February, Jarrett mentioned Dinges as someone who was going to have a chance to make a real impact during his first year in garnet and gold.

He probably had no idea it was going to be this big of an impact. And he absolutely had no idea in June of 2023 that a young man fighting for his life in a Gainesville hospital bed would end up being his cleanup hitter in the Super Regionals just one year later.

“Funny enough,” Marco said with a smile, “I just found this out — that I was in a hospital bed for 43 days. And my number is 43. And I just got a random number.

“So, that’s very, very interesting.”

No matter how Marco Dinges plays this weekend against UConn, no matter how he does in Omaha if the Seminoles get there, no matter how he does in pro ball when he gets there, there will be a father up in the stands cheering him on.

A father who, one year ago, was living a nightmare as he watched his son deteriorate in a hospital bed.

A father who now gets to watch his son live out a dream.

A father who is overcome with joy just knowing that his son is alive.

“I still sit in the stands there and feel it every single game,” Mark said. “I pinch myself that he’s at Florida State. And that he’s still alive.

“You could make a movie about this kid with what he’s been through. It’s an incredible story.”

The father then paused for a moment.

“It really is a miracle.”

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