​Photo via @Rockies/X

Eli Whitney | April 11, 2026

The Weight of the Bricks: Troy Johnston and the Quiet Battle Behind the Big League Smile

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There is a version of Troy Johnston that most fans see – the one bouncing on his toes at first base, flashing a grin broad enough to light up a dugout, playing a game with the infectious joy of a kid who can’t quite believe he’s being paid for this. That version is real. But that is not the whole story.

​Behind the easy smile and celebratory energy that his Colorado Rockies teammates have come to depend on, there is a man who spent years quietly suffocating under the weight of something he could barely name. Johnston, the Rockies’ first baseman/corner outfielder whose long road to the majors wound through minor league towns and sleepless nights, has become a compelling voice in professional baseball’s growing conversation about men’s mental health – a topic that, for generations, the sport asked its players to suffer through in silence.

​“It feels like you have a backpack full of bricks,” Johnston says, “and you are hunched over trying to carry it around all day.”

It is a description so precise and so physical that it lands differently coming from a professional athlete. These are men built for pressure, trained to perform under it, conditioned to project toughness as a professional requirement. But Johnston is not interested in maintaining that performance off the field. Not anymore.

​A Long Road and a Heavy Load

Johnston’s path to the big leagues was not a straight line. It was the kind of winding, uncertain journey that tests not just physical talent but psychological endurance – years in the minors, wondering if the call would ever come, whether the sacrifice was worth it, whether the dream was still alive. That uncertainty, he says, was the soil in which his anxiety took root.

​“A lot of it was driven by just the newness of my lifestyle, the newness of what was going on in the baseball world,” he explained. The anxiety did not stay contained to the field. It followed him home. It followed him to bed. Some nights, it did not let him sleep at all. 

“I had a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of waking up with panic attacks.”

​His wife was there through those nights – a steadying presence when the anxiety spiked without warning, and the world seemed to close in. He is grateful for that and makes sure to express his gratitude. But he also recognizes that love, however fierce, is not a substitute for professional help. At some point, the person you love cannot carry the weight of your mental health alone. Johnston reached that point. 

“At a certain point, you need to reach out and have help.”

​Finding a Language

​The person who helped Johnston find that help was Marius Aleksa, then the Miami Marlins’ mental skills coordinator. The relationship Johnston describes is less clinical than it is transformative – the way he talks about Aleksa, now at the University of South Carolina, suggests not just gratitude, but a kind of intellectual awakening. Aleksa gave Johnston something more durable than relief. He gave him a language and a set of tools.

​The tools are concrete, practical, and – crucially – portable. Johnston can use them anywhere: in the dugout, in a hotel room at two in the morning, in the on-deck circle with forty thousand people watching.

​One of those tools is the box breathing method – four counts in, hold for four, four counts out, hold again, repeated four times. A structured rhythm designed to interrupt the body’s panic response and reassert control. Johnston uses another technique he finds particularly effective: a deep breath followed by one final sharp inhale through the nose – a psychological reset, he says, slows the heartbeat and recenters the mind.

​“That wakes your brain up, resets your brain, re-centers it, and actually calms your heartbeat down.”

​The specificity matters because Johnston is careful to note that there is no universal prescription. What works for him may not work for someone else. The point is not the particular technique – it is the act of seeking, finding, and committing to whatever works.

“There’s no one straight shot for working with mental health, especially with men,” Johnston said. “Some people like to talk about it. Some people don’t. Some people like to work on their own. Some people like to work in groups.”

​What matters, he believes, is simply that people start somewhere.

​The Stigma Tax

​For men, and especially for men in professional sports, that starting point is often the hardest part. The culture of athletic masculinity has long demanded stoicism, silence, and the performance of invulnerability. Asking for help has carried a social cost – a suggestion of weakness, of softness, of not being mentally tough enough for competition at the highest level.

​Johnston does not dismiss the stigma. He acknowledges it directly and takes it seriously because he has seen what it can do to people. “I’ve talked to a lot of people in this realm,” he said. “It’s hard to get help unless you actually want help, unless you actually need help.” The stigma does not just discourage people from seeking help – it can prevent them from even recognizing that they need it in the first place.

​“When you don’t talk about it, you don’t use it, you don’t know, you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the resources.”

There is a compounding effect to silence, in other words. The less men talk about mental health, the less equipped they are to recognize it in themselves or others. The less equipped they are, the less likely they are to seek help. Their cycle is reinforcing.

​The antidote is conversation. Simply the act of speaking openly about what it actually feels like to carry anxiety, to fight panic attacks, to show up to a job you love while wondering whether your own mind is going to let you do it.

​“When you actually talk about it,” he said. “It becomes more inviting.”

​Two Jobs, One Life

​Johnston is a father now, and fatherhood, he says, has sharpened his understanding of the mental work required to be present in his own life.

​His daughter, still very young, does not know or care whether her father went 0-for-4 or 4-for-4 on any given night. She does not follow box scores. She is not tracking his batting average. “All she wants is her bottle and somebody to hold her, and I want to be that person,” Johnston said.

​“I have two jobs in my life. I have my job here at the field, and right when that ends, right when I clock out, right when I’m done, I have my job at home. And those are two separate things. Those are not intertwined.”

​This is not a denial of baseball’s outsized presence in his life – “How can you not think about baseball? It engulfs our whole life,” he acknowledged – but rather a deliberate act of mental compartmentalization. The field gets everything it has while it is on it. Home gets everything he has when he is there. 

He is also quick to credit the environment in Colorado. “What a great clubhouse we have here,” he said. The energy that teammates bring every day, the collective willingness to show up with enthusiasm and purpose, makes it easier to manage the days when anxiety creeps back in. Leaning on that energy – on the human infrastructure around him – is, he implies, a legitimate and important coping strategy in its own right.

​The Youngest Players in the Room

​Johnston’s thinking about mental health does not stop at the professional level. If anything, he seems most animated when the conversation turns to youth sports – to the kids who are still being formed by the games they play and the adults who coach them.

​Johnston speaks from experience. There were things going on with him, he has acknowledged, that went unrecognized when he was young – symptoms or tendencies that might have been identified earlier if those around him had that language or the awareness to spot them. He does not convey this with bitterness, but with the clarity of someone who understands that earlier intervention changes outcomes.

​“At a young age, you sometimes don’t even recognize it,” he said. “You don’t even know what’s going on with your body. You have so many hormones, so many emotions, so many different things.”

​His prescription for youth sports is both practical and philosophically grounded. Coaches and parents, he said, need to educate themselves on the signs of anxiety and mental distress in young athletes – not to diagnose, but to notice, to ask, to open a door. But equally important, he says, is the broader question of how young athletes are being raised to relate to their sport in the first place.

​“A lot of it is not putting too many eggs in one basket for a youth kid,”

​He is direct about what he sees in youth baseball: kids who play nothing but baseball, whose identity is entirely bound up in one sport, who have no soft landing if and when that sport becomes a source of stress rather than joy. “Most of them will not make it to high school baseball, will not make it to college [baseball],” he says – not cruelly, but honestly. The kids who play multiple sports, who take vacations, who have interests and friendships that exist outside of any single game, are the ones who develop the psychological flexibility to handle competition without being consumed by it.

​“If you’re out and you’re having fun with your friends, playing so many different sports and clubs and different activities, you become a more well-rounded person. It becomes a lot easier to play games, because that’s really what they are – they’re games.”

​Still a Game

​Troy Johnston knows better than most that baseball is not just a game. It is a livelihood, an identity, a dream. He spent years grinding towards it in towns where nobody was watching, doing the work in the hope that someday the phone would ring. That experience – the long road, the uncertainty, the grinding – does not disappear just because you’ve made it. In some ways, it intensifies.

​But Johnston has found something that many athletes spend their careers searching for: a way to hold the weight of what he does without being crushed by it. It has come through honesty, through asking for help, through learning to breathe, through his daughter’s indifference to batting averages, through a clubhouse that makes it hard to be sad.

​“It’s hard to be sad here,” he says, simply looking around the Rockies clubhouse. “But that anxiety does creep in every once in a while. You do have those negative thoughts. But when you lean on teammates, and you lean on that energy – it makes things a lot easier.”

​The bricks are still there, sometimes. But he’s learned not to carry them alone.