How are you?

He learned to hate those three words, but it wasn’t just the question that annoyed him. It was the look on people’s faces, the tone of their voices, the suggestion of concern or, worse, sympathy.

Danny Thompson did not want anybody’s sympathy. What he wanted was to play baseball, to be judged on his success or failure on the field. Nothing more, nothing less.

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The season before the diagnosis, he led all shortstops with a .276 average and received a few votes for the American League MVP, all while just 25 years old. His only disappointment? That he didn’t make the All-Star team.

Then, in the winter before the 1973 season, the news got out, and he noticed changes. People looked at him differently. The Twins’ front office talked to him differently. And even if they didn’t, even if it was all in his head, he felt the way he felt. He imagined people saw him and whispered: “That poor guy. How much longer is he going to be around?”

Thompson did not want the disease to turn into an excuse. One night, during a game against the Kansas City Royals, he made a key error in the seventh inning, dropping a simple throw to him at second base. The Twins’ lead evaporated, and the Royals roared back to win; Thompson didn’t help himself by going 0-for-4. The fans booed him as he walked off the field, booed him again at the plate, and those boos were all he thought about, especially because his mom and dad had traveled from Oklahoma to watch him play.

But later, when his anger and frustration and disappointment had subsided, he thought: At least now I know they don’t feel sorry for me because I have leukemia.

He was lucky. That’s what he always said: “I’m a lucky man.”

Thompson had come from Capron, Okla. — in a graduating class of four — to play baseball in front of thousands of fans. Plus, in the big leagues you didn’t have to worry about your luggage; one moment someone whisked it out of your hands before a road trip, the next it was waiting for you in your hotel room. That was nice.

But his wife, Jo, saw things differently. Her husband was like the character in the comic strip “Li’l Abner,” she said, the one with the dark rain cloud always over his head. She watched in 1969 as Thompson became one of the Twins’ top prospects, only to obliterate his body while chasing a pop fly. He collided with his teammate in left field, breaking his nose, jaw and leg, which put him in intensive care. He rallied back and the next year was called up to the big leagues. “Pure determination,” said Calvin Griffith, the team’s owner. But Thompson missed most of his sophomore season with ripped muscles in his arm and chest.

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No, Jo said, her husband didn’t seem to be the luckiest guy in the world.

The day before his 26th birthday in January 1973, he went in for an annual physical before the new season. He had been feeling tired, but that was to be expected, what with the 65 hours he was working as a car salesman and the three or four talks he was giving to fans at night. The doctor called a couple of days later. He wanted Thompson to come in for additional tests.

“You’ve got me worried,” Thompson said. “What are we looking for?”

“Bluntly,” the doctor said, “we’re checking on leukemia.”

At first, Thompson didn’t believe it when he heard the diagnosis: chronic granulocytic leukemia. He was 26 and in peak shape. He thought of Ernie Davis, the former Syracuse running back who became the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy but died from leukemia less than two years later. Then he felt fear. He was “scared to death.”

What about Jo? What about his young daughters? What about baseball?

Thompson hoped word wouldn’t get out, that it would remain hidden. He just wanted to be Danny Thompson, the baseball player, not Danny Thompson, the baseball player with leukemia. He had a simple post-diagnosis approach: “I would tell no one about it, I would put it out of my mind and I would play my ass off.”

There was something else, too, something he knew sounded strange: He was embarrassed that he had leukemia. What would his teammates think? His manager? The fans?

But a Minneapolis columnist broke the story before the season, and Thompson had to face it. It was all anyone wanted to talk about. Sometimes he felt like writing up his answers in a prepared press release; other times he felt like yelling that he was still a good player.

He struggled with it all, the attention and the thoughts that raced around his mind. He hit just .225 in 1973 and played in only 99 games, losing his hold on the shortstop position. The next year wasn’t much better.

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He had wanted to be a major leaguer since he was 6 years old, but toward the end of his career he wasn’t playing much. He was a utilityman, a benchwarmer — so much so that one day he showed up to the ballpark and found a sign above the spot where he usually sat: “Reserved for Thompson.”

He complained about his lack of playing time in the press. At home, he pouted and sulked to the point that Jo told him to knock it off. Road trips were the worst. When he wasn’t playing, he would sit in his hotel room and turn over big questions in his head. When would he start to feel the effects of leukemia? What would happen to his family if the disease won?

Still, he kept his sense of humor. During a particularly rough stretch, Thompson went to a fan luncheon. A local TV reporter interviewed him in front of the crowd.

“Have you been seeing the doctor recently?” the reporter asked.

“Yes, I’ve seen a doctor every other day for the past three weeks,” Thompson said.

“Why is that?”

“It has nothing to do with my leukemia,” Thompson said. “I have to go in that often to get the splinters picked out of my rear end.”

Six times in 1975 doctors at the Mayo Clinic injected him with live leukemia cells as his white-blood-cell count soared. The idea was to provoke his body to fight the cancer inside him, transforming his body into a battleground. The injections left him with quarter-sized sores on his arms and shoulders. They looked like “photos of the moon,” one reporter wrote, and they broke and oozed puss, ruining just about every shirt Thompson owned. He thought they affected him at the plate, too. He stopped following through at one point because every time he did so, the bat touched a boil on his arm.

The morning after one injection, Thompson woke up with a 101-degree fever. His body ached all over like he had the flu. He needed Jo to drive him to the ballpark. Of course, that was a day he was in the lineup.

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In the fifth inning, he drove in a run on an infield single, but while waiting on the field for someone to bring him his glove, his vision went blurry, the stadium spun and he couldn’t make sense of the world around him. He left the stadium and crawled into bed, the game drifting in and out of his consciousness as he listened on the radio.

Another time, he couldn’t even get out of bed, so Jo called the Twins’ trainer to let him know her husband couldn’t make it that day.

He tried to push the disease into the fringes of his mind. He told his dad leukemia was like a bad hop in baseball: You had to play it and move on. And there were the letters: He received hundreds every year, from people all around the country, letting him know they were rooting for him, that he was an inspiration. “I feel like a hero when I read those letters,” he wrote, “even if I go 0-for-4 or make two errors.” Another thing: Jo enrolled him in college in Oklahoma so he could finish his degree and eventually become a college baseball coach.

By the end of 1975 — a disappointing and trying season on a personal and professional level — he was optimistic. Next year could always be better.

The Twins traded him in the middle of the 1976 season. In his first game with the Texas Rangers, he singled twice, doubled and drilled a three-run homer — his only home run of the season. Rangers fans gave him a standing ovation during one at-bat, the first of his career. Goose bumps raced up and down his arms. He didn’t know what to do. Should he step out of the box and tip his cap or should he get back in there and hit?

He got back in there.

In July, he flew to Minnesota for another round of injections at the Mayo Clinic. He spent the following 24 hours on the bathroom floor of his hotel, throwing up and sweating. “It was a great feeling,” he deadpanned to a reporter. The final month of the season, he lived with pitcher Bert Blyleven, his old roommate on the road in Minnesota who was traded with him to Texas. Both of their families had gone home for school, so the pair lived together in a townhouse. Blyleven knew Thompson was tired, knew he had to go to the Mayo Clinic for treatment, but Thompson did not complain.

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After the season, Thompson went back to Oklahoma. Around Thanksgiving, Blyleven talked to him on the phone. “Roomie, I’m not doing real well,” Thompson conceded. “I’m not feeling real good.” His joints were so stiff that he could no longer walk. He rode in an ambulance and then a private plane to the Mayo Clinic. Doctors removed his spleen in early December in an attempt to halt the disease, but Danny Thompson died a week later. He was just 29.

Two years later, a group of former teammates, family and friends gathered for a golf tournament in Thompson’s honor. Harmon Killebrew organized it. Dignities and past greats from the baseball world showed up. So did Thompson’s dad, Jim. He squeezed his wife’s hand as he took in the scene and tried to explain his feelings to a reporter. The right words were tough to find.

“Danny and I had several talks about the disease and everything,” Jim Thompson finally said. “He would say that he was really lucky: How many guys get to play Major League Baseball?”

Source notes: Much of the information for this article came from a book Danny Thompson co-wrote with Bob Fowler called “E-6” that chronicles his 1975 season. Other information came from the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The New York Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and reports from the Associated Press.

(Photo: Getty Images)