ROCKWALL, Texas — "He just acts like any other little brother does," Barrett Rose says while waiting to start baseball practice on a Monday afternoon. "They're all quite annoying."
Ah, brotherhood.
"He's a rather large eighth grader..."
Merciless ribbing.
"Linebacker, d-line, tight end," Rose says, describing his brother Mac's football positions. "Probably moving towards o-line."
Does he have good hands, I ask?
"Oh, I don't know," Barrett says, kind of shrugging off the question so as to not completely throw his brother under the bus by saying no, outright.
I tell Barrett that Mac said he does.
"Yeah, well he likes to brag a lot."
For brothers Barrett and Mac Rose, it's just like any other brotherhood. Arguing, fighting, ignoring. The whole works.
If you've had brothers, you know.
Except for one day last spring, when younger brother Mac -- who has type 1 diabetes -- had an incident.
"He got really low that night," their father Barry explains, "and the next morning, he went into a seizure."
"I don't remember any of it," Mac says. "But they said my brother heard me, and ran up there."
Ah, brotherhood.
"I started to hear like, loud snoring sounds," Barrett says, "and so I ran up and checked on him, and saw him foaming from the mouth."
To hear their mother tell the story, Barrett saved Mac's life. But the older brother balks at that characterization a little bit.
"No, I still don't think about it in that way," Barrett says. "I just found him. I'm not the one that did anything for him. I just found him."
After a glucagon injection, Mac was okay. Back to playing football and baseball. Back to being a little brother.
"Everything came back to normal pretty quick," dad says. "But it was a big scare."
Before and since, the Rose family -- and their extended baseball family -- has raised money to support the juvenile diabetes research fund...
"Just knowing people care," Mac says, "it means a lot."
Back home, though...
"It does not stop the two brothers," dad explains, "from arguments and fights, and everything like that."
"We fight like normal brothers," Barrett says. "But we get along when we have to."
And when necessary, they've got each other's back.
Brotherhood. It's a wonderful thing, in all it's forms.