The Arm (19 page)

While a sleeve of tattoos covers Chris Carpenter's left arm, on
his right are more natural markings, a map of scars that tell his story. Five of them dot his shoulder thanks to a labrum injury, degenerative bone, and scar tissue. His elbow later gave out, and bone-spur surgery begat Tommy John. Carpenter became an arm-woes Yoda, dispensing wisdom to a dozen St. Louis Cardinals teammates who needed Tommy John during his nine years with the team.

“You try everything, which is kind of crazy,” he said. “When I was coming back from surgeries, I would do stuff to the point of where sitting there in the winter, reaching across to grab my beer mug watching football on Sunday, I'd feel a little something and think, ‘Oh, that was a good exercise.' And so I'd keep doing it.”

Everything revolves around the arm. It becomes the focal point of a player's life, like a child who needs constant attention and proper care and special treatment. It wears him out—“Holding your phone gets tiring,” Carpenter said—and dominates his thoughts and brings out sides good and bad. It is always there, unavoidable, a constant reminder. Worst, it is already guilty of betrayal, and now he must forgive it and trust that it won't do the same again.

“Is my scar going to rip open? Is my arm going to fall out?” said veteran starter Brett Anderson, who tore his UCL at twenty-three. “You haven't thrown in four or five months. You don't know what's going to happen.” Medication dulls physical pain, but nothing eases the mind. The calendar taunts the injured, every minute like an hour, every hour a day, every day a month, every month a year. This is the bond of Tommy John, the lesson passed from player to player, like fables down through the generations.

No current player has reached out to Tommy John himself for insight, because the game overflows with so many surgery veterans willing to dispense it. Things are different now, anyway. Nobody would dare ape John's rehab routine of throwing for forty-five minutes a day. They do their Jobes and tug on rubber resistance bands. The Bodyblade and its longer cousin, the Shoul
der Tube—two javelin-shaped implements held in the middle—are popular because their oscillating movements strengthen muscle. More and more pitchers are throwing weighted baseballs, as light as two ounces and as heavy as two pounds. Gone are the days when athletic trainers would fax injury reports once a road trip. Every minute medical detail gets attention, which highlights the frustration in the lack of progress at stopping elbow injuries in particular.

“After you have surgery, your body lies to you for the rest of your life,” said Los Angeles Angels starter C. J. Wilson, one of the more fortunate cases; his new ligament is on its thirteenth season. “It's never honest. You'll have days where you go out there and feel like you're throwing 105 miles per hour, and you look up and you're throwing the exact same speed. And you have other days where you feel terrible, and you're throwing one mile an hour faster.”

Daniel Hudson felt the confusion. He knew his arm was telling him something. He just didn't know what to believe.

W
HEN BRAD ARNSBERG STARTS TALKING,
the words do not come out in sentences so much as they do verbal tidal waves, anecdotes piling upon anecdotes, some fairly pithy and others non sequiturs, each trying to reach an ultimate truth where everything ties together, at which point he'll punctuate his thought with a well-timed expletive, because that's how real baseball men talk, and Brad Arnsberg, a man who is a lot of things, is unquestionably a real fucking baseball man.

The Diamondbacks hired Arnsberg, whom everyone calls Arnie, in the spring of 2013 to serve as their rehabilitation coordinator. “I've never been a coordinator, and I still don't know if I am,” Arnie said. “I don't know if I can coordinate my own life.” His job entailed looking after some of the young Latin American kids who spent the year working out at Salt River Fields, the Di
amondbacks' spring-training complex, but in the short term the job description went something like this: fix Daniel Hudson after his first Tommy John surgery.

Arnie spent eight years as a pitching coach for the Montreal Expos, the Florida Marlins, the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Houston Astros. Pitching coaches generally excel in one of two areas: mechanics or psychology. Arnie skewed far toward the mental end of the spectrum. “My main priority is rehabbing some of these kids, and just sitting and BS-ing with them,” he said. “That's the best thing I do. I got nothing [else], but I can sure bullshit.”

The first day he met Hudson, Arnsberg introduced himself and asked to play catch. He wanted to get a sense of how Hudson's arm was working. He was seven months post-op—past the range-of-motion activities, the tennis-ball throws he started at three and a half months, the 45-foot throws a week after that, and the gradual buildup to 135 feet. The distances are entirely arbitrary, part of a program that exists more because that's how it's always been done and not because 45 feet or 135 feet or any distance in between makes particular sense. Because doctors and trainers still don't know the ideal, every team's program varies slightly.

Two days into spring training, Hudson's shoulder started to hurt. Nearly every Tommy John recovery hits a speed bump, and this was Hudson's. He peeled back for a few weeks, refocusing his time on strengthening the shoulder and refining his mechanics. Most of the work entailed lessons Arnie learned from Tom House, the former major leaguer who is seen as the king of independent pitching coaches. Nolan Ryan used House, and so did Arnie following his own Tommy John surgery.

The New York Yankees drafted Arnie in 1983, and after a cup of coffee in September 1986, he arrived for good in August 1987. In his fourth game, he relieved a struggling starter: the forty-four-year-old Tommy John. By the end of the game, Arnie's elbow hurt. His visit to Frank Jobe confirmed a torn UCL. He
returned in 1989 with the Texas Rangers, where House was the pitching coach.

Arnie passed along House's drills to all his charges, Hudson being the latest. He wanted Hudson to hold his glove higher to keep his front side from leaking open, so he put a weight inside it to force him to elevate it. He gave Hudson a plain white hand towel and asked him to pantomime throwing a ball. Critics had long bemoaned the towel drill, not understanding its purpose. Arnie's was simple: he wanted to change Hudson's delivery and force him to get more on top of the ball rather than throw it like a sidewinding slingshot.

Nobody liked Hudson's delivery but Hudson. “The first time I ever saw him throw, I still remember,” said Ken Crenshaw, the Diamondbacks' trainer. “We were playing the Mets, and he was struggling in the first inning. Kind of throwing the ball all over. I actually talked to our pitching coach, and it's a little bit scary. You finally get a new guy, and you hear a lot about him, and I'm like, ‘Is he going to hold up?' It's always been my concern with him.”

Success was Hudson's narcotic. The thought of adding another thing to his rehab—something as crucial as mechanics, which was the one thing on which Hudson figured he could rely—felt like piling impractical on top of impossible.

“That's the way I've thrown for twenty years,” he said. “It's going to be difficult to teach my body something different, if we do think that's the way to go. I'm not going to change who I am as a pitcher. If they want me to keep my front side closed or in line, OK, but I'm not changing my arm slot. That's what makes me who I am. It got me to where I am. But honestly, what does anyone use for twenty years that they don't have to replace at some point?”

Considering how much he threw in high school and college, and the unorthodox fashion in which he flung the ball, it was miraculous that Hudson's arm lasted past his twenty-fifth birthday. But what could he do? A pitching coach at a baseball camp at the
University of Virginia had told him it was virtually impossible for a kid to change his arm slot.

“I liked hearing that,” Hudson said. “This is what makes me unique and different from everyone else. . . . I get frustrated because they're talking to me about this stuff from a physiological standpoint. You know, I'm a sport management major. I've never even looked at the human anatomy of a body. Like, I trust you that you're telling me something that's good for me. I don't need to know everything about it. If you tell me it's good for me, I'm going to do it. I don't need to know what it's doing to me on a cellular freakin' level. I don't really give a shit about that. I just want to go and pitch.”

Pitching is far from a plug-and-play proposition, so Arnie wanted to tell a story. It started with Roy “Doc” Halladay, the Blue Jays ace who won more than two hundred games and a Cy Young Award. Hudson reminded Arnie so much of Halladay, who, he noted, worked hard on his front side, too. Charlie Nagy, the Diamondbacks' pitching coach, nodded along.

“Man, if it's good enough for Doc, I would think it might be good enough for you,” Arnie told Hudson. “Because today was really, really good, and I've noticed in your towel sessions this and that, and I'm glad Charlie was here, because if I could improve anything out of here, it would be just a little bit higher. And then if you think back through the evolution of baseball . . .”

Arnie was just getting started, segueing to the mechanics of Stephen Strasburg, the Washington Nationals' triple-digit-throwing phenom, and how his delivery may well be immaterial, because . . .

“I read an article,” Arnie said, “and it was the best article I ever read, on the stress and the percentile of stress that's being put on the medial side of the elbow and the shoulder, being the deltoid and the biceps tendon area, and they said when a guy is throwing up to ninety-two to ninety-five miles an hour, let alone a hundred, the stress level that goes on the ligaments and tendons that
grasp this rotator together, that grasp this elbow together, are key cogs in it. They're at a ninety-nine-point-whatever. And they've hooked electrodes up. I would think it's somewhat close.

“In other words, my point being is them motherfuckers were gonna blow anyway.”

Hudson stood slack-jawed. It was a lot to process, even if Hudson was plenty smart enough to do so. He liked Arnie and trusted him and tried to do what he said, even when the muscle memory of twenty years of pitching revolted against it. Hudson's body fought his brain, and the body almost always wins, especially in the face of a punishing year of rehabilitation.

The desire to return was enough to push him through the shoulder setback, which improved with a cortisone shot. Still, no matter how many Celebrex he swallowed, Hudson couldn't rid himself of the feeling that something in his elbow was wrong. His body, it turns out, wasn't lying to him. The truth was just too much to bear.

E
VERY DAY WAS THE SAME
for Todd Coffey. Up at ten a.m., glass of orange juice, bowl of oatmeal, cup of yogurt. Hop in the car, get to the gym, jump on the elliptical, work up a nice lather for twenty or thirty minutes. Over to the rehab center. Stretch, loosen up with rubber tubing, chuck a mini medicine ball against a mini trampoline. Back in the car. Two minutes to the field. Uncover the tarp, rake the mound, jog, stretch some more, long toss. Throw. And then back home to paint Blood Bowl miniatures or try to find a good deal on an old Nintendo cartridge or kill time in any palatable fashion possible during an offseason with no baseball.

“Life is repetitive,” Jennifer Coffey said—especially in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, smack-dab between Charlotte and Asheville, population of around four thousand. Todd Coffey grew up here. He and Jennifer live in a house originally owned by Albert Tendall Coffey, his granddad, who played for the Ruth
erford County Owls back in the 1930s and bequeathed his love of baseball to his grandson. After Albert died, Coffey bought the house, renovated it, and made it his offseason home.

Once the 2012 season ended, Coffey was on his own. With the Dodgers no longer responsible for his rehab, he reached out to his cousin, Brendan Waters, who owns a facility called Therapy Plus in nearby Forest City. Waters and a trainer named Michael Melton mapped out what Coffey's next nine months would look like, all the way up to the June showcase. It was an aggressive plan for a Tommy John revision, and particularly for a revision with a flexor repair. The market for healthy thirtysomething relief pitchers was not exactly robust. Baseball is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind sport, and an injured thirtysomething relief pitcher might as well not exist.

“My biggest fear is letting myself down,” Coffey said. “To look in my mirror fifteen years from now and say, ‘What if I did this?' I don't want to have any wonders or questions about how things would've been different.”

So he pushed himself to places he didn't think possible. Ninety minutes of work every day on his shoulder allowed him to throw a ball at five months instead of at the eight-month mark after his first surgery. The elliptical machine became his friend, some sessions stretching past one hundred minutes. “We've literally had to cut him down from doing so much,” Waters said. Coffey affixed his iPad to a tripod and filmed every throw off the mound, trying to ensure his mechanics didn't waver. “At our age, there is no mechanical fix,” he said. “Our body is accustomed to a certain way. If your arm snaps, it snaps. If I go out there and try to change my mechanics, guess what? My shoulder, my biceps, my back is not used to that. I've been doing the same thing for twelve years. I can't make dramatic changes.”

Coffey saw progress. The range-of-motion exercises worked and reduced his extension from 23 degrees to 14. The mound sessions got better and better, enough that Coffey rejoined Twitter
on March 15 because he figured the talking his arm did would supersede anything his fingers might relay. After a decade spent on the road, he even felt like a better dad, able to coach one daughter's softball team and take another to a daddy-daughter dance. Hewing to the plan was working.