The Arm (38 page)

“Maybe Mexico doesn't have the biggest success rate of people going back into affiliated ball,” Jennifer said, “but you don't know if you don't try. He could be the one percent of people who get back. You have to exhaust every option before you throw in the towel.”

On May 31, 2015, Coffey agreed to a contract with Los Diablos Rojos del México, the best team in the Mexican League. It's where Machi impressed the Giants and where Coffey now vowed to do the same for all thirty teams. He didn't know much about Mexico City and didn't know enough Spanish to realize he was a perfect fit for a team called the Red Devils. It was baseball, though, real baseball. And he needed to play as a peace offering to those who didn't believe he would be back, to the baseball gods he would worship forever.

Earlier in the week, I had asked Coffey whether the game was telling him something. The Mariners fiasco. Then the Braves. Radio silence thereafter. The mound is an addiction, an artery into the pitcher's heart, and the thought of life after it scared Coffey. There is no sadder thing in baseball than a man who isn't done with the game when the game is done with him.

A few days before Coffey left for Mexico, he sent the longest text message I'd ever received.

After our conversation yesterday I have done a lot of thinking about what we talked about and how if this game is telling me it's over, it's always telling people it's over. If you ever fall into the trap of thinking you're not good enough or you think the game has passed you by you will never succeed, even in high school, because people are always telling you there's no chance, but we still push and strive and work hard. My whole career I have been told I wasn't good enough, not going to be able to do it. I never listened to them. Why should I start listening to them now? It's all about an
opportunity. You make your own opportunities. If you're not playing you cant be seen, just like in high school. If you listened to the people in high school that tell you you're not good enough and quit then I would've never got the opportunity to get where I got. So now another chapter in my career is getting back.

My resolve is strong, my heart is true. I will never give up. I will push it every day until I get that opportunity and when I do get that opportunity I will prove once again to everyone that I can still play this game. If this is the end, which I don't think so, then I'm going to leave this game the way I came into it—fighting and kicking to stay in it.

The light remained on. The show was not over. I told him I didn't expect anything less.

O
N JULY 27, 2015, IN
Cooperstown, New York, nearly fifty thousand people heard John Smoltz speak at his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Toward the end of his thirty-minute speech, he did something no inductee before him had ever done.

He wanted to talk about pitching arms.

Smoltz underwent UCL replacement on March 23, 2000. He came back at thirty-four years old and thrived, the second half of his career good enough to make him the first pitcher in the Hall of Fame with a Tommy John scar.

“It's an epidemic,” Smoltz said. “It's something that is affecting our game. It's something that I thought would cost me my career, but thanks to Dr. James Andrews and all those before him, performing the surgery with such precision has caused it to be almost a false read, like a Band-Aid you put on your arm.

“I want to encourage the families and parents that are out there to understand that this is not normal to have a surgery at fourteen and fifteen years old. That you have time. That baseball is not a year-round sport. That you have an opportunity to be athletic and play other sports. . . .

“So I want to encourage you, if nothing else, know that your children's passion and desire to play baseball is something that
they can do without a competitive pitch. . . . Please, take care of those great future arms.”

For Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey, Jon Lester and Trevor Bauer, for anyone pitching in Major League Baseball today, it is too late. Maybe the game can save Riley Pint and Anthony Molina or the kids playing at a Perfect Game showcase this weekend or even my son. He starts kid-pitch baseball this year, and while I think I understand how to protect him, I don't know for certain. There might be a mechanical flaw I can't see with the naked eye or even the slow-motion video on my iPhone. Maybe something lurks in his elbow, biding its time. It's an awful feeling, surrendering to the unknown, and yet my son and millions of other kids love baseball enough that we no longer have a choice.

After I finished this book, the baseball world kept spinning—and the people in it continued their journeys. Shortly before it went to press, I caught up with some of those I had followed for more than three years.

DANIEL HUDSON
Less than a year after his comeback, as he neared the end of his first full season since 2011, Hudson, who had been the Diamondbacks' eighth-inning guy, showed enough prowess to warrant the occasional save opportunity. He was regularly hitting 98 miles per hour, occasionally touching 99, and on September 1, when the radar gun flashed three digits—100—Hudson had achieved what only a couple of dozen others would in 2015, and maybe another hundred had ever done. That joke he made to Dr. Lewis Yocum before his first surgery—“If I don't wake up throwing one hundred,” he had said, half anesthetized, “I want my money back”—was no longer wishful thinking.

His arm held up for the rest of the season, and he finished 2015 with an average fastball velocity of 96.2 miles per hour. By the end of the year, only sixteen pitchers threw as consistently hard as him. The velocity didn't always trans
late into success, as Hudson finished the season with a 3.86 ERA, dragged down by a few massive blowups. He saw room to improve, whether by taking yoga classes before the 2016 season to improve his flexibility or simplifying his footwork during the delivery to resemble that of David Price, Sonny Gray, and Jake Arrieta.

Over the winter, Hudson texted me and asked whether I think he should spend the 2016 season as a starter or reliever. The Diamondbacks bolstered their rotation with the $206.5 million investment in Zack Greinke and overpaid in talent to acquire twenty-five-year-old right-hander Shelby Miller from Atlanta. Winning a rotation spot wouldn't be easy. Then again, free agency beckons for Hudson after 2016, and his old friend and teammate Ian Kennedy—who had the worst on-base-plus-slugging-against of any starting pitcher in 2015—signed a five-year, $70 million contract in January 2016 with the champion Kansas City Royals.

Deep down, Hudson worried about starting, worried about what it might do to his arm. Sara wanted him to stick in the bullpen, to succeed where he'd found success, and maybe he could cash in like the dozen-plus relievers who fetched multiyear deals in the winter of 2015, topped by the $31 million for sidearmer Darren O'Day.

In the end, Hudson planned on going into spring training as a starter, which I thought was the right move. Nobody knows what his arm is or isn't capable of doing; erring on the safe side isn't realistic because there is no safe side. Pitching in the bullpen was a perfect fallback plan if starting didn't work. And either option would set him up nicely to follow his first seven-figure payday—his 2016 salary is $2.525 million—with something even bigger. As much as he tried to focus on Sara and Baylor and golf and everything that made him happy, Hudson understood this was an opportunity most don't get. If he could stay healthy, he would
get another crack at generational wealth. And if he were lucky enough, maybe he'd even delete the old email and forget about the $15 million that could have been.

TODD COFFEY
On July 3, 2015, in his eleventh outing for Los Diablos Rojos del México, Coffey heard a pop in his knee. He limped off the field, his ERA 4.66, his morale nonexistent, the major leagues a million miles away, and that was before the doctor tried to pump him with a shot of something he didn't want. “And to top it all off,” Coffey said, “I ran out of gas on the way from the park to the hotel.”

Thus ended Coffey's Mexican League experiment, a month that earned him a few thousand dollars and a torn meniscus. It was lonelier there than he had expected—just him and baseball and movies at the hotel. Ripping up cartilage in his knee was almost a relief; no major league team was calling on him, and now he had more time to consider his future. He said he wanted to pitch in winter ball, but that didn't happen. Coffey would gear up for spring training, maybe even minus a few pounds; he and Jennifer had talked about how impressed teams might be if he showed up looking like a new man and not the same guy who by then would have spent almost four years out of the big leagues.

Coffey wasn't quitting. Not like this. Nothing was ever enough to persuade him. Finally convinced his body might be scaring off teams, he started a high-intensity-interval-training program and dropped forty pounds. On December 8, 2015, Coffey drove from North Carolina to Nashville, where baseball held its Winter Meetings. For the next two days, he trawled the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, a monstrosity of a hotel so ostentatious it boasts an indoor river, trying to reconnect with old friends and show them how good he looked. “Just need a chance,” he said. That's all he ever wanted.

Because hidden in a closet in Rutherfordton were the cleats from his last game with the Dodgers, and he promised himself he would wear them again. Coffey won't unwrap the shoes for any game outside the big leagues. If his team doesn't wear blue, he'll dye the shoes. Just one more game, one day to validate everything.

JON LESTER
As happened to him every spring, Lester endured a so-called dead arm period in March 2015 that spooked Chicagoans who feared their $155 million ace was a lemon draped in blue pinstripes. Though Lester's yips on throws to first base were exposed and exploited to the tune of a record 44 stolen bases against a left-handed pitcher, he turned in a classically strong first season with the Cubs: 205 innings, 207 strikeouts, 47 walks, a 3.34 ERA. Even better: his batting average is no longer .000, thanks to 4 hits in 62 at bats. While Lester's 11–12 record looked more like that of a starter on a poor team, the Cubs were anything but. Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer's bet on the kids worked, and a lineup half filled with rookies led Chicago to 97 wins and an NLCS berth. The Cubs have the talent to be the best team in the NL for the next half-decade. Even better: Lester's elbow felt good enough after 2015 that he did not need surgery to remove the bone chip and plans to pitch with it in 2016.

TREVOR BAUER
Over the first two months of the 2015 season, Bauer looked like he finally figured out the major leagues. His ERA sat at 3.22. He was striking out more than a batter an inning. The command remained iffy, though not killer. Then came a mess of a stretch, with some bad luck and bad execution and bad results that eventually got Bauer demoted to the bullpen. By the end of the season, his future in Cleveland's rotation was tenuous, in part because,
of the seventy-eight pitchers who qualified for the ERA title, his walk rate of 4.04 per nine innings ranked last. Even if he believed in it, the command training didn't translate to better results. So at the end of the season, frustrated with baseball, Bauer boxed up his stuff and sent it to the Seattle area. He planned on buying a house there and readied for another winter of experimentation with Driveline Baseball.

KYLE BODDY
Before he started training at Driveline, a teenager named Drew Rasmussen threw in the low 90s, topping out around 92 miles per hour. A year later, as a freshman at Oregon State, Rasmussen threw a perfect game in his fourth start, his fastball crackling at 97 mph. If he stays healthy, Rasmussen is a surefire first-round pick in 2017, and if he stays healthy and keeps throwing 97, he'll be a multimillionaire before his twenty-first birthday. When Boddy said he wanted to spread his gospel through major college programs, this is what he meant: bring in kids—now to a new facility in Kent, Washington, with a $5,500 high-speed camera, an Emotiv EPOC headset that measures brainwaves, and no holes in the floor—and train them from puberty to university.

Veterans seeking extra oomph on lost fastballs found their way to Boddy as 2016 dawned. Longtime starter Chris Capuano, a two-time Tommy John recipient, trained at Driveline. Trey McNutt, a former top prospect with the Cubs whose shoulder woes derailed him, hit 95 mph off an indoor mound and looked primed to revitalize his career. Driveline was growing into the monster Boddy desired—a place the smart pitchers appreciated and the injured ones needed.

In the coming years, he plans to expand to the Phoenix area, maybe even move there. For now, Boddy sequesters himself in the Pacific Northwest, far away from the Indians and Astros and other teams that locked in his services but
insisted on nondisclosure agreements. He wants to say who they are, but he's part of pro ball now, part of the machine he loathes. He just hopes, like so many before him, that the changes he wants to make last.

JAMES BUFFI
Once he started working with the Los Angeles Dodgers as a senior analyst for research and development, the details of Buffi's experimentation were no longer for public consumption. He continued to toil away with Doug Fearing's team of quants in the Dodgers' think tank as they looked to get back to the World Series for the first time in nearly thirty years. The Mets would extend that dry spell another year.

CASEY WEATHERS
Between Class A Lynchburg and Double-A Akron, Weathers threw 49⅓ innings—the most of his career. He held the 100-mph velocity on his peak fastball most of the season. Never did he get much closer to 105.8 miles per hour than that, nor did he control his walks enough to merit a serious major league sniff from Cleveland. That could come in 2016. Weathers turned down tens of thousands of dollars in guaranteed pay from other organizations to return to the Indians' minor league system.

HARLEY HARRINGTON
In addition to baseball and soccer, Harley has added competitive paddleboarding to his busy schedule. His father, Martin, read a story about how a kid was recently drafted despite not pitching from ages eleven to fifteen, and he wondered whether Harley might benefit from a hiatus. No one will accuse the Harringtons of obsessing too much over sports. One October day in 2015, when Harley's baseball team had a doubleheader scrimmage and his soccer team a game in Los Angeles, Martin made a difficult choice easy: he took the family to Sea World. Harley turns twelve over the summer and will enter sixth grade in the fall of 2016.

RILEY PINT
On the morning of August 7, 2015, scout Kiley McDaniel tweeted a picture of his radar gun reading 100 miles per hour. Pint, now eighteen, authored the pitch, and he continued to confound scouts who loved his stuff but blanched at his inconsistencies. This was the sort of Pint they wanted to see, one good enough to merit a cover story in the amateur-ball bible
Baseball America
. One hundred miles per hour before he was even a senior in high school was scary good—and also just scary, considering velocity's perils. Most scouts dropped Pint below left-hander Jason Groome in the high school class of 2016. If Pint comes out sitting 100 in the spring, of course, he's a threat to make history when the Philadelphia Phillies draft first overall on June 9, 2016.

ANTHONY MOLINA
The charges against Molina were dropped in late June 2015, according to his father, Nelson. The incident still sent him tumbling down prospect lists and in search of another scholarship. His solution: to throw in more showcases. Molina went to seven Perfect Game events in 2015 as well as the East Coast Pro showcase in Tampa and the Under Armour game in Chicago. His fastball sat from 89 to 94. He will be eligible for the 2016 draft.

BRAEDYN WOBORNY
After his visit to Dr. Kevin Witte, Woborny quit pitching. As a full-time, switch-hitting catcher, he batted over .380 as a sophomore and expects to graduate from high school in 2017.

MATT HARVEY
The New York Mets chose him to start game one of the 2015 World Series in his first year back from Tommy John surgery, a rousing success even as the Mets lost that game and Harvey's other start, the deciding game five, to the champion Kansas City Royals. Of the last ten game-one starters, five had undergone Tommy John.