The Futility Infielder

Friday marked an anniversary of sorts: it's been one year since I had surgery to repair the torn labrum of my right shoulder. The operation itself was relatively minor -- an hour-long arthroscopic procedure that required four small incisions to repair a hole the size of a quarter and left me with two plastic anchors implanted, two scars the size of dimes and two more the size of pencil erasers. But the upheaval it created was considerable; to say that it was a life-changing experience would be an understatement.

I injured my shoulder back in June 2003 in a backyard incident of competitive tomfoolery so idiotic it brought to mind my late grandfather's phrase, "I must have rocks in my head." Though the diagnosis -- a SLAP tear -- took about a month, I knew very quickly that I had done something terribly wrong because throwing a baseball even 20 feet -- which I attempted to do a couple hours later, for diagnostic purposes -- was nearly impossible. I spent about three months rehabbing the injury via physical therapy before my doctors and I reached the conclusion that surgery would be necessary to restore my accustomed level of function. My shoulder felt as though the wind had been knocked out of it, and though I couldn't pinpoint a particularly sore area, getting through a day pain-free was like trying to cover for an unfilled cavity.

I eased a considerable amount of my anxiety by making the impending procedure fodder for this column, researching SLAP repair and learning of its high success rate -- from a non-athletic standpoint. Thanks to Will Carroll's "Medhead Manifesto" piece (written with his father, an orthopedic surgeon) in Baseball Prospectus 2003, I got a very thorough explanation of the injury's ramifications as they pertained to baseball, and I quizzed Will about the surgery in the days leading up. He assured me that the operation would be "as minimal as it goes," though my days of blowing fastballs by hitters (yeah, riiiiight) were a thing of the past.

So under the knife I went.

For the first four weeks afterwards, I was required to wear a sling, a rather strange fashion accessory that granted me a certain amount of notoriety and recognizability -- kind of like an eye patch. During the first week, I was unable brush my teeth, shave, or feed myself with my right hand, and the slightest wrong movement could send jolts of blinding pain through my body. In order to keep the swelling down, several times a day I had to hook up to an cooler big enough to hold a six-pack that circulated icewater through a pad over my shoulder. The Iceman cometh, indeed.

The care that I got from my gal Andra during that first week -- which included her preparing a Thanksgiving meal for five, including her mother -- was incredible. In those foggy days after the operation she reminded me to take my meds (which included the now-banned Vioxx), kept the freezer stocked with ice, communicated my status to my doctor and my parents, ran my errands, rotated my Monty Python's Flying Circus DVDs, and even gave up our bed to sleep on our futon while I slumbered on a mountain of pillows she'd assembled. For the first time I could recall, I was able to sleep on my back, though I've since discovered that was the Vicodin doing the talking.

Andra and I had been living together for about seven months when I had my surgery, and we had just passed our three-year anniversary. Somewhere amid her expert caretaking, I recognized beyond any shadow of a doubt that I had to marry this woman, though it took me a few months to actually get down to business.

Gradually, I was able to begin functioning again. Sustained work was still out of the question, but once I could sit comfortably in my desk chair, I began my one-handed hunt-and-pecking, something that was uniquely suited to preparing my DIPS 2003 spreadsheet. The one-handedness was frustrating, though; the speed with which I could record my thoughts brought to mind an image of pedaling a bicycle with one leg. It was another week before I could lift my elbow (still in its sling) high enough to allow my right hand to join in the typing fun.

My time in the sling coincided with my trip to baseball's Winter Meetings in New Orleans. While my fashion accessory granted me ample material for discussion, it was always awkward when I had to "bring in the lefty" to shake hands with the writers I met. For months afterwards, it seemed as though each Baseball Prospectus writer who passed through New York City remarked that they hardly recognized me without the sling.

Still prohibited from any physical activity regarding my shoulder, over the Christmas holiday I was doomed to watch record snowfalls in Salt Lake City and its surrounding canyons while my dad and brother raved about the knee- or even waist-deep powder at Snowbird. I did, however, manage to make something productive of my non-skiing time, doing the arduous research -- spreadsheets again -- for my first two articles for Baseball Prospectus on the 2004 Hall of Fame ballot.

It wasn't until after the new year that I could toss the sling aside and begin physical therapy. My PT regime would require two or three visits a week for four months, a commitment that felt like taking on a part-time job. As a bit of a gym rat even through my injury, I was humbled at the outset when faced with how much muscle mass, strength, and coordination I'd lost -- not only from that month of inactivity but from several months of babying the injured wing.

It was tough going in the beginning. One exercise had me lying on my stomach and lifting a two-pound dumbell from the six o'clock to nine o'clock positions, and even that was a bitch. Even lifting such meager weights, I overdid it early on, developed some swelling, and had to shut things down for about a week, much to my frustration. I caught a real break when the lesser of the two therapists I was working with -- more aggressive, less communicative -- was transferred to another facility, leaving me in the care of the man who had been recommended as "the shoulder guy" by Andra's physical therapist (she had knee problems awhile back).

Late in April, after three and a half months of sweating out my rehab, a moment I'd been dreaming of for nearly a year came around: I was able to toss a baseball again. On a sunny, 70-degree Saturday which seemed divinely devised, I headed to nearby Tompkins Square Park with Andra, pal Nick and my trusty old mitt. Throughout our little game of catch, I was very self-conscious of my mechanics, and couldn't throw very far or for very long, but even with the discomfort it felt like surgery for the soul. Two weeks later, I shed the PT and resumed my workouts at the gym.

Not that it's been roses since then. I resumed my normal workout regime -- the kind of major/minor muscle group routine any idiot with a gym membership will be only too happy to tell you about. And while I regained my strength to about 90-95%, late in August I tweaked my shoulder during a declined bench-press. A week of pain, swelling, disrupted sleep, and the only-too-familiar feeling that I described as "loose meat" left me sure I had torn something. Perhaps even moreso than before, I spent a lot of spare time contemplating just how quickly an athletic career can end in the blink of an eye due to a wrong movement or a bad decision.

Much to my relief, my doctor finally diagnosed me with only biceps tendonitis due to overuse and told me to back off my workouts a bit. Whew! Still, my gym visits are considerably less regular than before, and I'm resigned not to push myself beyond about 90% of my presurgical levels for awhile.

But beyond the physical stuff, the most interesting development with the shoulder came with my writing. Carroll liked my original piece on the injury so much -- and his medical advisor, Dr. James Andrews, concurred -- that he asked permission to use it in his book, Saving the Pitcher. So there I am between hard covers, giving a three-page anatomy lesson. In the words of the late broadcasting giant Mel Allen, "How 'bout that?"

More than that, my labrum-related writing has brought a steady stream of readers to this site. Many of them are parents of baseball-playing teenagers who have suffered the injury, and they ask questions about what their kids can expect in the way of pain and functionality. Unfortunately, the picture isn't pretty from a ballplaying standpoint. Perhaps it was my own heightened sensitivity to the matter, but the torn labrum became 2004's chic injury. Carroll wrote an April Fool's Day piece for BP lampooning the lack of medical advances in treating the injury -- something about injecting a soy-lentil protein matrix into the shoulder of oft-injured major league pitcher/human cannonball Jose Rijo.

Later, Carroll wrote a serious in-depth piece for Slate on why the torn labrum had become, in his words "baseball's most fearsome injury." Simply put, the reason is that there's no magic bullet, no Tommy John surgery equivalent or conventional rehab protocol that has been shown to return players to their previous levels of ability. The roster of players who suffered labrum injuries in the last year or so -- Robb Nen, Shawn Green, Richie Sexson, Carl Everett, Mark Ellis, Juan Encarnacion, Jung Bong, Adam Loewen, J.J. Hardy, and Angel Guzman, to name a few -- is a list full of shot seasons and dashed hopes, with Green's return perhaps the best-case scenario.

As I've said before, I'm glad that my career doesn't require me to throw or hit a 90-mile-an-hour fastball to put food on the table. I wouldn't wish what I went through on anybody, but a year later, I look back satisfied that I've played the hand I was dealt as well as I could have.