The Arm (16 page)

“I think we talk ourselves into it to a certain extent, but if you're brutally honest with yourself, you recognize that you don't know,” Epstein said. “There's so much more that we don't know than we do know. That's the reality. And whether you do know it or not, you're one phone call away.”

One phone call away. When P. J. Mainville's name pops up on caller ID, Epstein doesn't want to pick up. Hundreds of times a year he'll get calls from Mainville, the Cubs' head trainer, and Epstein hopes every time it's not the worst-case scenario.

“My heart stops every time,” Epstein said. “You're just praying it's not a ‘Jake felt something in his shoulder today.' ‘Jon felt something in his elbow today.' ‘It's probably nothing but we're going to shut him down and get MRIs tomorrow.' That's the worst part. Your organization, your franchise, changes with one phone call. That's the worst part. You can weigh all the mitigating factors and it doesn't matter. You're still one phone call away.”

One phone call away, just like the arm is one pitch away. No matter how fragile and expensive, the arm is a Faustian bargain with which all thirty teams begrudgingly live.

“We're one phone call away on a $150 million investment, and that's the reality,” Epstein said. “So, no, we're not going to sleep well. But we're really happy we have Jon Lester.”

A
T THE LOWEST MOMENTS OF
his rehabilitation, Daniel Hudson would log into his email account and search for a message hidden in the depths of his in-box. When it popped up, Hudson knew he shouldn't click on it. He did anyway. He scrolled down and saw the memo from Billy Ryan, the assistant general manager of Hudson's team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was a contract offer.

The Diamondbacks had presented it to Hudson in March 2012, following his first full season with the team. The twenty-four-year-old had thrown 222 innings, won sixteen games, and posted a 3.49 ERA. Hudson didn't outright dismiss the offer of $15 million for five years. He didn't spend much time considering it, either, not out of greed but because it was startlingly undermarket. Starting pitchers like Hudson could make $15 million a season if they stayed healthy. Jon Lester's first full season, at age twenty-four, looked eerily similar to Hudson's: He threw 210⅓ innings, won sixteen games, and posted a 3.21 ERA.

Hudson thought he would be like Lester. All good pitchers do. Invincibility is a shared trait among elite athletes, and it colors their every decision. Turning down the money was the right choice, and Hudson knew that, and yet when he pulled up the email he would read it over again and again, stare at it, think about the paychecks that could've been.

“I should probably delete it,” Hudson said.

He still hasn't.

F
IFTEEN MONTHS AFTER HE RECEIVED
the offer, eleven months after his elbow blew out, Daniel Hudson flew to Jacksonville, Florida. It was June 4, 2013, and the first test for his new arm came against the Double-A Jacksonville Suns at Bragan Field. As much as their swings would give a sense of how Hudson looked, the better indication would come from a man named Yogi.

Behind home plate sat Bill “Yogi” Young, his radar gun trained on Hudson. The old scout trusts his gun. He treats it right. Never dropped it, not once. Sends it out for recalibration every year. Keeps it out of the rain. “I take very good care of my baby,” Yogi said. For twenty-six years, he aimed all different models of radar guns at baseball players around the country, and nothing has worked as well as his Stalker Pro II, which he paid $1,300 to have rush-delivered to Texas for a Double-A game in 2008 after his older model crapped out. His Stalker is the one thing in life that never lied to him.

That's why the number that flashed across its LED screen confused Yogi: 95. The first pitch Daniel Hudson had thrown to hitters in nearly a year was a fastball, gripped across the horseshoe-shaped seams, flung from a three-quarters arm slot, spinning at about 2,300 revolutions per minute, sizzling past Jake Marisnick, who took it for strike one.

I saw Yogi glance to his left, eyebrows aloft. Another scout named Mike Brown returned the look. Neither knew quite what to say.

“Wow,” Yogi said.

“Ninety-five,” Brownie said.

“I guess everyone should have Tommy John surgery,” Yogi said.

Less than a year earlier, around the time Todd Coffey was going under the knife for his second Tommy John surgery, Hudson had needed his first. During a game he started for the Diamondbacks, Hudson felt a pop in his right elbow after throwing a fastball. He wanted to pitch through it. His arm refused. The UCL had ruptured. Hudson suffered through endless days of rehabilitation, all leading to his return with the Double-A Mobile BayBears for the first of four minor league tune-up starts before he could rejoin Arizona. His audience consisted of three thousand fans, a fraction of that watching on the Internet, and two incredulous scouts. Hudson couldn't believe the 95, either; his fastball sat in the low 90s during the live batting practice sessions before his rehab assignment.

Everything that day had gone right. Hudson spent most of the morning certain the pouring rain outside would scuttle his start, but the clouds cleared by midafternoon, the sun bathed the field, and Hudson readied himself for the first of four or five minor league starts before he returned to the Diamondbacks' rotation. He slung a number 43 jersey over his shoulders and lounged in a locker room's metal folding chair, headphones clamped to his ears, the wails of an electric guitar stoking his competitive fire. The ripe locker room smelled like the minor leagues, the opposite of an antiseptic major league clubhouse, where Hudson had spent parts of the previous three seasons as a burgeoning star.

His lone concern was trivial. One of a rehabbing major leaguer's responsibilities is to embellish the locker room spread beyond the perpetual snacks of fruit, cereal, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Hudson didn't know what to buy. He paced the room, looking for a clubhouse attendant to make the food run, worried more about BBQ vs. Italian than himself vs. the Jacksonville Suns. “Danny Hudson,” Yogi said, “is one of the best kids in the world.” Yogi called him Danny, even though Hudson's wife called him Dan, his baseball card called him Daniel, and
everyone else who knew him called him Huddy. Danny just felt more personal.

Yogi knew all kinds. The baseball rats and the pompous shit heels, the ones too smart to play ball for a living and the ones too dumb to do anything else, the drunks and the teetotalers, the churchgoers and the commandment slayers, the good kids who didn't have enough talent and the bad kids endowed with too much. Hudson fit no baseball stereotype. His biggest vice was golf. He didn't cheat on his wife. He was a regular guy with a gifted right arm. Hudson first met Yogi in Great Falls, Montana, in 2008, where the Chicago White Sox, who drafted him in the fifth round, had sent him to play for their rookie-league affiliate. Yogi, a Sox scout since 2000, had gone to Great Falls to gather reports on the team and sit behind home plate with Hudson, who charted the pitches of his fellow starters on his days off. He followed Hudson after the White Sox traded him to Arizona, cringed when Hudson blew out, and wanted to be there to see his return.

Now, after the first 95-mph pitch, Hudson settled in with two more fastballs. He fed Marisnick his best pitch, a changeup, then followed with another fastball and a slider that cracked Marisnick's bat. “Breaking ball looks better,” Yogi said. Hudson cruised through the next two hitters and finished the first inning with eighteen pitches and nary a blemish.

“He's back,” Yogi said to Mike Brown. “All the way.”

Hudson started the second inning with a 92-mph fastball and got an easy out. The next hitter saw a 92-mph fastball and doubled. And the next slapped a 91-mph fastball for an infield hit. And the next stared at 90-mph fastballs, one of which flew high and outside when the catcher set up low and inside, and drew a walk. Hudson stepped off the mound, adjusted his cap. The bases were loaded.

“He's not right,” Yogi said.

“He's not letting it go,” Brownie said.

They saw subtle differences. Hudson squinted for signs from the catcher. It wasn't his vision; his left eye is 20/20, and he wore
a contact lens to correct his right. Something was stealing his focus, and squinting forced him to concentrate. Nobody in the stands noticed, but good scouts decode every clue. The body language. The mannerisms. They cross-reference their hunches with their technology. “The gun verifies what you think,” Brownie said. “That's the ultimate truth detector.”

Hudson was back up to 92 on his first pitch with the bases loaded. The next couple dropped to 90. A slider limped to the plate and the resulting force play allowed a run. Two down. Up next was pitcher Nate Eovaldi, a prospect and Tommy John survivor himself whose fastball in the second inning topped out at 99. Yogi's gun clocked Hudson's first two fastballs to Eovaldi at 89. The third was 88. Eovaldi swung through it to end the inning, and Hudson lurched off the mound and into the dugout.

Yogi glanced at Brownie again. Both knew something had happened. Neither dared speculate what. It could be small—an oblique strain, maybe, or a twisted ankle. They scrawled down a couple of final notes and pocketed their pens. That last pitch—that 88—hung in the air like the smell of burnt toast.

A moment later, my phone beeped to break the silence. It was a text message from Hudson.

I had to come out. Feels like shit. Just feels dead and tight all over.

F
OR SOMEONE COMING OFF UCL
reconstruction like Hudson, any setback sets off a panic. The injury in Jacksonville could have been inflammation or scar tissue or a tweaked muscle. No one really knew what the hell had just happened.

In Phoenix, Arizona, Kevin Towers, the Diamondbacks' general manager, watched MiLB.com's live stream of the game in Jacksonville on his computer. Towers embraces his reputation as a loose cannon among GMs; his email address includes his nickname: “Gunslinger.” Nobody in the organization liked Hudson more than Towers. He tried trading for him when he was GM of
the San Diego Padres and succeeded when he took the Diamondbacks job. He saw so much of himself in Hudson. They were both six feet four, both right-handed pitchers, both unrelenting competitors on the mound, on-field Hydes to their everyday Jekylls. Both wear scars on their right elbow, too.

Towers got his in 1985. It's a gnarly one, thick with bumps and ugly with wear and tear, a foot-long reminder of the distance Tommy John surgery has come. Fewer than fifty players had undergone the surgery in '85; perhaps ten thousand baseball players of all ages across the world have done so since. Towers needed arthroscopic surgery three times on the elbow after his Tommy John and finally gave up and retired at twenty-seven. He didn't want to think about what had just happened to Hudson. Towers turned off his computer. “You knew it couldn't be good,” he would say later, “just because he's such a warrior.”

Andrew Lowenthal, Hudson's agent, watched on the computer from his home in Livingston, New Jersey. Lowenthal had cold-called Hudson in 2007 when he was a sophomore at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Agents comb lists ranking high school and college players, and spend years recruiting in hopes that a personal connection develops. Hudson took a liking to Lowenthal, even though Hudson spent the next few days after they met for dinner hunched over a toilet bowl on account of some bad shrimp alfredo.

Over the next five years, Lowenthal negotiated Hudson's $180,000 signing bonus, played occasional psychologist, and kept him on a clear career path—the one that could lead to the tens of millions of dollars that teams paid quality starting pitchers. He advised Hudson to turn down the contract; three months later, Hudson blew out. Jacksonville was the first step back toward what could be generations of well-heeled Hudsons. Now this. Lowenthal didn't know what to say. He figured Hudson didn't want to talk and sent a text message: “Saw you came out. Everything OK?”

Kris Hudson watched her son on her computer in Virginia
Beach, Virginia. During Hudson's childhood, Kris stayed at home with him and his younger brother, Dylan, while Hudson's father, Sam, worked for the military in information technology. From the time Hudson turned ten, he spent most of his weekends at baseball tournaments, with Kris typically his chaperone. Mother and son were too much like each other, obstinate and feisty. They fought about him staying up to watch TV, about him finishing his dinner, him taking the car. Once, Kris let him have the keys—by chucking them at him. Hudson grew up, recognized the similarities, learned to appreciate them, and told his parents almost everything. Now Kris and Sam sat in their bedroom and worried about their son's surgically repaired elbow. “He's twenty-six years old,” Kris said to her husband. “What else is he gonna do? He hasn't gone back and finished his degree. He's talked about nothing else in his life but playing baseball.”

Sara, Dan's college sweetheart and now his wife, watched on her computer in Chandler, Arizona. They had married less than a year earlier. She had quit her job as a labor-and-delivery nurse to play full-time baseball wife, though she fit none of the stereotypes. Devilishly funny, even caustic, Sara was the marriage's alpha dog, which took some doing because Hudson is no wallflower himself. She usually got what she wanted, whether renovations on their house or what to eat for dinner or how soon they were going to get pregnant, which was very. She liked things under control, so when Hudson didn't jog out to the mound for the third inning, her fears ignited. Not again, she thought—not the frustration and depression and anxiety, the toll rehabilitation takes on a man, on a marriage, on a family's finances, especially when both know what could have been had he just signed the contract. “I just want to know if he thought it happened again,” Sara later said. “If it was like the first time.”

Nobody knew, not yet, not even Yogi Young and Mike Brown, who sat in the stands, trying to stay focused. They anticipated the worst, because baseball had conditioned them to do so, reminded them over and over that the sport's splendor is exceeded only by
its cruelty. Brownie texted his boss, Matt Arnold, the Tampa Bay Rays' director of pro scouting, and asked whether he should write a report on Hudson. The answer was no. Not if he's hurt again.

“It's like being on the threshold of a rainbow,” Brownie said. “You're right there, and then it's gone.”

A
FTER THE GAME, THE KID
with the video camera wanted to interview Daniel Hudson for the Jacksonville Suns' YouTube channel, and even though his elbow hurt like hell and he was worried his career was over and he wasn't thinking right, he said OK, because that's how he is. Hudson stood in front of a brick wall outside the BayBears' clubhouse. The kid, at least a half foot shorter, tilted the camera up.

“Daniel,” the kid started, “you made your first rehab start with the Mobile BayBears tonight. Just, first of all, easy question: How'd you feel out there?”