The Arm (39 page)

JOSÉ FERNÁNDEZ
The Miami Marlin's comeback season from Tommy John surgery didn't go quite as ideally as Harvey's. Fernández spent more than a month on the disabled list with pain in his right biceps. He returned for four starts in September and October and finished the year with a 2.92 ERA over 64⅔ innings with 79 strikeouts and 14 walks.

STEPHEN STRASBURG
After returning from a strained oblique on August 8, 2015, Strasburg was arguably the second-best pitcher in baseball over the last two months, after NL Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta. In 66⅓ innings, he struck out 92, walked 8, and posted a 1.90 ERA. He is a free agent after the 2016 season.

YU DARVISH
He spent the entire 2015 season rehabbing from Tommy John surgery as the Texas Rangers won the AL West despite his absence. They should be favorites in the division going into 2016, particularly with Darvish's return expected in May—fourteen months after his surgery.

TOMOHIRO ANRAKU
While his fastball continues to sit in the high 80s and low 90s, Anraku pitched well enough in the minor leagues that the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles summoned him to the major leagues for one start at the end of the 2015 season. Anraku threw six shutout innings, allowing two hits, striking out four, and walking five. He threw only ninety-four pitches.

SHOTA TATSUTA
Sent to the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters' minor league team in the Eastern League, Tatsuta threw 12⅔ innings, gave up fifteen hits, walked six, struck out seven, and had a 7.82 ERA. He told the
Wall Street Journal
that he likes to spend his downtime shopping at outlet malls.

KIRK GIBSON
About six months after the Arizona Diamondbacks fired Gibson, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He continues to work as a color analyst for Fox Sports Detroit's broadcasts of Tigers games.

KEVIN TOWERS
He wasn't unemployed for long after losing his job as Diamondbacks GM. Cincinnati general manager Walt Jocketty hired Towers as a special assistant before the 2015 season, a job he continues to hold.

STAN CONTE
Following 24 years as a major league trainer, Conte resigned from the Los Angeles Dodgers following the 2015 season to start a consulting business. He plans on advising teams on how to keep players healthy.

JACK ZDURIENCIK
The Seattle Mariners' general manager was fired on August 28, 2015, after six and a half seasons. The team's record under his stewardship was 505–595.

BRAD ARNSBERG
“Same shit as ever,” the Diamondbacks' rehab coordinator said.

O
N MAY 26, 2012, I
sent a terribly desperate text message to a twenty-three-year-old named Danny Duffy. He was a left-handed pitcher with the Kansas City Royals, and two weeks earlier he had blown out his elbow. I told him I wanted to follow him and write a book about it. He said he wasn't interested. A few days later, I inquired whether an Atlanta Braves right-hander named Brandon Beachy might be interested. Nope. Turns out young men facing the most harrowing moment of their lives aren't terribly keen on strangers shadowing them for a year.

I knew without a player—without a heart—this book was nothing. I tried twice more, hoping one might say yes, exulting when that happened, and then delighting at my fortune when the other did the same. Then one year turned into two and bled into three because nothing is linear about the arm, nothing easy, except perhaps dealing with the two people who could best tell its story.

And maybe it's proximity bias, but I feel like it's true: as compelling as the tale of a superstar's comeback might seem, Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey imbued this book with a realness born of their honesty and forthrightness and willingness to expose themselves in a manner no active icon would dare. Never once did they shoo me away. No questions were off-limits. They
wanted their experiences told right as much as I did. I sought one interesting subject. I got two perfect ones.

Right alongside them were Sara Hudson and Jennifer Coffey, embodiments of strength, not just in how they navigate their way through the peculiar world of baseball wifedom but how they managed their husbands' psyches as they plumbed the depths. Life with a sick spouse can turn necrotic quickly; Sara and Jennifer were professional psychologists without a diploma on the wall. Their husbands are lucky, and both know it.

Luck, it turns out, suffuses this book. Jay Mandel of William Morris Endeavor took me on only because I hung by a pinkie to Dan Wetzel's coattails. Now Jay is a sounding board, a trusted advisor, and my conduit to this world of books I didn't quite understand. When I had bad ideas, he let me figure out on my own how bad they were; when I stumbled upon a good one, he helped me find the right people to nurture it.

David Hirshey and R. D. Rosen are the editors I've long desired, caring for every last word, calling bullshit on my verbosity, challenging me to be better. This is a new book because of them, a better one. They saw something good and wanted to make it great. I hope I delivered that.

My other dynamic duo is Blake Schuster and Mike Vernon, whom I met as juniors at the University of Kansas and who today are the kind of journalists I'd want to hire. Hundreds of hours of recorded interviews were uploaded into a Dropbox, and they transcribed all of it faithfully, accurately, and without complaint. They read chapters right after I finished them and told me what worked and what didn't. This book is theirs every bit as much as it's mine.

Maybe out of fear that I didn't want to screw up material so ripe, maybe on compliment-fishing expeditions, I sent chapters and manuscripts to far too many people whose lives were far too busy to read them. And Greg Bishop and Eli Saslow and Andy McCullough and Chico Harlan and Adam Kilgore and Mike
Rothstein still did because however fantastic they are as writers, they're better people. Same goes for the others who offered advice and help: Nick Piecoro, Molly Knight, Wright Thompson, Chris Jones, Barry Svrluga, Marc Carig, Les Carpenter, Patrick Hruby, Wayne Drehs, Jonah Keri, Doug Miller, Ken Rosenthal, Mark Pesavento, Mike Vaccaro, Mike Fannin, Will Leitch, and the inimitable Jane Leavy, who made my year by asking to read it and my decade by going through it one line at a time.

I'm not sure any other employer would've tolerated a full-time baseball writer spending as much time on a side project as I did, though nothing about Yahoo Sports surprises me anymore. Working there excites me every bit as much as it did ten years ago when Dave Morgan took a chance on a kid who had no business in such a big-boy job. Now I spend every day writing alongside Wetzel, Adrian Wojnarowski, Charles Robinson, Eric Adelson, Pat Forde, Marc Spears, Kevin Iole, Mike Osegueda, and the best partner possible, Tim Brown, and it challenges me to do better. The backing of editors Bob Condor, Johnny Ludden, Joe Garza, Al Toby, Marcus Vanderberg, and Melissa Geisler, not to mention Marissa Mayer and the rest of the Yahoo! hierarchy, allows us to pursue great journalism, a rarity these days.

So much help came from inside the baseball establishment. MLB and the MLBPA agreed to let me see the HITS system, and Chris Marinak's guidance was imperative. He and Rob Manfred, Patrick Courtney, John D'Angelo, and plenty of others show how MLB is starting to care about the arm. Same goes on the union side: the late Michael Weiner was a beacon, and Tony Clark, Rick Shapiro, Greg Bouris, and others were just as eager to answer hard questions.

On the club side, Josh Rawitch and Casey Wilcox with the Diamondbacks were ever accommodating, and Joe Jareck and Steve Brener with the Dodgers made things happen I didn't think possible. On the writing side, the words of Joe Sheehan, Kiley McDaniel, Rob Neyer, Harry Pavlidis, Jason Parks, Kevin Gold
stein, Jacob Pomrenke, and Max Thompson provided necessary reassurance. On the agent side, Andrew Lowenthal and Rick Thurman gave incredible insight and depth not just into Hudson and Coffey but the business of baseball and how it truly works.

This book doesn't work unless more than 220 people answer my questions. Neil Roach, Kyle Boddy, and Glenn Fleisig were particularly kind with their tolerance of my ignorance. Other parts simply don't happen without the cooperation of Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and Jon Lester, the hand-holding of Hiro Abe, Gaku Tashiro, George Nishiyama, and Brad Lefton, or the generosity of Tommy John, Sandy Koufax, and Frank Jobe.

And now it's here, finally, for Debbie and Rich Passan to show off like proud parents. Their support means everything, as does that of Nicole and Aaron Atlas, Joan and Sam Sharpe, Amy and Adam Rieke, Catherine and Jason Pettus, Mary and Tom Martz, Pam and Eric Sharpe, and the rest of my wonderful family. Even Otto Rieke, who thought
The Arm
was a terrible title and instead suggested
50 Shades of Elbow
, because he was certain it would sell better.

How Sara Passan puts up with his nonsense, as well as mine and that of our sons, Jack and Luke, I'll never quite understand. As I sequestered myself inside a set of noise-canceling headphones and in front of a computer screen, she nurtured two exceptional boys, and for that I'll forever be in her debt. She's a superlative mother, wife, friend, person. Her unbending loyalty is rare, her unremitting patience rarer yet, her uncapped kindness rarest of all. Someone who embodies all three is a miracle. I hope she enjoys this when she finally reads it.

The recognition for Jack and Luke goes beyond the standard love-you trope. In mid-May 2012, when Luke was barely a month old, I was in his room at 3 a.m., watching him take down 4 ounces of milk in painfully slow fashion, the precipice of delirium fast approaching. My eyes struggled to peel open and my mind raced from thought to thought and I wondered about
what the Blue Jays were doing and the Orioles and why they approached pitching in the manner they did and how retrograde it seemed and it branched out so quickly that by the final ounce I had the idea for this book, which was either the stupid product of middle-of-the-night fever dreams or something that could help a lot of people.

I hope it's the latter. Jack is eight now. He's starting to throw harder. He's starting to ask questions about how to keep his arm healthy, too. And that's the goal, the raison d'être of the last three and a half years: to use the power of two men's stories to humanize a limb and get kids and parents alike wondering the same thing as Jack. Thank you for letting me try.

Daniel Hudson with manager Kirk Gibson and pitching coach Charles Nagy after he first tore his ulnar collateral ligament. Hudson long feared an arm injury because of his unorthodox delivery but never imagined what he would need to endure to return to the major leagues. (
Daniel Shirey/USA TODAY)

Daniel Hudson's fastball was perhaps his best pitch, running up into near triple digits before his injuries. (
Jennifer Stewart/Arizona Diamondbacks
)

Tomohiro Anraku threw 772 pitches over nine days at the 2013 Spring Koshien, the high school baseball tournament that is Japan's equivalent to March Madness. (
Katsuro Okazawa/AFLO/ZUMAPRESS.com
)

Todd Coffey with Dodgers catcher A. J. Ellis during the outing in which he blew out his right elbow for the second time. Coffey kept his shoes from that night and vowed to wear them the next time he walked onto a major league mound. (
Kirby Lee/Image of Sport–USA TODAY Sports
)

Cleveland Indians minor leaguer Casey Weathers prepares to throw a weighted ball against padded plywood with his coach, Kyle Boddy, who oversaw his return to organized baseball. Long controversial, training with overweight and underweight balls has become more common in recent years. (
Driveline Baseball
)

Diagram of the elbow, including the three bundles of the UCL. Doctors believe the anterior bundle endures the vast majority of stress on the ligament during the overhand throwing motion. (
Myriam Kirkman-Oh
)

The return of Matt Harvey from Tommy John surgery, in which he rehabilitated for five months longer than typical, was among the most successful to date. (
Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports
)

The Los Angeles Dodgers honor Dr. Frank Jobe, the pioneer of Tommy John surgery and regarded as the best sports orthopedist ever, as John (
center
) and Orel Hershiser (
right
) look on. (
Kirby Lee/Image of Sport–USA TODAY Sports
)

After throwing 164 pitches, Daniel Hudson celebrates a Virginia high school state championship with Princess Anne High coach Jimmy Hunt. (
Kris Hudson
)

The position of Washington pitcher Stephen Strasburg's elbows—in the so-called Inverted W—is believed by some to have caused his torn UCL. No evidence definitively links the Inverted W to arm injuries. (
Bob DeChiara/USA TODAY Sports
)

Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the surgeon for Todd Coffey, speaks at a memorial service at Dodger Stadium for Dr. Frank Jobe, his mentor. (
Los Angeles Dodgers
)