The Arm (18 page)

“This waiting game sucks,” he texted me. He was at the airport, and even if his elbow felt different than the first time, Hudson remembered the emptiness in his stomach from the year before. He blew his arm out for the first time in Atlanta, and the flight home to Phoenix, where an MRI machine and a diagnosis awaited, was the longest five hours of his life. This flight was even longer, this injury more mysterious, this discomfort greater. Hudson dug into a John Sandford novel on his iPad and shuffled his musical selection, hopeful that an assault on his senses would put the flight on fast-forward.

He landed in the late afternoon, too late to visit Dr. Lee but early
enough to grab dinner and a couple of drinks with Sara. She asked how his arm felt and he didn't say much. She didn't pry. He appreciated it. When Hudson woke up the next morning, his arm actually moved. It felt better except when fully extended. Sara felt relieved. Just a minor complication, maybe a few weeks or a month. She wasn't normally this optimistic; she just knew that optimism was necessary.

The appointment with Lee next day was encouraging. He loaded Hudson's elbow into different positions, put it through the standard stress tests, felt around for the telltale signs of a blown UCL. Lee found nothing alarming. “Doctor doesn't think it's anything more than inflammation,” Hudson texted. “Gonna get an MRI to be sure though.”

Hudson's MRI was over by 7:30 p.m., almost exactly forty-eight hours after he left the game in Jacksonville. Lee told him not to bother bringing the scans back to his office. He figured they'd talk about it at the stadium the next day and go over an updated rehab plan and timetable. At home that night, Hudson pulled pictures printed from the MRI out of a folder and stared at it. “I don't know why I'm doing this,” he said to Sara. He had no idea what he was looking at, let alone what he'd be looking for.

The next morning, at 8:30, Hudson's phone buzzed. He looked at the number. He recognized it from a text message the day before as Dr. Lee's. In between the first and second buzzes, Hudson's mind raced, questions flooding his psyche, chief among them: Why would he call now when he said he'd look at the results at the ballpark?

Hudson flipped the screen of his phone toward Sara. He told her who it was. Before he tapped the green answer button, he knew. So did she.

“I'm fucked,” he said.

H
IS VOICE TREMBLED. IT WAS
10:53, a couple of hours after he'd heard. He'd had a good cry already, a heaving, sobbing, why-me
of a lament in Sara's arms. He wasn't the shit heel or the dummy. He didn't disrespect the game or treat the privilege of playing baseball with anything less than his finest effort. Not that he believed any of those things mattered. Baseball wasn't casting judgment on him. The arm is just merciless.

“I guess the graft just wasn't strong enough,” Hudson told me. He didn't know many details. When Lee said the UCL was torn again, Hudson went into a fog. Lee sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher. Hudson responded the same to everything: “Uh-huh.” Hudson dropped his phone to the floor when the conversation ended. Everything was for nothing. He was Sisyphus.

Sara later called Lee for details. Like every orthopedist, Lee could explain only what happened. If he knew why—if anyone knew why—baseball's greatest scourge might disappear, or at least be manageable and not some booby trap set to go off at an indeterminate time. The graft, a tendon taken out of Hudson's wrist like in the original Tommy John surgery, had snapped just like the one with which he was born. It had retracted about a centimeter, which caused fluid to rush to the back of his elbow and cause the stiffness. Neither Lee nor Burroughs, the trainer in Jacksonville, could diagnose the tear because Hudson's body went into full-on protection mode; the muscles in the area surrounding the UCL instinctively tightened around the trauma, stabilizing the elbow, and Hudson's unusual ability to weather the discomfort hid from everyone else what he suspected. “They told me I have a high pain tolerance,” Hudson said.

Physical, at least. The mental toll grew with every conversation. Ken Crenshaw, the Diamondbacks' trainer who had drawn up Hudson's original rehab program, called to apologize. Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick and team president Derrick Hall texted their regrets. Josh Rawitch, the head PR man, told Hudson he was going to send out a news release, at which point a deluge of calls came in. He let them kick to voicemail.

Hudson didn't hear from Kevin Towers, his GM. “I was just
sick to my stomach,” Towers said. He didn't know what to say. Neither did Andrew Lowenthal, his agent. He talked about getting a second opinion, about how things were going to be all right. “You've got to tread lightly when someone is in that emotional state and be positive as possible,” Lowenthal said. “I remember hanging up, thinking that's one of the worst phone calls I've ever gotten. I'll never forget my mother calling me at four in the morning to tell me my cousin had committed suicide. I remember that feeling. This phone call, not to compare it to death, but it was probably the second-worst phone call I've ever gotten.”

The worst for Hudson was the first he made that day. Sam and Kris Hudson were sitting in their bedroom. They put the speakerphone on. Hudson couldn't compose himself. He tried to stop crying. Everything hit him during that conversation. The years his parents invested in his career. His rapid ascent to the major leagues, tearing through Low-A and High-A and Double-A and Triple-A, all the way to the major leagues the year after the White Sox drafted him. How he promised to provide for Sara. The contract he turned down. The reality of another year plagued by monotony, chasing this illusion, this mirage, this idea that next time would be different.

“I don't think I can do it again,” Hudson told his father, Sam, who suggested he first talk with Sara before making a rash decision. Hudson had done that, and he said the same thing to her, too, that he couldn't do it. “Take your time,” Sam said.

So he did. He calmed down. The tears dried. He chatted with Sara again. When he was in Jacksonville, Sara said, she felt nervous. She gets that sometimes, this sixth sense that manifests itself in extreme anxiety. This one was about his arm. She didn't want to bother him, so she didn't say anything.

He tried to rationalize it and came to the same conclusion Yogi Young did a long time ago: “They're all gonna break sooner or later.” Hudson's UCL happened to break twice, and he could
not let the mystery of why consume him. His mom was right: He was a baseball player. He wouldn't know what else to do. “Finally I stopped being a pussy and figured it out,” Hudson said. “My dad didn't want me to make a decision now and three months down the road hate myself for it. Because baseball moves on. With or without you.”

Over the next few days, Hudson gathered his life together and readied for another year just like the last. It had been the toughest of his life. This would be tougher. Only three players in major league history had done what he was attempting: return to the major leagues after back-to-back Tommy John surgeries. The first was a relief pitcher named Doug Brocail. He pitched for three years after an angioplasty fixed a 99 percent blockage in a left coronary artery branch. For Brocail, elbow reconstructions were like butterfly stitches. Mike Lincoln, a talented right-handed reliever whose arm bore scars from top to bottom, took almost four years to return to the major leagues from his Tommy John surgeries. The other was a journeyman named Denny Stark. He missed five years and came back for nine forgettable games.

Hudson was younger than they were, better than those guys, except that didn't matter. Plenty of other arms were younger and better, and they couldn't stay healthy, so nobody beyond the kids they faced in high school or those they blew away in the low minor leagues ever bore witness to what could have been. Pitchers who get hurt tend to stay hurt. It's a truth Hudson knew and one he needed to ignore.

He couldn't avoid every fact and figure. Thirteen days after Jacksonville, Hudson flew back across the country, to Pensacola, Florida. There he met Dr. James Andrews, the face of orthopedic surgery whose name to elite athletes conjured up images of the reaper. A visit to Dr. Andrews usually ended with a scar. And nobody in the world sewed up more Tommy John elbows than Jim Andrews.

Almost every patient Andrews cuts gets a pep talk the day before to explain the procedure and ask any questions. While
Andrews usually did most of the talking, Hudson needed some context for what exactly happened to him. He knew the failure-of-return rate of one in six cases. Failure like this, though? Catastrophic, instantaneous failure?

Twenty-seven years earlier, Andrews had created the American Sports Medicine Institute to study things like this. ASMI tried to research everything, though elbows, the body part that made Andrews rich, were a particular point of concern, because he kept seeing kids younger and younger come into his clinic wanting Tommy John surgery. In ASMI's longitudinal study of 1,200 Tommy John patients, just four blew out their new ligament before they returned to pitch in a game.

Hudson wasn't the one in six. He was the one in three hundred, the 0.33 percent, exponentially cursed. He didn't tell people this, because he didn't want anyone to accuse him of using an excuse. The baseball world was rooting for him. Not just the Diamondbacks but the few inside the game who understood the epidemic the sport faced. Hudson would be the test case to show that even after two elbow reconstructions, a pitcher could carve out a long and prosperous career.

The toughest person to convince? Daniel Hudson. He wanted to do this, yes, to prove it to himself and to the world. Only he couldn't escape a question that superglued itself to his psyche. Rarely does Hudson occupy his time trying to answer things he knows he can't. This wasn't some sort of rumination on predestination or an argument against free will. It was how the brain of a broken man responded to the idea that he wouldn't be able to do what he loves for more than two years. It was a dangerous question to ask. It was a vital question to ask. And he asked it more than once.

“What if I'm not supposed to throw a pitch again?”

D
ESPERATION CONSUMED DANIEL HUDSON BECAUSE
he remembered every moment of the previous 343 days, all the way back to the beginning of the arduous trip he would need to take once again. Ten days after his first Tommy John surgery, Hudson sat in the passenger's seat of a GMC Sierra that cruised up Interstate 10, his right arm immobilized in a gray contraption that looked more torture device than technological marvel. The truck parked at a medical mall on the outskirts of Phoenix. He was becoming a regular. Earlier in the week, nurses had removed the cast that held his arm in place. Now came the next step: replacing the stitches that held together the skin covering his elbow with Steri-Strips and trading in the iron maiden on his arm—a brace to stabilize it—for something a little less cumbersome.

To the world, Tommy John surgery consists of only two days that matter: the date of the procedure and date of the return. In reality, the days in between matter far more than either. Healing
a broken elbow takes at least a year, time that limps along with loneliness and quiet desperation, monotony and boredom. The physical aspect takes care of itself via a fairly standard protocol. The mental grind is the truer test. It changes a man, even when he's certain it won't.

“I know this has been traumatic,” Dr. Michael Lee said. He was the Diamondbacks' team doctor, a stratum below the name-brand surgeons like Frank Jobe or his protégé, Dr. Lewis Yocum, who had done Hudson's first surgery. Lee's job wasn't to oversee Hudson's rehabilitation so much as to guide him through the early stages and ensure he hit the mundane benchmarks along the way.

“He actually bathed himself today,” Sara Hudson would later marvel. Wherever she went, levity followed. Hudson loosened up around her because her presence demanded it. Sara didn't guide conversations so much as grab them by the arm and wrench them into complicity. Couple that with the fact that she was a registered nurse, and the setting at Lee's office put her at ease, even if it freaked out Hudson.

He hated hospitals. “They just creep me out,” he said. Hudson's mom was a nurse, too, and if ever he needed to pick her up at work, he refused to go inside. They are, of course, the very last place an athlete wants to find himself. Until his first Tommy John surgery, Hudson never even had stitches. Just before the anesthesia knocked him out, Hudson told Yocum that if he wasn't throwing 100 miles per hour upon his return, he wanted his money back. It's easy to think a year down the road before the realities of that year strike. Few things can humble a man who wants his fastball to hit triple digits like sitting on a table and squeezing something called the Eggsercizer.

The first day of rehab started a week after the surgery. No longer was Hudson popping codeine-laced Tylenol; it made him itch. The day-to-day toil would be supervised by Ken Crenshaw, the Diamondbacks' trainer, whom everyone called Crank, and that first session gave Hudson a sense of how wearisome his days
soon would be. Because his elbow was locked into place, almost all of the work focused on the wrists and fingers. Three sets of two minutes clutching the Eggsercizer, a squeezable, egg-shaped, molded polymer that provides resistance. Same with the Digi-Flex, a hand gripper with spring-loaded buttons for each finger to depress. Hudson then spread his hand into a rubberized web with finger-sized holes and stretched it for three seconds at a time, forty reps in all. Thirty more minutes hooked up to an H-Wave stimulation machine—Hudson called it the thumper, because of the force with which it activated his muscles—preceded another twenty with a HIVAMAT, which helps reduce swelling with low-intensity electrostatic pulses.

Visiting Lee was a nice respite from the Eggsercizer, if a bit painful. Hudson removed the elbow brace, and Lee started to slink the stitches out of his arm. “This one's gonna tug,” Lee said. He pulled out a six-inch-long piece. Hudson grimaced. Sara gave him credit for confronting his squeamishness; Hudson didn't once turn away. To distract him, she said: “We need to get you a manicure.” His response: “Never happen.”

She and Hudson grew up near each other in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia and lived on the same floor freshman year at Old Dominion. She could've gone to Virginia Tech, where her father, Jimmy Milley, was an All-American tennis player. She preferred ODU, a school in Norfolk populated by commuters.

Sara instinctually went into nurse mode during Hudson's examinations, tilting her head to get a better perspective. The inside of Hudson's elbow was bruised and school-bus yellow.

“Look how good it looks,” said Jessica Luevano, Lee's medical assistant and point person for Diamondbacks players.

“It doesn't hurt,” Hudson said.

“It's amazing,” Luevano said.

She laid the Steri-Strips across the wound that later would thicken into a hearty scar. Hudson gently slid on a compression sleeve covered with hair from Buckley, his English bulldog whose
tongue hangs out of his mouth like a stray piece of corned beef in an overstuffed sandwich. The old, bulky elbow brace was replaced by a sleek Össur Innovator X, straight from Reykjavik, Iceland.

“This one's awesome,” Hudson said.

“Pretty, too,” Sara said.

This was a proper implement for a million-dollar arm, set to 40 degrees extension and 100 degrees flexion. Over the next five weeks, Crank progressively turned the dial on the elbow a few more degrees, eventually down to a zero-degree straightened arm and the fully flexed 145 degrees. Hudson would ditch the Eggsercizer and other hand tools and focus more on breathing through his abdomen, improving his posture, and building the rotator-cuff muscles around his shoulder blade. He flexed and extended, pronated and supinated, used rubberized resistance tubing and the muscle thumper, received therapy through old-school massage and newfangled Class IV lasers.

This was just the beginning, harrowing for any Tommy John patient and still invigorating. There's optimism in the early stages, enough to keep Hudson looking for little signs. Like the view from the window in Lee's office building. It stared straight into downtown Phoenix, where Chase Field peeked over the skyline, close enough that he could feel it.

S
QUEEZE. RELEASE. SQUEEZE. RELEASE. TODD
Coffey buried his hand into a five-gallon bucket filled with uncooked white rice and let the kernels envelop it. It was thirty-eight days after his second surgery. He knelt on the floor of the Los Angeles Dodgers' spring-training facility, the epicenter of players rehabbing from a variety of injuries, and did what the protocol told him to. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. Release.

If buckets of rice for hand and forearm strengthening were good enough for Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens and Steve Carlton, Coffey wouldn't argue. As retrograde as the exercise seemed,
it beat squeezing and releasing a neon-tinted Eggsercizer. He used buckets of rice after his first surgery, and his new ligament had lasted more than twelve years. “I should do everything the same,” he said. Well, except the part where he exited the hospital with five scars. That was not fun.

“I had to take a shit with my legs straight out,” Coffey said. “You ever tried to take a shit with both legs straight? Try it. And then try being able to wipe left-handed without being able to bend both knees. It was not fun. Shit everywhere. Literally.”

Coffey guffawed not just at the memory but at the ridiculousness of actually sharing the story. Nothing is off-limits with him, nothing too embarrassing. Honesty is his defense mechanism, born of the bullying for being too naive or too fat or too whatever the assholes who razzed him chose to harp on. When Coffey signed and went to rookie ball in Billings, Montana, as a seventeen-year-old country kid who knew no better, a teammate named Eric Cooper said: “If you ever make the big leagues, I'll jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.” Cooper flamed out in Low-A. “I'd love to find him again,” Coffey said, “and tell him to jump.”

All of Coffey's former teammates brim with stories. About his wardrobe filled with paisley Robert Graham button-down shirts. Or the time he forgot to latch the top on his cherry-colored Corvette in Milwaukee and watched it fly off the back of the car, only to recover it the next day, get his Brewers teammates to sign it, and trade it in to a dealership for a new roof and some cash on top of it. Even the one that sounds too ridiculous—Coffey's first wife found a video of him on his cell phone having sex with another woman and soon thereafter became his ex-wife—is indeed true.

Coffey's foibles occasionally revealed themselves publicly. Jennifer went into labor about three weeks early and gave birth to a son, Declan, on October 7. Six days later, a mildly sleep-deprived Coffey jumped on Twitter and blasted out to his followers a political critique that lacked in grammatical dexterity what it made up for in passionate conservatism.

@ToddCoffey60: If Obama had his way I wouldn't be able to talk bad about him I like this country the way it is freedom of speech

@ToddCoffey60: Romney all the way

@ToddCoffey60: I think Romney Ryan should get there turn In the last four years Obama hasn't done anything

@ToddCoffey60: And he's trying to turn us in to a socialism

@ToddCoffey60: World ending anyway December 21, 2012 lol

The Internet being the Internet, Coffey got pilloried within minutes. Rather than cop to it, he went to the tried-and-true excuse of every celebrity whose use of social media has turned regrettable: I was hacked.

@ToddCoffey60: Sorry everyone I let my 14 year old Friends kid use my phone to play a game While I was watching the game and just saw what he tweeted

@ToddCoffey60: My friends, 14 yo kid

On election night, at 11:17 p.m., one minute after Fox declared President Obama the winner, Coffey tweeted: “Where fucked.” He deleted it immediately, softening his blaze of glory.

@ToddCoffey60: Wow big mistake

@ToddCoffey60: 4 more years of this guy, great

@ToddCoffey60: I'm out I'll be back on twitter in 4 years if we can make it 4 more years.

And @ToddCoffey60 was no more. He nuked the account that day, aware that even in the ultraconservative world of baseball, political ramblings of any variety can peeve a team, and he wanted interest from all thirty once his arm healed.

It's why he did the buckets of rice every day, why he did the same flexion-and-extension exercises as Hudson with a far different goal in mind: to remember how to straighten his arm. More than 400 innings in the major leagues after Tommy John surgery had left a permanent bend in Coffey's right arm. Hard as he tried to straighten it, the furthest it would go was 23 degrees before his surgery. Coffey believed getting even a degree or two more in range of motion would provide extra giddy-up on his fastball and better depth on his slider, and maybe even the ability to throw a changeup.

“Hoffy's gonna teach me his,” Coffey said. For two years in Milwaukee, Trevor Hoffman, who retired as baseball's all-time saves leader, had tried to show Coffey the grip for his changeup, considered one of the best in baseball history. It wasn't the typical circle change, held with the hand made into an OK sign, or a split-change, with the index and middle fingers shaped into a V with the ball jammed slightly between them. Hoffman stuffed the ball deep into his palm, with his thumb and ring finger holding it and his index and middle fingers in the air. It imparted a spin similar to his fastball, and with the arm speed on the two pitches the same, the changeup tricked hitters into more than one thousand strikeouts.

This was Coffey: Try something for two years, never get it, and convince himself it's a fait accompli anyway. His optimism was a gift, something he never took for granted. Had he let Eric Cooper's words win—“If you ever make the big leagues, I'll jump off the Golden Gate Bridge”—he wouldn't have logged 461 major league appearances. He might not have any.

It's why when Dr. Neal ElAttrache told him it would be eighteen months until he returned, Coffey scoffed. He respected ElAttrache's opinion, really, but just figured he was going to be wrong like so many others were. “I can't wait to run out of that bullpen next year,” Coffey said. “I want to be back right after the All-Star break. That's my goal. It fluctuates depending on how things go.”

Like Hudson, he had benchmarks to hit and dates to abide by. He wanted to pitch off the mound April 1, throw in a simulated game May 1, hold a showcase for all thirty teams to see how well he was throwing, and then sign in June. A few weeks in the minor leagues to face live batters, and back he'd be, better than ever.

“I wanted to take these few months slow,” said ElAttrache, though he knew better. Coffey sprinted from the bullpen and did parking-lot donuts in his Corvette. Slow was a cuss. He would squeeze and release, squeeze and release, the time between each muscle contraction and his return to the mound a few seconds less.

“Every time the phone rings, when I see his name on it,” ElAttrache said, “I hold my breath.”

I
N 2013,
BASEBALL PROSPECTUS'S
RUSSELL
Carleton looked at more than a dozen variables in trying to answer a simple question: what is the best predictor of arm injuries? It wasn't strikeout rates or walk rates or ERA. Not ground-ball rate or fly-ball rate or line-drive rate. Innings pitched? Nope. Pitches thrown? Not that, either. Age? Two-strike counts? Contact made? No, no, no.

“It's clear,” Carleton wrote, “that the biggest risk factor for injury is previous injury.”

If you've been hurt before, you're far likelier to get hurt again. The general sense among pitchers is that those who reach thirty years old without an arm injury aren't completely insured but far less likely to suffer something catastrophic. Which doesn't preclude first-time injuries from happening, of course; it simply speaks to the double jeopardy pitchers face after they hit the disabled list with an arm injury once. Todd Coffey and Daniel Hudson were living proof of Carleton's conclusion, and others like them lent credence to the idea that injury-proneness is more than the narrative stylings of frustrated fans.