The Arm (9 page)

L
AKEPOINT SPORTS BRANCHES OUT OVER
127 acres, a sprawling, billion-dollar, mixed-use complex in Emerson, Georgia, about thirty miles north of Atlanta. It boasts soccer fields, lacrosse fields, volleyball courts, a golf course, and sixteen synthetic-turf-covered, scoreboard-equipped, night-lit, full-sized baseball fields. Major league teams are jealous of the place. Perfect Game calls it home.

Every summer, about three weeks after nationals in Fort Myers, Perfect Game holds the WWBA National Championship at LakePoint, the wood-bat tournament that is the glorious fruit of its toil. Never before had Riley Pint attended a Perfect Game event, so scouts knew of him only by reputation. Pint took the mound July 9, 2013, and popped fastballs of 92, 93, 94, 95, and
96 miles per hour. Then he threw a one-knuckle spike curveball that was every bit as good as his fastball. Scouts flocked to sneak a peek. And just like that, after one game, Pint had displaced Anthony Molina as the most exciting pitcher in the class of 2016.

Because he lived and attended high school in suburban Kansas City and never went to Perfect Game events, Pint had spent the previous two years in relative anonymity, even as his fastball hit 90 after his freshman year. Baseball in Kansas is a seasonal endeavor, and rather than spend his winters at indoor baseball facilities, Pint plays basketball. I first met him at a basketball practice at Saint Thomas Aquinas, a private school in Lenexa, Kansas, where he was running circles around his teammates when he wasn't running wind sprints. Pint stands six feet four and weighs 190 pounds, perfectly proportioned for a body that can take on another thirty pounds. He is the argument against specialization, a kid who doesn't touch a baseball once the weather turns.

“My dad is always talking about it,” Pint said. “During the winter, when we're taking three, four months off, he says, ‘You know there are kids in California who still haven't put down a ball.' It's hard to put down a ball for that long, but he tells me we have bigger and better things ahead.”

Pint's father, Neil, pitched in college at Iowa State. Riley inherited his athleticism from his mom, Missy, as well, even if it wasn't evident early on. He still cringes at pictures of him as a twelve-year-old so pudgy that he needed to rub lotion between his thighs daily to prevent chafing. After his freshman year, he grew six inches without shedding a pound, and it was then that Neil realized how he needed to handle his son. He wouldn't be the parent who allowed the pressures of elite youth baseball to stunt his child's development. Don't pay attention to the rankings. Stay away from all but the largest showcases until his senior season. Whereas Molina was the classic travel-ball case, with eleven Perfect Game events before nationals, Pint was a modern anomaly.

“I've always felt like maybe I've erred on the side of being too
cautious,” Neil said. “But I'd rather do that than say, ‘Hey, you blew your kid out.'”

Neil and Missy don't worry about Pint. His grade-point average is a steady 3.5. The most dangerous beverage he drinks is Coke. “I'm trying to stay away from the soda,” Pint conceded. He never got into video games. He enjoys history documentaries. “I just like learning about the past,” Pint said. “My two favorite subjects are the Vietnam War and World War II. It really intrigues me just to listen. I'm a big documentary guy. I've watched an eight-hour documentary on Vietnam in HD on Netflix about three times.” He asks a different girl to every dance because Neil worries that a girlfriend could interfere with school and baseball, his two priorities. “I feel kind of bad sometimes for him,” Neil said. “I'm sure he wants a girlfriend.”

And then the commiseration vanishes, stolen away by the clock that ticks in Neil's head. Every day is one closer to June 2016, one more that Pint's elbow didn't roar, one more on the path to a delightful choice: life-changing money from a Major League Baseball team or a full scholarship to Louisiana State University, which made the offer to Pint after the WWBA tournament. Pint's friends at Aquinas joke with him about it, asking what it's going to feel like to be a millionaire. “I walk away or change the subject,” he said. “It's kind of awkward to talk about.”

As good as Pint's knuckle-curve was at LakePoint, the velocity on his fastball bowled over scouts and inspired a story on the Perfect Game website that all but anointed him. Perfect Game's love affair with velocity is much the same as baseball's in general: total and seemingly unbreakable, even as evidence linking the relationship between velocity and injury mounts. The nearly one-third of major league pitchers who average 93 miles per hour on their fastballs are nearly twice as likely—21.2 percent to 11.2 percent—to end up on the disabled list the next season as a pitcher whose fastball velocity fails to crack 90, according to a study from Jeff Zimmerman of the website
Hardball Times
. For those who
throw 96 mph–plus, the chances of a DL trip the next year jump to 27.7 percent, according to Zimmerman's analysis.

Molina and Pint hit the 96-mile-per-hour mark as sixteen-year-olds, and Pint didn't stop there. Early in his junior season, one fastball against DeSoto High School hit 98. His advisor, Greg Schaum, sat in the stands with his boss, agent Jason Wood, a former college player at Saint Louis University. Wood, mystified that a high school kid could throw like Pint, asked a question as legitimate as it was rhetorical: “When's enough enough?”

The answer for now came by way of Perfect Game. Anthony Molina needed to make room for Riley Pint. He was the new number one in the class of 2016.

I
N MANHATTAN, KANSAS, A TOWN
of just over fifty thousand, word tends to travel fast, and so when Braedyn Woborny's elbow started to hurt, he didn't want to tell anybody, except his girlfriend, who then told her best friend, who told her dad, who tweeted that he hoped the recovery went well, at which point Woborny's friends started texting and asking if he needed Tommy John surgery, and he couldn't lie, so, yeah, he said, he might.

“And then immediately,” said Joni Bunker, Woborny's mother, “we get not on the defensive, but like, ‘We didn't abuse him, we swear.' You feel like you have to go on the defensive, that you're going to be judged. What did you do to him? What did you let people do to him?”

Woborny is not Riley Pint or Anthony Molina. He is my kid, your kid, any kid, a sixteen-year-old sophomore who wears a Manhattan High School hoodie over a T-shirt with the Manhattan Indians logo, a boy who might be good enough to play college ball because he's the rare switch-hitting catcher but never has been to a Perfect Game event. He's got a bit of an arm, too—his throws reach second base in less than two seconds—and it's why he drove two and a half hours on a dank
November 2014 morning to a doctor's office in Blue Springs, Missouri.

While the face of Tommy John surgery today may be Matt Harvey and José Fernández and Stephen Strasburg, cases like Braedyn Woborny better represent the growing elbow epidemic. Every kid playing competitive baseball fears what Woborny heard from his orthopedist in Manhattan, Dr. James McAtee: he needed Tommy John, and there was an opening later in that week, so he should get ready for the procedure. Instead of acquiescing like other kids who see it as a badge of honor, Woborny wanted a second opinion, which Dr. Kevin Witte soon would deliver.

I met Braedyn Woborny, whom everyone calls Brady, at Witte's office with his father, Scott Woborny, his stepfather, Russ Bunker, and Joni, whose face creased into a forced smile as she stared at the paper in front of her. She read the questionnaire aloud for Woborny to answer.

“Pain on a scale of one to ten?” she asked.

“When I'm throwing, it's probably a seven to eight,” he said.

Woborny hadn't thrown much lately following a fall tournament that prompted his first visit to McAtee. Rest and some occasional Aleve took care of everyday pain. The next question tried to pinpoint when the injury happened. Woborny shrugged. Joni didn't know, either. Maybe the tournament. Maybe over the summer. Maybe years ago.

“Every game was a doubleheader as a freshman,” Scott said. “They'd make him catch the whole game, and then he'd pitch the second game.”

“But he wants the ball,” Russ said.

“He's a competitor,” Scott said.

“How do you squelch that, really?” Joni asked. “There's so many good, positive things to that. As a parent, because trust me, we've gone over and over, you're supposed to protect them. And so as parents, what did we not do? Who could've done better? What could we have done different? . . . We live in
Kansas. I mean, you know? It's not like we're in Florida or live in Texas.”

A little before 11:00 a.m., a nurse whisked the family back to a spacious office where Kevin Witte waited. He is one of a growing number of surgeons who, after training with top orthopedists, brought UCL reconstruction to the masses. Joni wanted a pedigreed surgeon to examine Woborny, and Witte's fellowship under Dr. James Andrews qualified.

Witte asked Woborny a few questions to get a better sense of how much he threw, where it hurt, and when the pain started. He nodded along when Woborny copped to pitching one half of a doubleheader and catching the other.

“Before I examine you here, we'll talk about this,” Witte said. “So . . . if you're thinking worst-case scenario, I did look at the MRI. You've got some bony changes in the sublime tubercle, which is the part of the ulna where your ulnar collateral ligament detaches. So it actually looks like something that's been bothering you for a while, because you actually almost pulled off a little bit of bone from where that ligament attaches.”

Before bones ossify, or harden, they are in danger of being torn away by the ligament, which is why full UCL tears are exceedingly rare before fifteen: the bone suffers the force of the elastic energy rather than the ligament. The site of Woborny's injury—the sublime tubercle is one of the three corners to which the triangular UCL attaches—was rare. Usually such injuries, called avulsion fractures, affect the medial epicondyle, the pointy knob of the humerus.

Witte asked Woborny to lie supine on the blue exam table. He started stretching Woborny's shoulder into internal and external rotation. Witte hypothesized his elbow hurt because of poor internal rotation and showed him something called the sleeper stretch, in which he would lie on his side, pull his arm forward, and slowly elongate the muscles in the back of the shoulder.

“You're only sixteen,” Witte said. “It's really young to start doing surgery.”

“I agree,” Joni said. “One hundred percent.”

“I would make you fail conservative treatment first,” Witte said. “I actually just had this conversation with my mentor, Dr. Andrews. He called me the other day, because we had a mutual patient who is a sixteen-year-old kid. [He had] changes on his MRI, and they really wanted to go down there and talk to him. So they went down and talked to him, and [Andrews] called me Monday, he was like, ‘I just can't do it. Sixteen.' Similar situation. ‘If I operated on every sixteen-year-old that came in here with this elbow pain for the first time,' he goes, ‘I'd be operating on everybody.'”

It was settled then. No Tommy John surgery for Woborny, not yet. Witte didn't mention that in a 2002 study published in the
American Journal of Sports Medicine
, six of eight patients with avulsion fractures of the sublime tubercle eventually needed surgery after rehab didn't work. Woborny was still a kid. He didn't need to know that.

“I don't want you throwing for six weeks,” Witte said.

“Done,” Joni whispered.

“Excuse me?” said Witte.

“Done,” she said, louder.

In addition to rest, Witte prescribed a platelet-rich plasma (PRP) treatment, in which he draws blood, spins fifteen milliliters in a centrifuge, extracts about two to three milliliters of pure platelets—growth-factor-heavy cells that help heal damaged tissue—and injects them into the elbow joint. “I can't tell you with any certainty that it actually makes a difference,” Witte admitted, “but I know it's something else, an adjunct you can add to the conservative treatment options.”

As Witte left the room to let them consider how they wanted to proceed, Joni started to tear up.

“Braedyn,” Russ, the stepfather, said, “that was the best news you could possibly—”

“Oh, my God,” Joni said.

“This other guy said we needed surgery,” Scott, the father, said.

As the adults in the room huzzahed, Woborny didn't say anything. There was no sigh of relief, no invocation of a higher power. He would do the stretches and get the PRP. He just wanted to play ball.

W
HEN NEIL PINT INFORMED PERFECT
Game that his son had chosen to skip its most important event of the year in favor of attending its competitor's, in came the reinforcements. Jerry Ford goes to ballparks all the time. He's a scout at heart, a magnate second, leaving the daily management to his son Andy and the two others who formed Perfect Game's original four, Tyson Kimm and Jason Gerst. The number one player in the country does not turn down a spot in the Perfect Game All-American Classic, held every August in Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres. Only that's exactly what Pint had done, and Ford came to Kansas City to convince him otherwise.

The Under Armour All-America game happened to fall on the same weekend, and its organizers had called Neil Pint first. It had poached the top player from Perfect Game once before with Byron Buxton, the number two pick in the 2012 draft, and Neil was an easy sell. His extended family, still in Iowa, could drive to Chicago and watch Riley pitch at Wrigley Field. Almost certainly he would start the game, which the MLB Network would broadcast. Neil said yes almost immediately.