The Arm (17 page)

Awful, he could've said, because he did. His arm hurt the entire second inning. It was sore on the back side and tight everywhere. It wasn't one pitch. It was all of them. No life on his fastball, no bite on his slider, no action on his changeup. Nothing. Hudson didn't hear anything pop and conditioned himself to deal with pain, so he kept throwing. Inside the dugout, the BayBears' trainer, Kevin Burroughs, saw the look on Hudson's face, nervousness replacing the typical glower. At the first opportunity, he had hustled Hudson into the clubhouse and back to the trainer's room. Burroughs ran a valgus stress test, a three-part examination of Hudson's elbow that hunts for signs of ligament damage. All three came out negative. Usually there's pain, apprehension, wincing, a jumpy arm. Hudson sat silent as a monk while Burroughs dug into his elbow, even though it was throbbing. He had grown used to his arm hurting.

Instead, he told the kid: “Felt OK. Uh. You know. It could've gone a little better than it did. But for the most part, it was pretty good.”

“What was the plan for you tonight?” the kid continued. “Was the plan for you to only go a couple of innings and see how you felt?”

No, he could've said, that was not the plan. The plan was for ninety pitches, not forty-eight. The plan was for six innings, not two. The plan was for this to be a quick layover on his return to the big leagues, where he belonged. The plan was most certainly not for his arm to go dead in his second inning back, to leave him here, on a trainer's table that felt more like a desert island, with the trainer reminding himself not to say what he really thought because Hudson didn't need to hear it.

Instead, Hudson told the kid: “Yeah. Just see how it felt. Play it by ear and go from there.”

“Was the decision to take you out a feel thing on your part,” the kid went on, “or was it your manager coming to you saying, ‘Hey, that's enough'?”

It was me, he could've said, because it felt terrible, on the field and in the trainer's room and by his locker, where he spoke with Sara, explaining what happened, saying he didn't know much. A local newspaper reporter came in and asked the same kinds of questions, and Hudson evaded those as well, which made him feel terrible. He didn't like lying; he just didn't want to explain that his elbow might've blown out again. He wasn't supposed to think that. He couldn't help himself. While the physical scar on his elbow had long ago healed, the emotional one inside him felt fresh as ever.

Instead, Hudson told the kid: “It was probably both.”

“Do you know what the next step for you is in the rehab process?” the kid inquired.

Get drunk, he could've said, because that was the plan. Back in Phoenix, the Diamondbacks were booking Hudson a flight home for the next day. He'd probably get back too late to see Michael Lee, the team physician, so he'd have to wait another day for that. And even if Lee's tests found no more than Burroughs's did, Hudson would probably still hop into an MRI tube to rule out
ligament damage. The wait scared him, and if that meant passing the time with some 7 and 7s, he'd drink.

Instead, Hudson told the kid: “At this point, it's more day by day and how I feel.”

For another minute Hudson prattled on with clichés and non-answers and misdirection. Only his face told the truth, something the scouts could've seen. It was pained and wounded, beaten and defeated. He would know his fate in less than seventy-two hours. Until then, he would wait.

“Daniel,” the kid said, “thanks for your time.”

“Yeah,” Hudson said, “no problem.”

I
N MARCH 2013, THE BASEBALL
card company Topps released its retro-printed Heritage set. Daniel Hudson was card number 149. He recognized the picture. Hat cocked back on his head, left hand unbuttoning his jersey, mouth agape. He sent out a tweet commemorating the occasion.

At least he could laugh at himself. Blowing out an elbow treats baseball players to all sorts of indignities, beginning with the moment it happens. Standing on the mound, the focal point of the forty thousand people in the stadium, and then pacing around because something is wrong. Handing the ball to the manager, knowing you won't pick up another for at least four months. It's pain on top of pain, especially for the pitcher who can suss out the problem. Right after the photographer snapped that picture of Hudson, the Diamondbacks' manager, Kirk Gibson, and the team's training staff arrived at the mound.

“My elbow is fucking done,” Hudson said.

He was right. His UCL was completely torn. Dr. Lewis Yocum, protégé of the originator of Tommy John surgery, fixed it as he had hundreds of others and sent Hudson home with explicit instructions not to do anything with his right arm. He wore a cast and then a restrictive brace and tried to follow every step of
the rehab protocol and pledged to never let his impatience get the best of him, no matter how antsy he got.

Boredom, on the other hand, beat down Hudson. He created a shortstop named “Daniel Hudson” in the video game
MLB 12: The Show
, even though he was in the game already, because it didn't feel right to play as himself when he wasn't actually playing. If Sara happened to be home when Hudson was killing time on his PlayStation, she would wait for it to utter his name in a speedy animatronic lilt—“
DAN-yul HUD-sin
”—before yelling, “
DAN-yul HUD-sin
, take the trash out!” He killed time golfing, the challenge of man against course replacing man against man, the competitive rush of staring down a hitter, knowing nothing in the world would stand between him and an out. It's why he didn't like going to the ballpark; not only did Hudson feel useless, he was jealous of his friends getting to do what he so desperately wanted.

Hudson earned his way to the major leagues. He wasn't much of a prospect until his senior year at Princess Anne, when he grew four inches and his fastball ticked up from 87 to 94. No team drafted him, so he took a partial scholarship to Old Dominion, a half hour crosstown. He was an out-of-shape baseball player who, at his first workout, took about twice as long as his teammates to complete a running drill. “Guys, I can run,” he said. “I'm not a bad runner. I just literally can't move my legs.” They laughed, ran him into shape, and watched him win freshman All-American honors. He entered his junior year as a potential first-round pick until he struggled. Between that and his unique arm action, Hudson's stock fell.

When the White Sox drafted him, Yogi's first report to the team noted “some mechanical flaws and varied arm slots that are very correctable.” Almost every scout pinned a red flag to his report on Hudson because of the arm action. “I have awkward mechanics to begin with,” Hudson said. “Low arm slot. I don't have the greatest-looking delivery. Post-throw it's ugly.” All of which might be worth correcting if he gave much of a damn what others thought.

He didn't, and history vindicated his indifference. Scouts assign
prospects grades on a 20-to-80 scale, with an average of 50. In Great Falls, Yogi had put down a 50 for Hudson, with a future upside of 60—best-case scenario, an occasional All-Star. By 2012, when Hudson was shredding the National League with sixteen victories and a 3.49 ERA, Yogi called his fastball a 70, an elite offering. A pitch that had hovered between 88 and 92 miles per hour upon his signing jumped to the high 90s. Against San Francisco in 2011, Hudson popped a 98 on the stadium gun. When a collector showed up for a random drug test that night, Hudson half-jokingly worried that someone had spiked the new acne cream his dermatologist gave him to take care of some pesky zits.

Losing Hudson tormented Towers. It wasn't just his arm. “He's just a freaking warrior,” Towers said. He knows no higher compliment. Towers built the Diamondbacks after his own image: grit over talent, attitude over aptitude, character over all. In the middle of the Diamondbacks' playoff push in 2011, Hudson threw an absolute stink bomb against Houston, which lit him up for eleven hits in three innings. Gibson walked to the mound, and Hudson started yelling at him: “Why the fuck are you taking me out of the game?” The Diamondbacks were in the midst of a twenty-five-games-in-twenty-six-days stretch. “Just let me wear it,” Hudson said. “I'll wear it for two more innings.” Gibson laughed. As a player, he'd turned managers' hair gray with his own recalcitrance. Good thing Gibson was cue-ball bald, because this was payback.

“If you were to model your staff after a guy for his demeanor, his determination, Daniel would be one of those guys,” Gibson said. “It was a huge blow for us when we lost him. It was huge. He's a unique individual.” During the team's internal meetings when executives projected their roster three years into the future, Towers excitedly penciled in Hudson as part of the 2015 rotation. Hudson couldn't return soon enough; Towers hated his pitching staff. “I'm tired of it,” Towers said. “I hate guys that make excuses. I don't need pussies.”

In late April 2013, Towers and his consigliere Mike Fetters
watched a game inside the Diamondbacks' clubhouse. Over a two-week span, their bullpen would blow the lead in eight games. This was one of them. Hudson, who often spent time during the games doing rehab work, sat with Towers and Fetters to watch the end of the game. He didn't last that long. When the Diamondbacks lost the lead, Hudson yelled, cursed, and showed himself to the exit. He refused to watch any more failure.

“Oh, fuck, Fet,” Towers said. “We've got to get this guy back.”

T
HE CURRENTS LOUNGE INSIDE THE
Hyatt Regency Jacksonville is a paint-by-numbers hotel bar, with a few flat-screen TVs, a menu of mediocre food, and a broad liquor selection to help people forget they're drinking at a hotel bar in Jacksonville. Hudson ordered a drink to wash down his loaded nachos with extra sour cream. He picked it up with his left hand.

“I'm sorry you came down to see only two innings,” he said to me.

What do you say to that? That it's OK? That everything's going to be all right? Bars may be home to more honest words than anywhere, but some truths can wait. Hudson spent the last eleven months thinking about nothing but his arm and how it betrayed him once. Pitchers coming back from Tommy John spend every bit of mental energy convincing themselves to stop worrying it's going to happen again. And here he sat, three hours after an 88-mph fastball, his right arm limp on the bar top, scared it actually might have. He didn't need to talk about that.

Anything else sufficed: the ballgame on one of the TVs, guns made using 3-D printers, music, how his granny back in Virginia gave not a single, solitary damn about what anyone else thought. How much he wanted kids. How he worried he couldn't have them. Every fifteen or twenty minutes the bartender checked in to see if he was good. Hudson said he was. His demeanor said otherwise.

He lived the parts of Tommy John so few understand. The optimism and fear, the strength and weakness, the triumph and failure—all the pieces that constitute its greater reality. Elite athletes traffic in hyperachievement, and Tommy John surgery forces them to quit the pursuit of it cold turkey. It feels Sisyphean until the moment they're back on the mound, the place they're more comfortable than any in the world. Nothing beats a major league mound, a ten-inch-high Kilimanjaro that few get to climb. Nobody in team sports commands a game like the pitcher. He dictates the pace and controls the tempo. A goalie in hockey or soccer can win a game with superior reaction. A pitcher
prevents
action. There is great power in that.

Earlier that day over lunch, Hudson had talked about reclaiming his domain. This was so much more than a minor league game. It validated those days when his arm hurt so badly he was afraid it would fail him again. He never told Sara about the pain. “I didn't want her worrying,” Hudson said. He didn't say anything to his parents or the Diamondbacks' training staff, either. He told only his little brother, Dylan, because he could keep a secret.

It started when he threw breaking balls from the mound for the first time in April 2013. Soreness shot through his forearm and elbow. He knew he should have said something to Ken Crenshaw, the Diamondbacks' athletic trainer, or Brad Arnsberg, the pitching coach the organization had hired especially to nurse him back. Except there was supposed to be soreness, and it would go away, and it did, and when it returned, it was somewhere else, down along the flexor muscles in the forearm, which made him think that was normal as well, even though it hurt not just when he was throwing but when he was simply drying his hair with a towel. And perhaps, even then, the soreness was appropriate. The impossible mystery of the pitching arm was that no one knew for sure what Hudson did to make his arm hurt. At this bar, on his third drink, the night young enough for a few more, he damn sure didn't know himself.

Maybe it was just inflammation or scar tissue or something else. Maybe it would go away with some soft-tissue work using a fascial abrasion tool, a cast-iron implement that hurts like mad when a trainer scrapes it across your skin to loosen muscles and feels like heaven when the muscles comply. Anything but the other maybe.

Seven months earlier, just as he was starting to throw, Hudson had marveled at his good fortune. Not an iota of soreness. Not a single setback. He knew better than to trust that. Beware the pitcher who's free of fear. “That's what I keep telling myself: It's going too well right now,” Hudson said. “Something bad is going to happen, but it hasn't happened yet.”

W
HEN HE WOKE UP THE
next morning, Daniel Hudson's right arm wouldn't move. It was bent at the elbow, 95 or 100 degrees, swollen and hard. He tried to straighten his arm. No luck. He started gathering his belongings from around the room, left arm functional, right cocked like he wanted to salute a commanding officer. Packing took a little longer than usual. Eventually, Hudson's arm loosened up. He tried to keep it moving, though the closer he extended it to zero degrees, the more the previous night's discomfort returned.