Angels’ Walsh returns with clearer head

First baseman began the season on the IL trying to resolve neurological issues.

Jared Walsh has been waiting for this moment.

The Angels first baseman, who hit pause on his start to the season while trying to sort out what was causing him so much neurological anguish, finally found himself back in the big league lineup for Saturday night’s 6-2 loss to the Minnesota Twins at Angel Stadium.

Walsh drove in the Angels’ first run on a groundout in the fourth inning. He went 0 for 4 and struck out once but played solid defense at first base.

“Yeah, it was good,” Walsh said. “Really exciting. It felt a little foreign at first but as the game went on, got a lot more comfortable.”

Walsh is anticipating playing through rust at the plate and defensively. “It’s definitely a process and hopefully I keep on improving, but [I feel] a lot better than I felt last year,” he said before the game.

Manager Phil Nevin expects the same thing but sees Walsh’s return from the injured list as a big plus.

“We planned on him being our first baseman,” Nevin said. “It just wasn’t that way for the first month and a half . ... We had plenty of guys that worked over there and filled in and did a fine job, but he’s been our guy and we expect him to be. He’s been full go and ready, just as he was if he were to start the season.”

Walsh, for the better part of 1½ years, has had neurological and vestibular issues, such as dizziness, confusion, fatigue, headaches and insomnia.

“There was just kind of a general fogginess,” he said of what playing in a game was like last season. “Trouble fixating my gaze with my eyes ... and then just not really having a great idea of where my body was at in a space.

“Those are all things that

I’ve made a lot of progress in.”Walsh, an All-Star in 2021, played 118 games last season, hitting for the cycle in one Angels win, but his season was cut short after he needed surgery to correct thoracic outlet syndrome.

Walsh started this season on the IL despite having a strong spring training, wanting answers to his health issues. He found a clinic with the help of his mother, Lisa, near the Angels’ triple-A facility in Salt Lake City. There, he found answers. The specialists surmised his symptoms were the result of contracting COVID-19 three times, but they could not conclusively say that was the case.

Almost two months since he first went to that clinic, Walsh’s symptoms have eased significantly. He also has a much better understanding of how to manage them.

“When I knew something was wrong, I’d be walking and, like, bump into a wall,” Walsh said of his symptoms. “I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’ So, just being really clumsy all the time was really scary.”

Walsh explained that he has been using a Leif Therapeutics device, though he did not do so in any of his rehabilitation games. The device straps close to his ribs and measures his heart-rate variability as part of his symptom management.

“If you’re getting to a point where you’re real foggy or I have a headache or I’m feeling really lethargic, it’s usually my heart rate variability is plummeting,” Walsh explained. “So what happens is if you go about breathing the right way, it kind of brightens up a little bit. I guess that’s one of the things that’s been weird to me. I didn’t notice, but throughout all this, my breathing patterns got thrown off in some way.”

At the clinic, Walsh was taught to take two to three minutes to breathe through those moments when his heart-rate variability would go down.

And doctors have continued to be optimistic that one day those symptoms will completely subside.