Miraculous rise from ashes of injury: Creation tale for the Stroman Empire
NEW YORK— Six months ago, on the day young starting pitcher Marcus Stroman tore his ACL on a back field at the Blue Jays’ spring-training complex and was believed lost for the season, people in and around the team grieved each in their own way.
The player himself broke down and cried, first in front of team trainers and coaches, and later on the phone while speaking with his parents and close friends. Stroman’s teammates tried to immediately put the injury behind them — out of sight, out of mind — as professional athletes are wont to do; Jays’ fans on Twitter staged a public wake for what was to be the budding star’s breakout season.
When Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos got the news, he went for a drive, alone, through the sleepy streets of Dunedin, Fla.
“I don’t throw stuff or yell,” Anthopoulos said.
“I just go for a drive, collect my thoughts. I just did that for probably 30 minutes, had a little moment to myself, got over it and turned the page.”
"Everything I did this past summer, to see that it paid off, I couldn’t be happier." MARCUS STROMAN
Before the season had even begun, he had lost his ace. Anthopoulos knew there was an “outside chance” Stroman could make it back before the end of the season, but it was too long a shot to bank on, so he set about planning the season without him.
Stroman, meanwhile, was already making a plan. After his initial devastation he started to see the possibilities ahead. He read up on ACL injuries and was encouraged by the potential for a September return. No matter how unlikely, he just needed to know it was possible. He also realized he could rehab at Duke University, giving him a chance to finish the degree he had put on hold three years earlier when the Jays drafted him.
What had felt like death mere hours earlier was starting to look like a blessing in disguise.
“I think it went from him being at his lowest point to then him trying to turn all the negatives into positives,” said Aaron Sanchez, Stroman’s closest friend on the team and one of the first people he called in tears after the initial diagnosis.
Accustomed to being counted out for his size — at 5-feet-8, Stroman is among the shortest starting pitchers in baseball history — this was now another opportunity to prove doubters wrong.
“He knew there was nothing he could do about the situation, so there was no reason to pout or to get stuck on being gone,” Sanchez said. “Now it was time for him to work and get back to where he wanted to be.”
Stroman’s once-tragic narrative now reads like a movie script. The Long Island native is — weather permitting — to make his first start of the season Saturday at Yankee Stadium, where he was originally scheduled to be the Jays’ opening-day starter. The symmetry was not lost on the 24year-old right-hander, who said he “got chills” when manager John Gibbons gave him the news earlier this week.
“Everything I did this past summer, to see that it paid off, I couldn’t be happier,” Stroman said.
It is thanks to Stroman’s unrelenting work ethic and hyper-positive outlook — as well as a progressive, data-driven approach to injury rehabilitation — that his improbable comeback has come to fruition.
“I tell you what, man, he’s got a big energy — a big, positive energy,” said Dr. Robert Butler, an orthopedic surgeon and assistant professor at Duke who oversaw Stroman’s rehab.
“As in most things in life when we have an obstacle or a hurdle, a good mindset is a powerful thing. That’s maybe Marcus’s strongest muscle, if I could put it in such a term.”
Even before he could walk, Stroman was trying to keep his arm sharp: throwing from a seated position or working on his pitching grips. He was vowing to be back in September just days after surgery.
When Butler and his team first met Stroman in May, his first question was, “Can I pitch this year?”
“We didn’t tell him yes or no,” Butler said.
Instead they explained the process and the benchmarks he would have to hit to progress to each next step.
They showed him the objective data points they would use to gauge his progress on a daily basis, letting his body be their guide rather than following any general timeline.
“There isn’t a six-month-return-to-pitch ACL protocol,” Butler said, adding later that the data-focused approach allows for a more “individualized” rehabilitation.
That said, typical ACL reconstruction rehab is about nine months, Butler said, so he didn’t expect Stroman to pitch this season. He had never heard of a pitcher tearing the ACL in his landing leg and returning in the same year.
Granted, ACL injuries in baseball are rare. Yovani Gallardo, a pitcher for the Texas Rangers, returned from ACL surgery in 2008 after just four months, but his injury was to his push-off rather than his landing leg, which bears far more weight.
“There wasn’t much history specific to his injury,” Butler said. “But then again, Marcus isn’t a typical human, either.”
Stroman worked out twice a day, six days a week with Butler’s team, which included physiotherapists Nikki Huffman and Jason Shutt. They used heart rate monitors and wearable sensors to track how his body responded to particular exercises, but also more qualitative measurements, such as the pain he may be feeling on a given day.
Along the way, Stroman kept ticking boxes and moving forward.
The rehab was gruelling, but there was never a setback or a low point, Butler said, “because there was never really a still point.”
With the Blue Jays playing as well as they were in the second half of the season, Stroman says he felt an added urgency to return in time for a pennant race.
He handed in his final college assignment — a paper on 17th-century slavery — and then the rehab team put him through a combine-like series of tests.
“Once all those boxes were checked off there was no doubt in my mind at all,” Stroman said.
When he made his first minorleague rehab start this month in Lansing, Mich., Huffman and Shutt drove from North Carolina to watch him pitch.
“I can’t thank them enough,” Stroman said.
He has described his rehab as the most difficult thing he hopes he ever has to do in his life.
“It was extremely intense,” he said. “I can’t put it into words.”
But getting a chance to rejoin his team in time to pitch in a pennant race?
“This,” he said, “is the fun part.”