WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Photos of the Washington Monument or plane flights home populated most of his former Nationals teammates’ social media accounts as Aaron Barrett sat in West Palm Beach, two years, seven months and two managers away from the last time he pitched in a major league game.
His fellow relievers Koda Glover and Joaquin Benoit stayed with him there this time, though they can’t exactly commiserate with the 30-year-old right-hander who has spent more time rehabbing his arm than any man should. Glover is frustrated he hasn’t been healthy since last season.
Barrett hasn’t been healthy in almost three years, watching his prime slide away into injuries he just can’t help. He hopes they are behind him now. He hopes his prime is still in front of him. He could be pitching in minor league games as soon as this summer. If all goes to plan … well, knock on wood.
“Aaron is a rock. He really is. He’s one of the toughest kids — I call him my son in jest, but he truly is,” Nationals pitching coordinator Paul Menhart said. “ … What he’s going through and how far he’s already come is already miraculous.”
Barrett’s saga — and if any baseball injury story defines the saga genre, it is his — began in late 2015, when Barrett began feeling so much pain in his throwing elbow that he could no longer feel his fingers. He appeared in 30 of the Nationals’ first 60 games that season and warmed up in others, a workload no arm is meant to handle, one his simply rejected.
Doctors found bone chips in that elbow and a damaged ulnar collateral ligament, one that required Tommy John surgery to fix, and left him with a jar filled with bone chips so large they could be measured in centimeters, not millimeters. He still has the jar. He once showed it off. Barrett has never been one to try not to think about his injury history. He can’t do much but embrace it.
Not a year after that surgery, when he had finally gotten back on a mound in Viera, Fla., Barrett’s arm snapped — just snapped before his eyes, with a crack so loud it still echoes in the minds of the coaches that were around him when it happened.
“It’s something I wish I could forget,” Menhart said a few weeks ago. But he still can’t forget it.
His doctors said they had never seen an arm look like that, the extent of the damage more believable if it had come from being hit by a car than throwing a baseball. They loaded his arm up with pins and wondered if he would ever throw again. Barrett didn’t let them wonder. He was willing to wait. By late last year, he was throwing again. The Nationals gave him a two-year deal, so he knew he would enter this spring training with a home and a chance.
A week ago, for the first time since the day his arm snapped and his big league career nearly shattered with it, Barrett stepped onto a West Palm Beach mound as a hitter stepped into the box. Menhart asked that no one except the necessary personnel come to watch and moved the session to the back fields instead of the bullpen where the fans could see. He thought things might get emotional. He was right.
When Barrett first started rehabbing from the broken arm, he went to see a special physical therapist to help him throw again without repelling the idea. He could barely lift his arm into throwing position without his brain trying to undermine his body. Each new step in his recovery brought back old memories, and this one did, too.
“About six pitches in, I had a couple flashbacks,” Barrett said. “I said, okay, and tried to put that in the back of my mind. I got through it. But I think just a lot of things were going on.”
Barrett wanted to get hitters out, unable to subdue the instinct to preserve reasonable expectations. When he couldn’t meet those expectations, he got frustrated and stayed that way for a few minutes after the outing. He headed to the dugout to calm down. Instead, he started bawling.
“Uncontrollably,” said Barrett, who became a father since the last time he pitched in a big league game and watched close friends such as Blake Treinen sent elsewhere as the bullpen he used to know turned over entirely.
“I called my wife. She was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know why I’m crying, but I am,’ ” Barrett said. “ … These emotions were coming over me. I didn’t know how to explain them.”
When anyone around the Nationals discusses Barrett, they talk about his attitude, about the positivity he’s shown, about his unwillingness to let the dream die. When talking to Barrett, you feel that attitude and understand why he believes there’s some destiny involved.
One night in early October last year, he and his wife were sitting on the couch, watching anxiously as the Nationals trailed Game 2 of the National League Division Series to the Chicago Cubs. Then Bryce Harper hit a monstrous game-tying homer, which sent the Barretts into a frenzy. An hour later, they were speeding to the hospital, where their first child, a girl, was born.
“If I had been healthy,” Barrett said, “I would have been at the game and I would have missed the birth.”
Because when 2015 began, Barrett was an integral part of the Nationals bullpen, a man bouncing back from playoff debacle but a staple of late-inning relief. His mid-90s fastball and wipeout slider made him Matt Williams’s most relied-upon option in an unsteady bullpen. Before the fateful outing in which his elbow gave out that season, Barrett struck out 35 batters in 29 1/3 innings pitched over 40 appearances.
No one will put a radar gun on Barrett just yet, not until he builds to regular season intensity, which is a few weeks away, though he did say his change-up has improved dramatically since his pre-surgery days, for reasons he cannot explain. Hitters swung and missed at it last week, and they never used to do that.
Barrett said major league trainer Paul Lessard and General Manager Mike Rizzo came to his first live batting practice session, though he didn’t see them. Both of them congratulated him afterward. Soon, Barrett hopes they will be evaluating him.
“I tell them what I tell everyone,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”
As usual, the Nationals bullpen will be a topic of conversation this season, stronger at the back than ever, yet unproven in middle relief. The old Aaron Barrett would probably have a spot there when healthy. The new Aaron Barrett hopes that by the time this 2018 season is over, he might just have one, too.
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