Second In Command

All-Star Brian Roberts Bounces Back After a Terrifying Elbow Injury

The previous evening, on the infield at Yankee Stadium, Roberts had been badly injured in a grotesque 2nd inning collision at first base with New York outfielder Bubba Crosby. Roberts was trying to cover first after Cosby had bunted the ball. Crosby ran over Roberts’ left arm, dislocating the elbow, tearing the ulna collateral ligament and pronator flexor mass. His left arm hung horrifically askew. Roberts didn’t know, at that moment, if the arm still was attached to the rest of his body.

He immediately was driven to Columbia Presbyterian by ambulance. X-rays were taken, and Roberts spent a “miserable” 90 minutes undergoing an MRI, lying flat on his stomach, his damaged left arm raised painfully above him. The arm then was placed in a half cast, and Roberts was taken to a room for the night. He didn’t sleep much. “It crossed my mind several times,” he says, that his days as a major league baseball player might be over. He also spent time looking back on his baseball career and life up to that point. All sorts of thoughts were swarming about in his head. Sleep was difficult.

He had one visitor that first night at Columbia Presbyterian-Bubba Crosby. The two had been teammates on Team USA while in college, and Crosby was deeply sorry about the harm he had caused to Roberts’ arm.

When Bancells arrived the next morning, Roberts still had no idea what the future might prescribe for him. He had had his finest season as an Oriole and was voted the team’s Most Valuable Player. But when Bancells was at his bedside, Roberts, then 27, had no idea if 2005 would be his last year as a baseball player. In fact, he had no idea of the full extent of his injury at that point. Nor did Bancells.

But Roberts, though in pain and seriously hurt, is not a brooder. So he asked Bancells what he would need to do to rehab so he could play again in 2006.

It was that positive attitude, the contemplation of the future and what Roberts could do to return to the field rather than dwelling on the pain and the unfortunate luck he had had just 14 hours earlier, that gave Bancells hope. “It was a traumatic injury, an acute injury,” Bancells says. “But listening to him in the hospital that morning, asking about what he could do to play again, the more I became confident that Brian could meet Opening Day 2006 as a target.”

Over the ensuing five months Roberts himself did not always share that early confidence of Bancells. The second baseman had good days and bad days, ups and downs, hopes and doubts, optimism and pessimism. He underwent surgery in Cincinnati 10 days after the collision with Crosby. He returned to his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, where for five weeks he could not even dress himself or take care of basic household chores.

He went through months of physical therapy, never picking up a baseball bat, never knowing when-or if-he would be able swing one in a big league park again. But through intense work, he slowly began to see some light, feel some confidence, get it in his mind that his career was not over.

He arrived at spring training camp in Ft. Lauderdale in mid-February hopeful yet unsure when he would be able to begin playing again. As his teammates headed to the batting cage to take their whacks at the ball, Roberts had to watch. Bancells and others wanted Roberts to go slowly. The surgery on his arm, performed by Dr. Timothy E. Kremchek, an orthopedist and the Cincinnati Reds’ medical director, had been successful. But there still was no guarantee that Roberts would be ready for Opening Day.

Still, even being at spring training was considered a blessing by Roberts, not just because he was able to be with his teammates and around baseball again, with the goal of being ready on Opening Day. But because it was the end of his winter of discontent, the most dismal winter of his life. It should have been a joyous winter. Robert had completed the finest season of his baseball career. He had hit .314 with 18 homers, 73 RBIs, and 45 doubles, been elected a starter on the AL All-Star team, and was chosen his team’s MVP. He finished among AL leaders in average, steals, doubles, and on-base percentage. But he had no time to savor those achievements. Instead, he had to attempt to become whole again, both mentally and physically, after the trauma of his collision with Crosby in September.

Except for going to physical therapy sessions every day, where he was driven by his parents, Roberts barely left his Scottsdale home for the first month and a half.

While he says he never was actually depressed over his predicament or his uncertain future, he wasn’t always his usual, amiable self. “There were days when I felt, ’Leave me alone. I just want to sit in my room and think.’ But for the most part, I just focused on what I had to do.”

He also relied on his religious beliefs to help see him through his ordeal. “With my faith,” he says, “there’s a plan, and it happened for a reason. I wanted to be positive. I really didn’t think it was the end.”

Still, thoughts of an unexpectedly truncated career did cross his mind from time to time-despite his attempts to think positively.

But his spirits were buoyed by many other people beyond just his parents. There was his physical therapist, Sue Falsone from Athletes’ Performance, the high-powered strength, conditioning, and endurance program in Arizona where Roberts works out every winter. Falsone accompanied Roberts and his parents to Cincinnati for his surgery and worked out with him daily over the past winter to guide his rehab regimen. Jay Gibbons and his new wife, friends from church, and other professional athletes who worked out at Athletes’ Performance gave him encouragement. “A lot of people kept me going,” he says.

His parents remained with him in Scottsdale until Roberts felt he was able to move about and do things on his own.

“I realize how blessed I was to have family like that,” he says of his mother and father, a long-time college baseball coach in the Carolinas.

At Athletes’ Performance, Roberts was unable to approach with his normal vigor the intensive strengthening and conditioning program that he had engaged in during past winters. For the first six weeks he avoided all strength workouts. He began with baby steps, doing leg work, body weight programs, riding a stationary bike for a few minutes. “It was slow progress,” he says. “It was good to finally break a sweat and make progress,” he adds. “But in the back of my mind, it also was pretty frustrating. It was the toughest winter I’ve ever been through. I am used to being active and coming and going. It was like I was two years old again. I had to be taken care of.”

He tried to keep upbeat, but it wasn’t always easy. There were days when he wondered whether his struggles, the slow pace at which he was recovering and rehabbing, would ever end. He’d go through long periods of frustration. Falsone kept pushing him.

But Roberts still wondered when he would be ready to play again. Would it be April 3, or would it be Sept. 3, essentially meaning a lost season?

Even when he arrived at Ft. Lauderdale, Roberts still had no idea when he would be out on the field again, although he always tried to hope for the best.

Soon after he arrived at spring training, as others were hitting live pitching, Roberts could do no more than hit off a tee. “I knew we had a long ways to go still,” he recalls.

He also had to get used to living in a body that wasn’t its usual self. Instead of arriving at spring training in tip-top share, as he had in the past, he was behind schedule thanks to being incapacitated for so long. “There were days when I was frustrated,” he says of his early days trying to hit a baseball off the tee and then off live pitching on a back field at Ft. Lauderdale. “You know as a professional athlete what your body feels like when it’s good. But for me at times, it just wasn’t right, and that doesn’t feel good.”

The injury itself seemed to be repaired. Roberts talked with Dr. Kremchek regularly. “It was incredible how patient he was, how encouraging he was,” the switch-hitter says of his doctor. There was no real danger of reinjuring the repaired left elbow.

Roberts also spent extra time with hitting coach Terry Crowley, first hitting off a tee and then moving to the cage. He took grounders in the infield. Sometimes his body hurt. Sometimes he felt disappointed at the way he hit the ball. There was soreness in certain parts of the body where the tendons had been reattached and even in his shoulder, because of the different way he had to approach hitting at first. “Some days it felt if it wasn’t one thing, it was another,” he recalls.

Yet even his doubts couldn’t vanquish his excitement at hitting and fielding a baseball again. “I was finally getting to do stuff I hadn’t done,” he explains. “That was encouraging.”

The Orioles were cautious in not rushing Roberts. They weren’t sure if he could make it back in time for Opening Day. They wanted him in the lineup, but they didn’t want to risk pushing him.

“This kid works so hard and never really takes a break,” says manager Sam Perlozzo. “If anybody can be out there on Opening Day, he can.”

The big day for Roberts was Tuesday, March 21, with 13 days left until Opening Day. On that day Roberts played in his first spring training game.

“It was good, but scary,” he says of contemplating his first appearance in a game since that evening lying disabled on the field at Yankee Stadium. “You can take batting practice and take ground balls, but you can’t simulate a game situation.”

But at the same time, he was exhilarated. “Just to have those butterflies again was kind of nice,” he says of his spring training debut. “But you just don’t know how your body’s going to react until you do it.”

His first time at the plate, he says, was when he was most nervous, even though he knew his elbow was fully repaired. “Just stepping into the batter’s box, I didn’t think a swing was going to blow it out,” says Roberts. “I was more focused on the task at hand.”

Still, he was relieved when the first three pitches he saw were balls. He wasn’t eager to take that first swing. But when he finally did, on a 3-1 pitch from the Mets’ Victor Zambrano, he sent the ball to deep center field. He didn’t get a hit that first game, but he hit the ball sharply all three times he batted.

“It felt great,” he says. “It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for six months ... I was surprised how well I recognized pitches this early.”

But the pivotal moment for Roberts came in the top of the third inning when he had to dive-and fall on his once-incapacitated left elbow-for a ball that had eluded first baseman Javy Lopez.

After he stopped the ball and threw belatedly to home plate to try to catch a Mets’ runner, Roberts got up very slowly. There was a figurative hush emanating from the Orioles’ dugout. Perlozzo admits he would have preferred not to see Roberts make the dive and land on his left side in his first game back.

“It was a little scary,” says Roberts. “I looked up at [right fielder] Jay [Gibbons] to see if I was all right.”

Other than some soreness that likely would have been felt even if he hadn’t hurt his elbow back in September, Roberts was okay.

“In some ways it was really nice to have done it,” he says of the dive. “It’s just like any obstacle you have to overcome for the first time.”

After a half year of overcoming obstacles, Roberts finally felt assured that he was ready to begin the 2006 season on time.

And no one will be happier than Roberts to hear the traditional call of, “Play ball!” on Opening Day 2006.

“If I can run out there on Opening Day, I’ll know it’s a blessing from God,” Roberts acknowledges. “There’s no way I could have believed six months ago that on April 3, I’d be able to run out there with my teammates.”