Derrick Sylvester couldn’t believe it was happening again.
It was March, his teammates in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization were getting themselves ready for the upcoming season, and Sylvester had to put his glove, cleats and equipment away. The pain in his ribs, an ailment he had battled the season before, was back, as was the shortness of breath from spasming muscles in the area.
It was only days into another crucial season in his attempt to climb baseball’s slippery minor-league ladder, and the Franklin product was already falling behind.
“You get ready in the offseason, ready to throw, and then it was just six straight weeks of I didn’t even touch a baseball and didn’t throw at all,” Sylvester said. “It’s just kind of a fluke, unfortunate thing that you’ve just got to get through.”
It’s taken the spring, but now Sylvester is back. The former Southern New Hampshire University standout is on the verge of a return, ready to pitch in a pair of rehab assignments in the rookie-level Arizona League this week with the goal of being sent out next week to a Dodgers affiliate, where he can resume his rise through the professional ranks.
He’s ready to pitch again, but he won’t look the same doing it. Sylvester, a right-handed reliever, is using a tweaked delivery to diminish the chances of another injury, going from a closed shoulder set-up to one in which he starts with his left shoulder more open to the batter.
So far, he’s confident the new delivery will allow him to stay healthy, all the while pitching well enough to impress the front office personnel who will decide his future.
“I basically had to teach myself a new way of throwing to try to prevent the injury from happening again,” he said. “I was confident coming back that if it was healed, it wasn’t going to bother me anymore, that I’d be able to adapt. I felt strong, I worked really hard to keep my body in the best shape possible.”
A change was necessary after the setback that stalled the 25-year-old’s progress. Sylvester felt the pain in his side in his first outing of the spring, then felt it get worse in his second appearance and still worse in his third. Each time, the symptoms were the same – pain that grew with each pitch and sapped his velocity as his body became less and less capable of handling it, and an inability to breathe comfortably once the pain set in.
Sylvester knew something was wrong, and on March 23, an MRI said as much, confirming a stress fracture to one of the lower ribs on his left side. The break forced the muscles in the area to try to make up for it, causing them to overwork and spasm and resulting in the shortness of breath that set in. The injury itself wasn’t strange, but its location baffled the trainers.
“You sometimes have guys with upper rib injuries on their throwing side, but they had never seen a guy have a stress fracture on the opposite side of his throwing arm, and it’s a bottom rib,” he said. “So it’s kind of a weird injury that doesn’t happen to pitchers or baseball players, really.”
And yet, Sylvester is sure it had already happened to him. The symptoms were identical to the ones he felt last year, when he was promoted from rookie ball, where he compiled a 1.04 ERA in 2014, to the Great Lakes Loons, the Dodgers’ Single-A affiliate. Sylvester got a spot start and pitched well, persuading the Loons to keep him in the rotation, but the pain began to set in immediately after. Unable to maintain the first-inning speed on his fastball, Sylvester struggled before eventually being shut down, finishing the year with a 1-6 record and 5.72 ERA.
He never had the injury confirmed, but knew after getting the March diagnosis what he had gone through – and what the recovery this year would entail.
“A broken rib, there wasn’t much you could do rehab-wise,” he said. “Basically, what my rehab was was trying to stay in the best shape I could pitching-wise, lifting-wise, arm-wise, but without throwing and re-aggravating the injury.”
By June he was throwing bullpen sessions, however, and Sylvester got to work furthering changes to his delivery he instilled last year. He used to have his left shoulder pointed between third and home and pitch from the closed stance, but has opened himself up to where his shoulder is pointed halfway down the first-base line. From there, he drops his glove, picks up his leg and strides toward the plate.
The new delivery takes the torque off of the recovered rib area, and after an adjustment period, Sylvester said he’s fully adapted to it.
“It feels, surprisingly, really comfortable,” he said. “For something that probably looks so unnatural to watch, just because you don’t see guys start open like that, it feels really natural.”
It’s an odd-looking approach – which, Sylvester acknowledged, could be an advantage.
“The hitters even mentioned, ‘It looks like you’re going to start in the windup, but then you just picked up your leg and delivered. If you can have a high leg kick and a low leg kick with that, you’re definitely going to mess with guys,’ ” he said. “Maybe it’s something that’s going to be able to be used as a tool, as another weapon.”
If the rehab stints go well, Sylvester will be on his way to resuming his still-bright baseball future. He said he’s not sure where he’ll be assigned, be it Great Lakes or another affiliate, but he’s not about to approach the season with any apprehension, even after two brushes with injury.
“I’m ready to go. It’s just something that, at this point, you’ve just got to go for,” he said. “You can’t be scared at all that you’re going to get hurt again. You’ve got to leave it all between the lines, because at the end of the day you don’t want to look back and be ‘Oh, I was scared to throw this pitch’ or ‘I was scared to get hurt again.’ ”
There’s an element of risk involved, but Sylvester also said that that’s part of what makes professional baseball exciting.
“You never know what can happen. Every day you can get promoted, or you can get released,” he said. “I can’t make that decision for them. I can just make that decision difficult for them, pitching the best that I can and showing them that I’m healthy, I’m ready to go and I’m coming back better than before, and I’m going to be better than they’ve ever seen me.”
(Drew Bonifant can be reached at 369-3340, abonifant@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @dbonifant.)