PEORIA, Ariz. – Ryan Anderson isn’t a kid anymore.
He is long past the phase of his life when a strong left arm, unbridled naivete and an overload of confidence made him believe the fast track to the major leagues had a lane just for him.
The Seattle Mariners’ first-round draft pick in 1997 has spent three years trying to perform the simple act of throwing a baseball without pain. Three shoulder operations since the last time he pitched in 2000 have turned a can’t-miss career into total uncertainty.
He is rehabbing again at the Mariners’ spring training complex, unsure where it will take him.
“I think it’s my last chance,” Anderson said, sitting at his locker in the Mariners’ minor league clubhouse. “If this doesn’t work, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to come back again.”
Reality bites when you’re 25 and hoping to remain a baseball player at 26.
Maybe for that reason, Anderson is going about his latest rehabilitation with a diligence that coaches and trainers haven’t seen from the player who didn’t take it this serious when he was younger.
“He looks very good. It’s the best I’ve ever seen him,” said Pat Rice, the Mariners’ minor league pitching coordinator. “But I don’t want to say too much. I’m in the no-jinx mode with him. We’re going to knock on wood every day.”
The plan with Anderson this time is to take his rehab slowly. He is playing catch every other day, throwing at a distance of 75 feet, and doesn’t expect to pitch in a game until at least July.
“We’re not going to be in a big hurry,” Rice said. “Hopefully this one took. The way he has worked, he has allowed this surgery to work better than the others.”
Anderson remains one of the most asked-about players in the organization even though he hasn’t thrown a pitch since July, 2000, with the Class AAA Tacoma Rainiers.
He’s working out in the minor league camp on the far practice fields at the Mariners’ complex, and the autograph-seekers still follow him.
“When he gets off the field, there are fans waiting for him with his card,” said Jim Slaton, a special assignment coach with the Mariners who was Anderson’s pitching coach at Tacoma.
Slaton remembers the day Anderson’s shoulder started bothering him in 2000. The two were playing catch before a game in Las Vegas when Anderson felt something wrong and spiked his first throw into the ground.
“The day before, he had probably the best game he’d thrown all year,” Slaton said. “I thought he had a problem. I didn’t know it was that serious.”
Anderson thought he’d slept on his arm the wrong way and that it would be fine.
“The next day I went to play catch again, and same thing,” Anderson said.
He didn’t pitch again that season and, when it didn’t come around in a winter of rehab, he had rotator cuff surgery on March 6, 2001.
It wiped out that season, but Anderson came back hoping to pitch in 2002 when the labrum in his shoulder let go during spring training. Surgery on the labrum ate up 2002, and when he continued to experience problems, he had another operation that wiped out 2003.
Neither the Mariners nor Anderson are giving up yet, but it’s clear this could be the end just as easily as it could be a new beginning.
“We’re in uncharted territory,” Rice said. “You’ve got to be a pretty special guy to go through it that many times.”
The Mariners took Anderson off the 40-man roster this offseason, a move that exposed him to other teams through the waiver process. While it wasn’t a surprise that nobody grabbed him because of his health, there was talk that the Detroit Tigers were interested.
“I thought I was going to be a Tiger because they were low man on the totem pole,” Anderson said. “I want to be a Mariner but I really wouldn’t care if I was playing anywhere, as long as I’m playing. I don’t care if I’m pitching in the Dominican, Japan, Russia, high school league.”
That mindset is a vast change from the certainty Anderson felt about his major league future when he signed in 1997.
“I knew when I was in high school,” he said.
Anderson never seemed closer than April 2, 2000, when he pitched an exhibition game at Safeco Field and dominated the Philadelphia Phillies.
From there he went to Tacoma and waited for the call.
“I thought that year was my year,” he said.
It was, but for all the wrong reasons. Now Anderson is trying to make it all right.
“I’m an optimist,” he said. “But I’m a realist, too.
“I know the chance of me coming back is a little slimmer because this is the third one. This is baseball. This is what happens. It stinks that it happened to me, but I’ve got to deal with it and go from there.”
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