Red Sox’s Hendriks slowly but confidently steps back from Tommy John: ‘I don’t like it’

BOSTON — Liam Hendriks had his pants down as he spoke. His underwear was on, but his uniform reached his knees. He had just thrown his first bullpen of the year last Wednesday, a momentous step forward for any pitcher returning from Tommy John surgery. Yet he stood in the Boston Red Sox clubhouse and refused to treat the event as serious or even noteworthy.

How did his arm feel?

“Connected,” he said.

Was there some extra adrenaline going up a hill?

“Not really,” he replied.

What stood out about the rehabilitation process?

“It’s so boring,” Hendriks said with a straight face.

None of this came across as dismissive. It was played for laughs, a break from the monotony for Hendriks, his teammates and even the assembled reporters. He spoke in front of a full scrum with TV cameras and microphones, all because of a 15-pitch bullpen three hours before the game. Give Hendriks credit for not rolling his eyes. He didn’t travel from Australia, through years of baseball obscurity and rounds of cancer treatments, to celebrate a few pre-game fastballs in the bullpen.

“I don’t know if the trainers love me or want to kill me,” Hendriks said. “Every day is a struggle to tell them to let me do more and to have them try to hold me back in a normal stratosphere.

“Which is stupid.”

He longs for moments of greater significance and is convinced that they will come.

There are numbers that help tell every baseball story, and Hendriks’ career is told through his three All-Star Games, two Reliever of the Year awards and 116 career saves. His backstory is chronicled through the fourteen teams and six Major League organizations that saw him come and go before anyone trusted him with the ninth inning. He is the only graduate of Australia’s Sacred Heart College to ever play in the majors, and he was drafted four times and traded three more before most people had ever heard of him. But here he is, a survivor in more ways than one.

Hendriks’ past twenty months have been dominated by four rounds of chemotherapy, a six-game rehab assignment in the minors weeks later, and his emotional return to the big league last May. He had four good outings in June before Tommy John surgery in August and then heading to free agency.

“Theoretically, I have a new elbow,” Hendriks said this spring. “So I have another 10 (years) in me.”

Now 35 years old, Hendriks is determined to prove himself again. He signed a two-year contract with the Red Sox in part because they promised him two things: they believed he could pitch this season, and they wanted him to spend most of his rehab process with the big league team. So that’s what Hendriks did. On the road, at home, all spring training. He’s not recovering in some fancy, remote facility; he has pitched on the field, sat at his corner locker and joked on the bullpen bench. Cancer treatment kept him away from people for far too long last year. But he doesn’t wallow. He doesn’t ask questions.

GO DEEPER

In the Red Sox trainer’s room with Lucas Giolito and Liam Hendriks

“I’ve never been a big ‘why me’ person,” says Hendriks. “I think it was inevitable that I would have something to do with my elbow. Unfortunately, I’ve had to deal with a lot of other things in the same year, but it is what it is. I can’t change anything. All I can do is come to the park every day with a positive attitude and hopefully bring some of the younger guys over here.”

When Hendriks reported to Red Sox camp, he had been given a target velocity of 60 mph, as in: a pitcher who normally throws a 60 mph fastball should throw about 60 mph when he hits seven months away from Tommy John surgery. But in his early days of spring training — “My surgeon probably won’t be happy about this,” Hendriks said — he was throwing in the mid-70s.

“Not consistent!” Hendriks clarifies. “Consistently low 70s. But it’s still, the jump from where I was the time before was a little too high. … A few times I was a little too focused on the paint. But I’d rather go too far than too little.”

That is the Liam Hendriks experience. Numbers don’t do justice to what he brings on the mound and off the field. He’s a bulging, obscenity-screaming, nonsense-talking wild man, but also a Lego-building, caring and joking teddy bear.

Within these extremes, the cancer diagnosis in December 2022 was a shock. Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Doctors told Hendriks to expect six rounds of chemotherapy. He is proud that he only needed four. He can’t remember the exact date his last round started, only that it was the Chicago White Sox’ home opener, and he would be in their bullpen, not some hospital. He underwent a bone marrow biopsy in late April and began a drug rehabilitation assignment in the first week of May.

His elbow lasted just over a month after that.

The truth is, Hendriks knew his elbow was in trouble long before it snapped. He had first heard of a small tear in his UCL in 2008. He’d thrown for more than a decade without breaking it, but when he staged his return from cancer treatment — after taking a full six months off — he could tell it wasn’t right.

“He didn’t care,” said former White Sox teammate and current Red Sox teammate Lucas Giolito. “A lot of guys would be like, ‘Oh, this hurts,’ and then in the training room or whatever. He said, ‘I’m just going to keep going until it breaks.’”

Have you ever thought about protecting it after going through so much to get back on the mound and a club option looming?

“No. F- no,” Hendriks said. “I don’t like it.”

Hendriks said he has come to believe that he is most prone to injury when he holds back.

“The elbow was gone anyway,” he said. “So I’m not going to sit there and try to rehab for another six weeks and then not come back. If it goes, it goes. If not, then no. I was pretty sure it was already done, but I was hoping maybe it was just a little (bit) of scar tissue, and if that breaks off at the right time, you’ll be fine. It wasn’t that.”

That offseason, the White Sox declined a $15 million club option, making Hendriks a free agent. It is not uncommon for pitchers recovering from Tommy John surgery to sign a two-year contract with the goal of actually contributing in that second year. When Hendriks spoke to interested teams this winter, he made it clear that it was not a negotiation for 2025.

“We have made it very clear that if you come in with that attitude, that is not allowed,” says Hendriks. “There were some teams that reached out and just wiped out from there.”

Hendriks expects to pitch for the Red Sox in August. He signed a two-year deal that guarantees him $10 million but includes a $12 million mutual option through 2026. By the time he signed, Hendriks had started playing catch with his physical therapist, and Hendriks said he was less concerned over his elbow and more. concerned about taking a pitch to a non-baseball player. But Hendriks punched his partner in the chest and the immediate feedback was that Hendriks was not ‘muscular’, meaning he stayed loose and did not tense up. The movement was as natural as ever.

When Hendriks talks about boundaries, he only talks about breaking through them. From Australia to the All-Star Game. From waivers to signing long-term contracts. From stage 4 cancer to a faster than expected recovery. From Tommy John surgery to putting too much power on his fastball in spring training. Now a 15-pitch bullpen and an ironic miniature press conference.

Does the light at the end of a Tommy John tunnel look different from the light at the end of a cancer tunnel?

“Ehh, in my eyes it’s the same,” Hendriks said during spring training. “There is still an end goal. There’s one more goal I need to get back from. It’s just a bit more of a slow process.”

Hendriks does not have a wait-and-see personality, and that is exactly what he has had to do over the past year and a half. He’s determined to throw the ninth. Contact him again when that finally happens.

“It’s not that (the rehabilitation) takes a long time. I can keep it up for a long time,” said Hendriks. ‘I can’t stand slow. And it’s the slowness that really pisses me off.”

(Top photo of Hendriks in May 2024: Maddie Malhotra / Boston Red Sox/Getty Images)