TIGERS IN LAKELAND: Sheffield 'pain-free'

Subject: TIGERS IN LAKELAND: Sheffield 'pain-free' Tue Feb 12, 2008 9:24 pm

TIGERS IN LAKELAND:
Sheffield 'pain-free'; Zumaya 'on a mission' to return early 100%

February 12, 2008

By JOHN LOWE

FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER

LAKELAND, Fla. — Gary Sheffield gave the best possible answer Tuesday to one of the Tigers’ big questions of spring training.

Sheffield said that he is swinging the bat “pain-free.”

When Sheffield swung at full strength last season, the Tigers were an offensive bulldozer blazing a path back to the playoffs. Then he -- and they -- weren’t the same after he injured his shoulder on the third weekend in July.

Joel Zumaya, like Sheffield, had major surgery last October on his right shoulder. Like Sheffield, Zumaya is among the early arrivals at the Tigers’ spring-training camp, which officially opens Friday.

Unlike Sheffield, Zumaya won’t be ready for the start of the regular season. The right-hander doesn’t even know when he will throw for the first time since the surgery. And he’s working on an emotional rebound, let alone the physical one.

Not long after his surgery, Zumaya said, he cried all night. He did so because he realized a lot of people didn’t believe that he hurt his shoulder the way he said he had: As he helped his family in the San Diego area gather possessions and flee last October’s wildfires, a box fell on his pitching shoulder and devastated the AC joint.

He knew that Internet posters accused him of careless causes of the injury, such as a dirt-biking accident.

When Zumaya quit crying, he wrote a note to himself. In bold letters, it reads:

“I will prove this world wrong.”

The world, he senses, thinks he won’t come back from this injury.

“There’s a lot of doubt about me right now,” Zumaya said Tuesday. “A lot of it. I’ve read it.”

Zumaya has brought his six-word note with him to Florida. He sees it in his bedroom every morning: “I will prove this world wrong.” Before he leaves for the ballpark, he flicks the note with a finger on his pitching hand.

“I’m on a mission,” he said. “Mark my words, I’ll be back, and I’ll be able to do what I’ve been doing.”

Zumaya acknowledges that because of the shoulder surgery, he might never again throw 103 mph. His days of owning the majors’ fastest fastball, the one measured in triple digits, might have been stolen forever by his shoulder damage.

In his next sentence, his defiance rises and he says he might hit triple digits again.

“Might” is a frequent word in talking about Zumaya these days. If he had been healthy, he might have been on course to take over the closer’s job from Todd Jones sometime this season.

“Knowing I had a good chance of being the closer, it was really sickening,” he said of his shoulder injury. “Thank God I have family members who are supportive and kept me going.

“Everything is going good. Everything is going forward. I’ve lost 20 pounds, and I’m getting strong. I was 260 at the end of last year, and now I’m 240. I took it off by working out and eating right -- not eating fast foods.”

Zumaya said he is doing just about everything a pitcher would do in camp, except throw. That’s a bit like a pilot doing everything a pilot would in training, except fly. He doesn’t have any date circled on the calendar for when he might throw next.

“I have no idea -- no one has said anything to me,” he said.

The club continues to hope that Zumaya will pitch again by mid-season.

“I’m not going to rush it,” Zumaya said. “I’m thinking about my future with this team. I want to be good and healthy.”

“Good and healthy” describes Sheffield. He said he’s also throwing well. That opens the possibility he can play the outfield when not in his normal job of D.H.

Sheffield and the club believed his surgery last fall was to “clean up” his shoulder. But the surgeon found additional, unexpected damage: a torn labrum.

“The doctor looked at me after the surgery,” Sheffield said, “and told me, ‘I don’t know how you played with this. You had a lot more damage in there than we anticipated. For you to play like that, I’m just amazed that you even swung the bat.’ ”

Now it’s time to envision the healthy Sheffield in a lineup that has gained Miguel Cabrera and Edgar Renteria. If you take Sheffield’s performance in the 2 1/2 months before his injury, then project it over a full season, he would amass 50 homers and 135 RBIs.

And unlike the shoulders of Sheffield and Zumaya in the last year, production like that won’t hurt at all.