TORONTO – Toronto Blue Jays second baseman Devon Travis is hoping a quick stint on the 15-day disabled list will eliminate the lingering soreness in his right shoulder that’s plagued him for three weeks and derailed his promising rookie season.
“It’s something we were trying to avoid at all costs,” Travis said of going on the disabled list. “But it’s not something that we wanted to linger on throughout the year. It was the best decision for me and for the team.”
The Blue Jays told Travis Thursday night that he was being placed on the DL — the team called up Munenori Kawasaki in his place — after he missed his fifth consecutive game with the injury. He had a cortisone shot on Thursday to help relieve the inflammation that’s built up in his shoulder, which meant he would have had to miss the next few games anyway while the shot does it’s work.
“We were going a little bit shorthanded. We figured, he’s getting better, but it’s almost a week now anyway. Let’s bring another body up here,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons. “He’s a tough kid. He played through a lot of discomfort. And it affected him. It affected his swing.”
Travis’ numbers had sharply declined in the month of May as he attempted to play through the injury. While he hit .325/.393/.625 in his rookie-of-the-month April, his numbers plummeted to .185/.241/.315 in May. What’s worse is that as Travis played through the injury, which originated in his collarbone, he was causing further damage to his shoulder.
“Anytime it’s your lead shoulder, it can affect you quite a bit. Even more so than the pain, is mentally. The body works in crazy ways and it does things to avoid the pain and I feel like I was cutting off my swing a little bit,” Travis says. “My shoulder just inflamed a little bit. When you get that swelling in there, the pain starts to move further”
The trouble started in Cleveland when a Brandon Moss liner hopped off the grass in shallow right field (Travis was playing in the shift), bounced up and smacked Travis right on the tip of his left collarbone.
“I think on the bench they thought it got me on the chest,” Travis says. “But it got me right on the bone. That crap hurt like you wouldn’t believe.”
He had x-rays and a CAT scan immediately after the game, both of which came back negative for any bone damage. He woke up feeling sore the next day but decided he could play through it. Two weeks later, the pain simply wasn’t going away.
“You start overcompensating for your collarbone hurting and then you start putting extra stress on your shoulder,” Travis says. “I was trying to find ways to swing differently and my body was like, ‘you’re not gonna do that to me.’ In my head, I didn’t think I was doing anything different, but I was.”
Travis watched video of his at-bats and saw himself grimacing after every swing, something he didn’t realize he was doing in-game because his adrenaline level was so high. When he got back to the dugout after an at-bat he felt plenty of pain in his shoulder but it would dissipate with time, especially when he went back out to the field and focused on the game.
Not helping his cause was the fact Travis didn’t make the Blue Jays training staff aware of how much pain he was in.
“I was pretty nicked up but I felt like I could play through it, so I didn’t even really tell anybody,” Travis says. “That’s part of my problem. When things are small at first, for me, inside, I always try to tell myself I can play through it. I don’t need to go into that training room. So, that was a quick little lesson. If something’s bothering me, say something and get it taken care of, before it turns into anything further.”
Travis, just a couple months into his big-league career, can be charmingly naïve about the game and the business of baseball. He’s constantly seeking advice from teammates in the clubhouse — “Guys are probably sick of answering questions from me, I ask so dang many,” Travis says — whether it’s about something as innocuous as the correct time to show up at the ballpark or something that can affect his season like a stint on the disabled list.
“I don’t know how anything works at all. Today I was asking, like, okay, so I’m on the 15-day DL. Does that mean that if I don’t come back right on that 15th day that there’s a new 15 days?” Travis says. “Like, I have no clue what’s going on with all that. So it was nice to hear that I’m already six days into it.”
The Blue Jays theory, according to Gibbons, is that Travis should be ready for a rehab assignment at the end of his 15-days and will return to the major league club shortly after that. For now, he’ll shut down baseball activities and ice his shoulder constantly as the cortisone does its work and hopefully roots out any lingering inflammation in the shoulder.
Travis hates sitting out and can barely stand to watch the game from the dugout. But he’s doing everything he can to stay positive about a situation that could have been much worse if he’d let it linger longer than he did.
“The last couple days have been pretty dark for me,” Travis says. “But there’s just nine more days to go. Nine long ones to go.”
