MEDICAL MARVEL
Alberta-born Blue Jays farmhand shines for Lugnuts despite missing one of the necessary parts
With your right hand, reach back and touch your left shoulder blade. Feel that lateral ridge of bone? Just below that — this will take a bit of a stretch, but you can do it — you’ll find a slab of muscle. Triangular in shape, it is part of your rotator cuff. That muscle goes to work when you raise your arm above your shoulder.
It’s called the infraspinatus, and it’s particularly useful if you happen to throw baseballs for a living.
Shane Dawson has a dent where hi s infraspinatus should be. Which is a pretty big deal, because Dawson is employed by the Toronto Blue Jays as a left-handed pitcher for their low-Class-A farm club in Lansing, Mich. Remarkably, even without the help of his left infraspinatus, he is Lansing’s best pitcher. Last week he was named to the Midwest League allstar team.
This is not the only remarkable detail in the Shane Dawson narrative. He was born in Fort McMurray, Alta., which produces lots of crude oil but few refined baseball players. When he was 14, he and his family moved to Drayton Valley (pop. 7,000), a 90-minute drive southwest of Edmonton. Oil, forestry and hockey are big in Drayton Valley. Baseball? Not so much.
But Dawson discovered early that he could throw a baseball harder than any other teenager in town — harder, he figured, than most anybody in Alberta. Naturally, he set his sights on the big leagues.
Major-league scouts rarely visit Drayton Valley. But the summer before he entered Grade 12, Dawson thought he was good enough to make Canada’s junior national team. Then, just before the tryouts, he broke his leg.
“So I didn’t get any recognition that year,” he said. “The next year I really came back with something to prove. I went to an MLB scouting camp in Okotoks ( just south of Calgary). I was the last pitcher there and nobody knew who I was. I guess I attracted some scouts’ attention.”
The Blue Jays drafted him in the 17 th round in June 2012. He was 18. And as far as anyone knows, his infraspinatus was in good working order. After high school, Dawson enrolled at the Prairie Baseball Academy (PBA) in Lethbridge, where select players sharpen their baseball skills while attending classes at Lethbridge Community College. When the Jays came calling, PBA coach Todd Hubka sent Dawson off with a message.
“When I got drafted, he said, ‘I’m really happy for you, but I want you going in with the right mindset. In pro ball, you are not going to be the hardest-throwing guy and you have to really focus on commanding the ball,’” Dawson recalled. “So I went into my first pro season with that mindset that I have to be a control guy and a deception guy, not an overpowering guy.”
Dawson, whose fastball tops out at 91, enjoyed some success, posting a 3.05 ERA over his first three pro seasons. But he also showed worrisome signs of wear and tear. That trend peaked in frightening fashion during a start on Aug. 16, 2013, shortly after the Jays promoted him to their short-season club in Vancouver.
“I had no command of the ball, which is out of the ordinary for me, and I pitched really bad,” he said. “After the game, I couldn’t even hold my hand straight. I was shaking, my elbow hurt so bad. That was the first time my arm ever hurt, so I thought I tore my elbow or something.”
After resting for the balance of the regular season, Dawson reported to the Jays’ fall instructional camp in Dunedin, Fla. That’s where doctors discovered the dent.
“When they did my entry physical and looked at my back, there was a huge divot,” he said. “It looked like somebody hit me with a pitching wedge. They were freaking out. I was freaking out.”
In rare cases, athletes excel despite missing pieces. R.A. Dickey was born without a supposedly essential elbow ligament (the one they fix with Tommy John surgery after it tears). Former Jays pitcher Kelvim Escobar lacked a supraspinatus, another rotator-cuff muscle.
Muscles can wither, too. Repeated overhead stress of the shoulder can cause infraspinatus atrophy. It is more common in volleyball players — Dawson played volleyball in high school — than in baseball players, but a 2004 study of 491 majorleague pitchers showed that 10 of them (4 per cent) had suffered “appreciable” atrophy of the infraspinatus. That’s what doctors discovered during Dawson’s 2013 exam, he said.
Whatever the origin of the problem, the other three rotator-cuff muscles are forced into overload to compensate. And as Dawson discovered, the resulting distortion of the kinetic chain puts added stress on the elbow.
Such cases require a delicate balance of specialized conditioning and rest. It took more than a year for Dawson and the Jays’ medical and training staff to find a regimen that allowed him to achieve durability. Doctors don’t believe exercises can revive Dawson’s atrophied muscle, so the focus is on strengthening the remaining shoulder muscles.
Last year at Lansing, arm fatigue forced him to shut down in July, but so far this season, his new program is working. He performs specialized shoulder exercises before and after games, and follows his own routine between starts, making sure to rest when he feels fatigued.
“We’ve worked on a lot of things to find something that really works for me,” he said. “I don’t play catch on the day after a start. If I’m not feeling good, I’ll just not throw my side (session), and I’ll take a lot of extra time to just really feel good. This staff has really been good with helping me find that medium — not too much, not too little.”
In 12 outings, including 10 starts, he has a 3.19 ERA to go with an 8-3 record and 1.11 WHIP. He has not missed a turn.
He says this is the first time he has been able to show the Jays his true potential.
“This is how I can pitch, and I feel like I can pitch at a lot higher levels,” he said. “I feel I have the pitch-ability. I feel like I can learn a lot more. I feel like I have the competitive nature that a lot of teams want.”
Sometimes, however, his competitive nature is a twoedged sword.
Last week, in one of his two sub-par outings this season, Dawson twice charged hard and far off the mound in vain attempts to corral balls that his infielders might have handled. On two other plays he made throwing errors. A series of ground-ball hits in one inning left him barking into his glove as he came off the mound.
“For me, the biggest thing is just keeping my emotions in check,” he said. “I feel like I wear my heart on my sleeve when I go out there, and sometimes it gets me in trouble.”
Sal Fasano, the Jays’ roving pitching co-ordinator, was on hand for Dawson’s frustrating night. The next day he and Dawson had a chat, with Dawson doing most of the listening. Later, senior adviser Rich Miller took him aside and reinforced the message.
“I talked with my coach today and that’s something I really have to work on — communicating with the infielders,” Dawson said. “Because I’m so aggressive off the mound, he feels that sometimes the infielders get a little timid and don’t want to attack the ball as much because they see me going so hard for the ball. Playing within myself is something I really do have to learn, because I do try to overdo a lot of things when I play the game.”
It has always been thus, going back to his baseball, hockey and volleyball days in Alberta, he says. In fact, pitching first appealed to him because the pitcher has an impact on every play.
“I really like that,” he said. “I like having complete control of the game.”
Gradually, however, he is learning that omnipotence is not part of any pitcher’s repertoire, and that trying to make it so can hurt himself and his team.
“Being 21 years old, I have a lot of time to learn how to keep that in check,” he said. “I feel like I’m on a good track right now.”
That track began in Alberta, made a stop in Vancouver and brought him to a picturesque stadium a few blocks from Michigan’s capitol building. The path to Canada’s biggest city will require a few more stops, each brimming with greater challenge.
But Shane Dawson, missing muscle and all, still radiates the same self-assurance that set him on this improbable odyssey back in Drayton Valley.
“My parents always had confidence in me that I could do great things if I put my mind to it,” he said.
There was a huge divot. ... (Doctors) were freaking out. I was freaking out