This past weekend in Port St. Lucie, MLB.com’s Michael Baron spoke with Mets pitcher Bobby Parnell about the disappointment of last season’s injury, getting over mental hurdles during rehab and working his way back after Tommy John surgery.
Michael Baron: Bobby, how’s the elbow feeling?
Bobby Parnell: It feels good, it feels solid, the surgery went well, the rehab’s gone well, I feel like I’m in a good place right now and I like the direction we’re going.
Michael Baron: You open up as the closer last year and it turned into a real disappointing season quickly. How did you cope mentally with that?
Bobby Parnell: It was a tough hurdle to get over but I kept moving forward, kept trying to stay positive. There’s guys down there who had the same surgery so I was able to talk with them and hang out with them a little bit and continue with the same kind of baseball activities, just not throwing as much so it was definitely a tough hurdle but something that was easily overcome.
Michael Baron: What were some of the initial exercises you do to start rebuilding the joint and the arm strength?
Bobby Parnell: Initially it’s just stretching, trying to get the ligament pliable again and then you go into resistance bands, starting out very light. From there you go into the stabilization program where they’ll try to move your arm around and you try to keep it as still as possible and then from there it’s pretty much just going to weights and do whatever you want.
Michael Baron: When they say ‘okay, it’s time to pick up a baseball and start throwing,” did you have reservations or concerns, was that a big mental hurdle to get over?
Bobby Parnell: Yeah, I mean it was definitely more of a mental hurdle than a physical hurdle but I think by that point they say that your arm’s capable of doing whatever it wants to do but you just have to go out there and have faith in it and faith that the surgery went well and that it’s not gonna happen again so I’d say it was more of a mental hurdle.
Michael Baron: A lot of people forget that you actually had disc fusion surgery at the end of 2013. Could that injury have impacted your elbow injury in one form or another?
Bobby Parnell: I would say so. Usually when you have an injury it compounds if you’re not careful and with my neck surgery I definitely didn’t come into shape, I didn’t make any lies about it but I didn’t come into shape the way I wanted to or the way I usually do and the throwing program wasn’t the best so we got together with the coaches when I got down here and we got on the throwing program and it’s just unfortunate but I think that if I had a better offseason I probably would have been healthy last year but it just wasn’t the case and I just had to get over it and keep going.
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