He sees their names on the news all the time, sees the multi-million dollar and multi-year contracts next to those names and remembers how not so long ago you could get a decent debate going by asking the question: “Who would you rather have on your team in three years, Brett Lawrie or ‘Blank?’”
But the good news is it doesn’t sound as if any of that matters to Lawrie.
Soon, Seattle Mariners third baseman Kyle Seager will put pen to paper on a seven-year, $100-million contract extension. Last spring, Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim signed a six-year, $144.5-million extension. Like Lawrie, those two established themselves as everyday players in 2012 after breaking into the majors in 2011. Bryce Harper’s career started in 2012 when he hit the ground running – literally – at the age of 19, playing in 139 games. He has one year left on a five-year, $9.5-million contract signed out of the draft and then it will be his turn to break the bank.
As for Lawrie? He earned $516,000 this season and will be subject to the vicissitudes of salary arbitration for the first time. That isn’t chump change, but for a guy who pushed a lot of merchandise (his jersey was the 20th-best seller in the second half of the 2012 season, just behind Miguel Cabrera) and lit up the game with comparisons to George Brett and Pete Rose, you’d think there might be a sense of opportunity – and money – lost. And with the winter meetings just around the corner, a chance exists that Lawrie might even have to make a position move, to second base, depending on how general manager Alex Anthopoulos addresses his need for an infielder.
“Frustrating? Not for me – I mean, I can only do what I can do,” Lawrie said Thursday, in a telephone interview from his off-season home in Arizona. “Seager and Trout have had some good luck on their side, in terms of staying healthy. I know if I could do that – if I could just play 150 or 155 games a year – it could come together for me, too.
“I mean, think about what baseball players say every time we take a day off or miss some time. ‘It takes a couple of pitches to get back to a game mentality, right?’ When you play a lot of games in a row, it helps how you see the ball; it helps how you see the pitchers. I’m like anybody else: I get my best flow when I’m playing all the time.
“Right now,” he added, “right now what I’ve got going for me is positivity.”
Since the four players established themselves as everyday guys, their paths have diverged in terms of health. Lawrie has played 302 games since the start of 2012, Harper 357 – he has had his share of health issues – while Trout has played in 453 games, been a three-time all-star and won a Most Valuable Player Award in addition to winning Rookie of the Year. He’s Mickey Mantle. Seager has been on the field for 474 Mariners games and made this year’s All-Star Game. Harper was National League Rookie of the Year in 2012 and is a two-time all-star.
Lawrie’s 2014 season ended when he sustained his third oblique strain in as many seasons – three innings after returning to the lineup following a six-week absence due to a broken finger suffered when he was hit by a pitch from the Cincinnati Reds’ Johnny Cueto. In 70 games he hit 12 home runs, nine doubles and posted an OPS of .722, but what was missed most noticeably was his energy.
As he spoke, it was clear that Lawrie isn’t satisfied simply chalking up his injuries to dumb luck. He spoke at length about the fitness routine he is undergoing in Arizona, at the It’s All In The Game Sports Complex that is overseen by former major league pitcher Mike Remlinger. Lawrie raised some eyebrows when he eschewed doing his rehabilitation at the Blue Jays minor league complex in Dunedin, but he claims there was a reason for it.
“I didn’t want to go to Florida, because basically all you do is go from your hotel to your workout and then back to your hotel and then you do it all over again and after a while, it’s tough on your head,” the 24-year-old Lawrie said. “I mean, in Florida every day is the same. You can only walk around the mall so many times before it starts to eat you alive mentally. So I told George [Poulis, the Blue Jays trainer] that I wanted to go another route. It was weird being home when the season was still going on … but it’s kind of helped keep things moving. For me, it’s helped create more positivity to be able to come back to my own house when I’m done.”
Lawrie said that he has developed “a better game plan for the off-season instead of simply going for it.” He has focused on understanding the mechanics of his body, down to how he walks and how his body was compensating for the wear and tear of the Rogers Centre’s artificial turf. Twice, he used a common pejorative in reference to his oblique injury. “I found out that one of the things I was doing was almost shutting down the left side of my body, for example,” Lawrie explained. “Some of the things I was doing … it was like my body was a time-bomb. Working here, I’ve focused a bit more on getting the little things to fire around the big things. I realize that you need to understand your body – down to the littlest movements – to understand how you can get thrown off.
“I’m a tightly-wired guy, in terms of the type of body I have,” the native of Langley, B.C., said. “It’s a matter of doing things to let movements flow a little more freely.”
The Blue Jays will no doubt be heartened by these words, if they in fact reveal a more controlled Lawrie — a more aware Lawrie. And if Lawrie needs a sounding board, he can look to the newest member of the team, catcher Russell Martin, who was lectured repeatedly by veteran Los Angeles Dodgers teammates such as Luis Gonzalez about treating every physical action as if it was the deciding act in the seventh game of the World Series. Gonzalez told Martin one day to stop taking the whole “he plays baseball with a hockey mentality” thing literally. He wasn’t playing hockey. He was squatting, running the bases, hitting and throwing as a major league catcher – in a 162-game schedule. It was a nice narrative, the hockey stuff. Unfortunately, it was also going to kill his career.
If the Blue Jays are smart, they will instruct everybody in the organization to stow the hockey talk whenever questions are asked about Lawrie. The truth is, he needs to be less of a hockey player and more of a baseball player in order to show that while some of his peers may have rocketed past him, the game itself is still within his reach. After all, Lawrie doesn’t just have positivity and good intentions going for him, he has youth on his side, too.