DUNEDIN, Fla. — When Matt Shoemaker was right at the finish line of his rehabilitation from ACL surgery, one of the final hurdles he had to clear to objectively prove his recovery was a single-leg Romanian deadlift loaded with his body weight.
That’s 220 pounds of kettlebell, 110 in each hand, which Shoemaker picked up off the floor and balanced while standing on his surgically-repaired left leg, before bending forward at the hips — back flat, shoulders back, core engaged — until he reached parallel and used nothing but his glute, hamstring, and spinal erectors to stand back up. If you think that’s easy, you should try it.
Thing is, Shoemaker had been performing so much single-leg strength work over the prior six months in order to re-condition his knee to stress that it did feel easy. So easy he went back and repped out 230. And then 240. More and more weight than he’d ever lifted with a single leg before.
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“Usually, when you’re healthy and working out, you don’t really do all that much single-leg stuff. Definitely not over such a long period of time. But because of the knee, all we were doing was single-leg stuff,” Shoemaker says. “And I feel such a difference.”
Monday was Shoemaker’s first time back on a mound after suffering an ACL tear early last season. That felt great — full stop. So did how well he threw, as Shoemaker dominated the eight batters he faced, using all four of his pitches. But the most encouraging feeling was how strong his legs were beneath him on the mound.
Shoemaker spent the last year training five, sometimes six days a week at a facility in Ann Arbour, Mich., near his off-season home. He performed every leg exercise you can think of under progressively more challenging loads, working his way up to extremely heavy, single-leg work. And Monday, he felt the effects of all that effort beneath him on the mound, not only with his plant leg — the one he had surgery on — but his drive leg, too.
“Going through rehab, you strengthen your lower half so much. And as we all know, as a pitcher, lower half is so important,” Shoemaker says. “With the plant leg, I’m driving. I’m planting good and getting over that knee. Just those little movements. Any little movement you can do non-pitching-wise, you’re getting your body better. And when you get your body better, your pitching’s going to be better, too.”
Trainers will often use an ACL injury as an opportunity to overhaul an athlete’s strength and conditioning holistically. Recovery from the surgery is long and tedious, progressing gradually through very basic movements early on in order to allow the tendon graft — usually taken from the patellar, hamstring, or quadriceps — to take and not risk a rupture. It then takes months to rebuild strength, endurance, and coordination in the leg. It’s a grind.
So, if you’re going to have all that time on your hands and be in the gym so often, you might as well work on your entire body. That was the approach Marcus Stroman took while recovering at Duke University in 2015, working daily with Nikki Huffman, who would go on to be Toronto’s head trainer before leaving the organization this past off-season. Before she left, Huffman put Shoemaker on a similar program.
Maybe it’s no wonder Shoemaker looked so strong and controlled Monday on the mound. He worked quickly and effortlessly, mowing down three hitters in his first inning on 15 pitches and three more in his second on 10. He allowed a groundball single to lead off his third, before promptly picking the runner off first base. He then reached his pitch count as he got the next batter to strike out — Shoemaker’s fifth in an eight-batter outing — chasing a split-finger fastball.
In all, Shoemaker threw 22 of his 32 pitches for strikes, eight of them swinging. All the usual caveats about spring training results and the quality of opposition at this time of year obviously apply. But so, too, do the caveats about Shoemaker having not been in a game for nearly a year and pitching on a reconstructed knee.
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“I wasn’t surprised, because the guy’s a hard worker. But I expected he might only be so-so,” said Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo. “But everything was sharp. He was painting. His split was good, everything was good. He looked just like he did last year.”
Last year would be the four-and-a-half stellar starts Shoemaker made to begin 2019 after missing almost all of the year prior due to forearm issues. He threw consecutive seven-inning shutouts to begin the season, and was carrying a 1.57 ERA when he tore his ACL during a run-down in his fifth start.
It’s probably unwise to expect Shoemaker to be that dominant this season, but it’s completely reasonable to anticipate he could return to the form he showed earlier in his career before losing multiple seasons due to injury. From 2014 through 2016, Shoemaker put up a 3.80 ERA with strong peripherals (3.77 FIP, 8 K/9, 1.9 BB/9) over 79 outings, staying off the heart of the plate with his four-pitch mix to generate soft contact and turn lineups over.
The elements of his past success were all on display Monday, as he threw each of his four-seam fastball, split-fingered fastball, slider and curveball for strikes. His splitter was particularly effective, as usual, and he maintained the release point on his curveball, staying on top of it which is crucial to his ability to locate the pitch.
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At one point, Shoemaker got a called third strike by freezing a batter with nothing more than a four-seam fastball perfectly located on the outside edge. That’s as good of a sign as any for the 33-year-old right-hander.
“That’s great — it means that you really executed a good pitch, whether it surprised them or caught them off guard or was just well-located,” Shoemaker said. “I love a good away fastball. You locate that thing and the hitter’s like, ‘Oh, that might be a ball.’ But it’s painted away and catches the corner. That’s awesome.”
From here, Shoemaker will continue building up his pitch count towards the season and hopefully, finally, at long last get back into the every-five-days routine of being a major-league starter again. He hasn’t had that since 2016, when his long trip through the injury wilderness began.
To that end, Monday’s outing was a relief. A reassurance. A rejuvenation.
“All of it. It’s all of it. You say any of those words, they all fit,” Shoemaker said. “Most importantly, it’s just really exciting. It’s been a while. You fight through injury, surgery, get back — I’m just so excited to be back out there.”
