Pavano said he was bruised by the belief among fans, reporters and some teammates that he was not dedicated to his craft. When he reflects on four lost seasons, he said he thought it could have been different if the Yankees’ team doctor, Stuart Hershon, had recommended reconstructive elbow surgery sooner.
Hershon, like other Yankees doctors, is not permitted to speak with the news media.
Pavano shares some of the blame. He said he should have reported his back problems early in the 2005 season, when he made 17 starts through the end of June. Those issues brought about everything else, he says.
“I wish I had been smart enough to just get it right,” Pavano said. “Say something, make sure something was taken care of, instead of just keeping pitching and thinking it was going to get better.”
A daily massage at his apartment helped for a while, Pavano said, but pitching with back pain affected his arm. He went on the disabled list that July, and the Yankees announced that he had right shoulder tendinitis.
He made two rehabilitation starts after a month of rest and was re-evaluated by Hershon and Dr. James Andrews, whom Pavano had known and trusted for years. The new diagnosis was rotator cuff tendinitis and associated pain in the humerus.
“When they reported I had rotator cuff tendinitis, I actually had a stress fracture in my humerus bone,” Pavano said. “It wasn’t rotator cuff tendinitis. It was just misdiagnosed until I got to Dr. Andrews.”
The back pain flared up again the next spring, and it worsened when Pavano tumbled on a fielding play in his only exhibition appearance. The Yankees called it a bruised buttocks, a term they regretted because it came to highlight the absurdity of Pavano’s woes.
Officially, he was still out with shoulder tendinitis. By May, Pavano was back on a minor league mound, but he left a start for Class AA Trenton with elbow discomfort. This, Pavano said, was a pivotal point.
Six years earlier, when Pavano pitched for Montreal, Andrews had removed bone chips from his elbow. He did it again in May 2006, removing a chip the size of a marble. (Pavano kept it as a souvenir, he said, until it turned to mold and dust.) The procedure was a temporary fix. It helped for a while, but when Pavano broke his ribs in a car accident that August, he aggravated the elbow by trying to keep pitching without telling the Yankees about the injury. In hindsight, Pavano said, he could have had Tommy John surgery that summer, but the Yankees did not recommend it to Andrews.
“I think I could have, but we’ll never know,” Pavano said. “He was told not to. He was told to take the bone chips out and rehab it.”
Two starts into the 2007 season, the elbow pain returned, and Pavano insisted on major surgery as the only way to heal everything. It took four doctors — Hershon, Andrews, Lewis Yocum and David Altchek — to find one who agreed definitively. That was Altchek, the Mets’ team doctor.
“They had to go through all that red tape; that’s why I had to go get all these opinions,” Pavano said. “It was crazy. And I had to walk around with my heart in my throat: ‘Are you serious? You’re messing with my career here.’ You think I wanted to have Tommy John surgery? But I knew I needed it and I knew I could come back from it. That’s why I was all for it.”
If all of this is true, then Pavano’s injuries, which were seemingly random and bizarre (bruised buttocks?) were all, in fact, connected. Granted, the ribcage injury was dumb on his part, but the bone chip surgeries were a precursor to Tommy John surgery (Brian Cashman later goes on to say that bone chips are often a sign of ligament problems, which could be corrected by TJ surgery). Pavano also says that if he had gotten the surgery earlier, something he wanted to do, then he could have returned 7 weeks earlier and would have been helping the team this year.
Of course, how much of this is truth and how much of it is embellishment. I mean, the team doctors (like Hershon) aren’t allowed to speak to the media so there’s no medical rebuttal and Brian Cashman tried to offer somewhat of a response, stating that Pavano’s bone chip problems didn’t necessarily mean that he needed TJ surgery (a last resort, so they tried to have him rehab without it). Cashman did defend Pavano though, saying that Pavano’s work ethic has been there, but he just hasn’t been healthy. Kepner’s article could serve as Pavano’s “out”, as he attempts to get a new contract come the offseason (not necessarily from the Yankees, in fact, that probably won’t happen) and make amends with his past.
