Tigers' hopes riding on $105 million knee of Ordonez
Five things to know about the Tigers
LAKELAND, Fla. -- The comeback that has stretched from Chicago to Austria to Lakeland has reached its final stages on the back fields here. Under the warm Florida sun, Magglio Ordonez is running. Start, stop, start again. Now Ordonez is sliding. Through a cloud of dust, this is a test of the Emergency Magglio System.
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| Can Magglio Ordonez (right) make the kind of impact Ivan Rodriguez did in his first season with Detroit? (AP) |
"You know, I wasn't really nervous, but in the back of my mind, doing baseball stuff, running, stopping, sliding, I was a little worried," Ordonez says. "But when I started doing all of my work, I started feeling great and got my confidence back."
It is midday during the most optimistic spring the Tigers have enjoyed in years. Real progress finally came last season, and it appears to be continuing now. The Tigers successfully mined the free-agent market for a second consecutive season, signing Ordonez and closer Troy Percival. There is a direction. They're healthy. And as for one of the most serious questions, manager Alan Trammell says Ordonez likely will see his first action as a Tiger as a designated hitter in a Grapefruit League game Wednesday or Thursday.
In fact, if things continue as they are so far this spring, Ordonez will be right in the middle of the Detroit lineup on opening day, April 4 against Kansas City. Not since Cecil Fielder in the early 1990s have the Tigers had the consistent, dependable, productive cleanup hitter they expect Ordonez to be (Juan Gonzalez in 2000 doesn't count, he only stuck around for one season).
"From the first day, he hasn't missed a beat," Trammell says. "He's been right there with everything we've done. Here's a guy who is experienced, so he doesn't need six weeks to play, or 100 at-bats this spring. I'm sure even if he was 100 percent from the get-go, we'd be spotting him. But I watched him hit today, and it looks like he was tuning it up. He was hitting the ball all over the field."
When Ordonez is on -- and before last summer's injury-ruined season, he had averaged 32 homers and 118 RBI in the previous five seasons -- that's what he does.
But here's how close Ordonez came to perhaps never reaching those numbers again: Early last September, frustrated with Chicago doctors' inability to fix his damaged knee, he left his pregnant wife home in Miami and boarded a plane to Vienna, Austria, alone and nearly desperate.
Already, he had undergone one arthroscopic surgery last June 5 to fix a meniscus tear resulting from an ugly May 19 outfield collision in Cleveland with outfielder Willie Harris. He rehabbed the knee and returned to the field just over a month later. But he was still not right. The knee swelled and, 10 games later, he was disabled again. Doctors found another meniscus tear deep inside of his knee, and he says the deep pain he thought resulted from a bone bruise turned out to be a circulatory problem.
The official diagnosis was bone marrow edema, and when doctors showed him the X-rays, all Ordonez saw was the season disappearing and the calendar pages falling off of the wall as he zoomed toward free agency.
"I went to a couple of different doctors in the United States, and they didn't have any good answers," Ordonez says. "I don't think they wanted to get involved with a high-profile player. One of the doctors with the White Sox knew a guy familiar with these kind of injuries and recommended him to me.
"I set it up myself because I was losing time. We didn't know how long it was going to take, and I needed to heal fast because I was going to be a free agent."
Essentially, according to Ordonez, the process in Austria involved doctors using shock-wave therapy -- something not yet approved in the United States for his type of injury -- to create microfractures in the knee, "to create trauma in the bone and increase the blood flow. Instead of a drill, they created microfractures."
