NEW YORK — Every ballplayer — heck, every man — goes through it at some point.
You comb your hair and you notice it’s thinner than it used to be. The eyes start to wrinkle around the edges, or for J.J. Hardy – who says he’s always had wrinkles around his eyes – there are other telltale signs.
“I started to get these gray hairs here,” he says, tugging on his goatee, seated on a couch in the visitor’s clubhouse of Yankee Stadium, an hour-or-so from yet another pristine Saturday on the diamond. “It’s this patch, this is what shows me. It’s used to be like one here, one there. Now there’s a lot. It’s happening.”
Hardy is 34 years old now, far removed from the Sabino High School baseball player with stars in his eyes, the oldest player in the Orioles dugout. He is in what he describes the “dog days of my career,” and it’s almost October.
The aches are achier. A pulled groin these days feels like what a torn groin used to feel like.
He lets out a sigh.
“I wake up with things, and it’s like what the hell? I didn’t do anything there, and I’m just sore,” he said. “You just grind through it. I feel like my body hasn’t cooperated with me my entire career.”
And you begin to understand just why Hardy keeps plugging away, day after day, year after year.
Up and down
He describes baseball’s daily grind as a roller coaster, but his career can be summed up as such, too. For every rapid incline, there seems to be an even steeper decline to follow.
Hardy was on the verge of making the big leagues in 2004 when he dislocated his left shoulder and tore his labrum, shelving him for the season. He’d make his debut with the Brewers a year later, becoming the 20th Tucsonan to make The Show. Hardy hit .247 with nine homers and 57 RBIs as a rookie. A year later, he collided with Phillies catcher Sal Fasano at the plate, sprained his ankle, couldn’t shake it, and by July he’d require season-ending surgery.
He rebounded in a big way in 2007, hit 26 home runs in 151 games, earned an All-Star nod and came back the next season and hit 24 more homers in 146 games.
In 2009, he slumped in a bad way, batting .229 for the year with only 11 home runs. His middling play earned him a midseason trip back to the minors, a move that, he said, sapped the fun out of the game.
It was then he realized baseball was a business, and he vowed to return with a more serious approach.
After a season in Minnesota with the Twins, his power fell drastically — he hit six home runs with 38 RBIs in 101 games — and the end appeared on the horizon.
On December 9, 2010, Hardy was shipped to Baltimore in a package deal for a collection of also-rans, and not all that much was expected.
Which, of course, is when he delivered the best season of his career, hitting 30 home runs with 80 RBIs for the Orioles, who inked him to a three-year deal.
If the 2011 season was a dream delayed, his 2012 campaign was a dream continued, as he belted 22 more home runs while winning his first Gold Glove award. More importantly, he played a career-high 158 games. He followed that big year up with a 25-homer, 76-RBI season, which included his second All-Star berth, his second Gold Glove and his first Silver Slugger award, and he’d follow with his third straight Gold Glove in 2014.
Then, predictably, the roller coaster zoomed downward once more.
He spent a month on the disabled list to open 2015, plagued by a shoulder injury, but he returned in 2016 feeling better than he’s ever felt. So, of course, on May 1, he fouled a ball off his foot, broke a bone, and missed eight weeks.
A dime-store psychologist might surmise that what keeps him ticking is an aching desire to reclaim the days of glory, and he does not back down from that assessment.
“I know I’m capable of it,” he says of consistent stardom. “If it was two years of really good and then an off-year, that’s not what I felt I’m capable of. Every year that is not as good as 2008, I’m fighting to get back. Maybe that’s what’s pushing me. If every year was like 2008, maybe I wouldn’t have that drive to get back there. But those are the guys, I mean, those are the superstars.”
And now, at 34, come the mysterious aches and pains. At least he used to know where they came from. Now they pop up like a gopher in the infield.
Something special
in Tucson
Mark Hardy laughs — pardon this — at his son’s misfortunes.
“You think he’s got aches and pains, you oughta try them at 66!” he says on Wednesday by phone from Tucson. “I haven’t heard him go, ‘I’m getting old and feeling it.’ But there are the tell-tale signs.”
This is not the life Mark Hardy expected for his son. Not the life he wanted for him, even.
Imagine that? Is there another father in the land who wouldn’t give his right arm for his kid to be a 13-year major league baseball veteran? A two-time All-Star? A three-time Gold Glove winner making $14 million this year? Arguably the best baseball player Tucson has ever produced?
But Mark had a taste of professional sports, and it left him sour. He played two years on the professional tennis circuit, and all the fun he’d expected to have growing up went right out the window. He gave it one last go at the 1979 U.S. Open qualifying, lost, and gave it up.
“It was a miserable experience, but one of the best miserable experiences I ever had,” said Mark Hardy, the longtime tennis pro at the Westin La Paloma resort. “It was all I wanted growing up and then I got there and it wasn’t that fun, and when J.J. was the star through little league, he wasn’t raised to be a professional athlete. We said, ‘this isn’t your goal; you’re trying to enjoy playing ball and move on.’
“But his senior year, you’d look around the stands and there were 20 radar guns aimed at him, and I thought he was gonna get cancer from ’em.”
Mark had an inkling his son was special even earlier.
“My favorite story about J.J.: When I was a kid, little league was the top thing for me. That’s what I lived for. My dad was my coach, and my 12-year-old year, we went 14-0, with 168 runs, 11 against us,” he said. “When J.J. was coming up, my dad was at the end of his life, and he wouldn’t miss a game. Sat in his folding chair for them all. One day I said, ‘How do you think our team would’ve done against these guys?’
“And he said, ‘I think your team would’ve beaten that team badly. He said you didn’t have video games to play, it was all baseball. Your No. 9, 10 guys were better.
“I took it to the next level: ‘Who do you think was better, me or Logan, J.J.’s brother? Logan was a pitcher, too, and he said, ‘I think you might’ve been a little bit better.’ OK, what about Jay?’ and he said, ‘Oh, you were never close to that good.’ That’s when he was 9.”
By high school, J.J. was a full-blown phenom, a three-time all-state selection for the Sabercats, a 2001 All-American after batting .455 with eight home runs and 40 RBIs.
Sixteen years later — a lifetime later, really — he’s leaving tickets at Yankee Stadium will call for his former teammate Guy Welsh, Sabino’s freshman shortstop when Hardy was a senior.
He hasn’t forgotten his old crew, even if he sees them increasingly less often. He regularly talks with former Sabino assistant Mike Hanson.
He even married a Southern Arizona girl. Marana’s Adrienne Acton won two national championships in 2006 and 2007 with the Arizona softball team. Their story got off to an inauspicious start: Hardy didn’t know Acton in Tucson, but after seeing her in the 2007 Women’s College World Series and falling hard, he tried to have the Brewers’ public relations staff get her number from the Arizona athletic director.
The UA said no. J.J.’s cousin John, who played baseball for the Wildcats, knew some softball players and made the soft intro; after speaking by phone for six weeks, J.J. finally worked up the courage to invite Acton to Milwaukee, the first time they’d met.
“She’s pretty special,” he said with a grin. “She knows that when baseball season starts, I’m a different person, because when she played she knew what it took to be as good as she was.”
Learning the ropes
Hardy breaks it down simply.
“For the eight months of the year we’re playing, I feel like I’m a different person than I am the four months we’re off,” he said. “My mindset turns 100 percent baseball. That has to be my mindset. Maybe for some other guys, it doesn’t have to be. But I need it. I’m one of the smallest guys in the clubhouse, the oldest. … This is my 13th season, and I tell myself I’m going to come to the ballpark a little bit later, relax at the hotel. And then I’m here early.
“It’s like, what am I doing? I’ve got like two hours just sitting here. It’s a routine. It’s something I’ve done every year. I feel uncomfortable if I’m here 30 minutes later than usual.”
That routine has won him some respect in the Orioles’ clubhouse.
“He’s a guy who makes you feel comfortable in all aspects of life,” said second-year outfielder Joey Rickard, 25, a former UA standout. “He’s a natural leader, and it’s something you can tell just by how he goes about his business. I watch him daily. He knows what he needs to do every single day and he sticks to it.”
He recalls that early in his career, he had a 2017 J.J. Hardy himself.
“Craig Counsell, 100 percent, was that guy for me,” Hardy said of the 16-year major leaguer, his teammate with Milwaukee and now the Brewers manager. “I watched him go about his business, and when he did say something, it meant more than anyone else.”
If he learned something on field from Counsell, he learned some things off the field from his teammate and best friend, outfielder Corey Hart.
Hart got married when the two played Double-A ball, to a woman with a child. They’d have a few more, and Hardy saw what it was like for Hart to have to bid goodbye to his family for the road. It ate at him, and, Hardy said, left an imprint.
Hardy waited to have children. He and Adrienne welcomed their first in October 2015, a son they named Jay Jax. The initials run deep, it seems.
“It (was either) have kids early and let them come into the locker room and see what dad did, or not have to leave your kid behind for 10 days,” Hardy said. “I think it was the right decision for me.”
If the pain of a phantom shoulder injury hits Hardy hard, the pain of waving goodbye to Adrienne and Jay hits him harder. The pain of a brutal two-game slide or ugly roadtrip is nothing compared to those goodbyes.
On this Saturday, though, the family is up in New York for the series, and all the aching will go away.
“I get to go home and see my little guy, and I’ll forget about this game completely,” he said. “That’s one way I’ve changed. When I was younger, I’d get a nice bite to eat with the guys and have a few drinks. Not anymore. No chance. No chance I’m having a few drinks.”
He has more important things in his life now. And, soon enough, it’ll be all he knows.
“I look forward to the day I’m done and they get the four-month J.J. for 12 months,” he said.
He gets up from the couch at Yankee Stadium. It’s a comfortable seat, and he lets out a little groan as he stands up.
Age. It’ll get you.
