Andy Musselman
It was April 15, 2005, and everything was going according to plan when sophomore pitcher Jeff Stallings began his normal pre-game stretching and preparations for his ninth start of the season — a road game at Wake Forest.
He felt fine, and to that point in the season Stallings was 5-3 with an ERA of 3.48 — well on his way to a successful year.
But after throwing for a few minutes in the bullpen, he started to throw curve balls, and that’s when the pain shot through his right arm.
“Immediately, I could tell something was up,” he said “My elbow started bothering me. I had a lot of pain in my arm.”
Despite the pain, which persisted through his warm-up, Stallings took the mound and went six innings, allowing just one run on four hits. But after the game, the elbow pain was still there.
To that point in his baseball career Stallings had never experienced any injuries — other than the normal soreness pitchers experience after an outing. So unaware of any serious problem, he continued his preparation for the next start.
However, over the course of the next week, the pain was steady, and the coaches decided to sit him down and let the arm rest. For two weeks he didn’t throw a baseball.
But when he tested the arm after the layoff, he again felt that familiar ache in the elbow. Then after an MRI exam, Stallings got the news that no pitcher ever wants to hear.
“It’s a partial tear of the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow,” the doctor told him. And it was a tear so severe only Tommy John surgery — ligament replacement surgery named after Major League Baseball pitcher Tommy John, who was the first pitcher to have this type of procedure — could repair the damage.
“Tommy John [surgery] is a pitcher’s worst nightmare,” junior pitcher Andrew Brackman said. “Once you have an injury like that, it’s pretty devastating. You don’t know how you’re going to come back.”
For Stallings, though, his concerns weren’t immediately selfish. He was more concerned about the welfare of the team and his responsibility to his teammates.
“It was a big blow to me. But I kind of felt like, after it happened, that not only had I let myself down, but I had let my team down,” Stallings said. “I couldn’t be out there to help them. There was just nothing I could do.”
His season had ended just that quickly, and now all he had in front of him was the uncertainty of surgery and rehab.
The rehab process
After having surgery June 2 of that year, Stallings’ right arm was in a cast for two weeks, and he was unable to use it at all. And after the cast came off, he was still limited in what he could do with the arm that had gotten him this far in baseball.
The rehab process began slowly, as he worked to regain the full range of motion in the arm and then moved on to things as simple as gripping an object — a difficult task for him at the time. From there it was on to the shoulder and finally to throwing a baseball again.
Stallings said as the process went along it became more intense and more physically and mentally taxing.
“Towards the end of the rehab process I was in the training room for an hour and a half to two hours a day,” the redshirt junior right-hander said. “And it was every day.”
With the strain of the rehabilitation workouts and the still-persisting feelings of having let his team down, Stallings said he experienced a roller coaster of emotions throughout the process.
“I had good days and bad days,” he said. “Some days when I started throwing again, I would wonder whether it was healed all the way because I still had pain in my elbow. Then other days I could really let it go.”
Brackman, who lived with Stallings for a summer and was around him through the workouts, said it was easy to see when the rehab was taking its toll on Stallings.
“It was hard for Jeff,” Brackman said. “You could definitely see that the rehab wasn’t easy.”
Along with Brackman, Stallings sought the comfort of a former teammate — Daniel Caldwell, who pitched for N.C. State and suffered the same injury. Stallings said he talked to Caldwell on a number of occasions when he needed reassurance.
“[Caldwell] just told me that it was normal to have good and bad days. And that you just got to throw through it and know that if you keep doing your rehab everything’s going to work out,” Stallings said “That helped out a lot.”
About a year after the surgery, Stallings had his first opportunity to pitch again when he was invited to the Cape Cod League — a college all-star league in Massachusetts.
But the excitement of the opportunity quickly faded as he felt he was overused and decided to leave after a short time.
“They wanted me to throw too much. But I was still early in my rehab process,” he said. “They wanted me to throw every other day, and that was something I wasn’t comfortable with.”
Coach Elliott Avent, who Stallings called when he felt he needed to come home, said he was happy Jeff made the “smart move.”
“It showed his maturity,” Avent said. “A lot of guys would’ve just pitched through it because they were having so much fun and it’s so nice up there. It was a big step for me in seeing Jeff’s maturity.”
Return to the mound
In total, Stallings’ rehab lasted nearly two years as he went 22 months before returning to the mound for the Wolfpack on Feb. 11 of this year against William & Mary. In the game — the Sunday finale of the first series of the season — Stallings showed glimpses of his old self as he went five innings and allowed three runs in picking up the win.
But before the game, he experienced feelings he hadn’t felt in a while.
“I felt like I did before I made my first collegiate start,” Stallings said. “You don’t know what to expect. I hadn’t been out there in quite a while. And I knew a lot of people were ready to see me get back — my parents, the coaches, teammates, fans. But I just didn’t know what to expect.”
In the locker room before the game he actually got emotional because of his nerves.
But for him, dealing with nerves was part of what made his return seem somewhat normal.
“If you don’t get nervous, you’ve got something wrong with you,” he said. “And maybe you don’t belong in the sport. For me, it gives me that high or that adrenaline rush, and it helps.”
Since making that first start, Stallings has appeared in two more games and recently picked up his second win of the season this past Friday. In that game he went six innings and allowed just one run on three hits.
“He pitched as good as I’ve ever seen him,” Avent said of Stallings’ outing Friday. “He commanded three different pitches. He was just outstanding.”
So far this season, Stallings is averaging a strikeout an inning, has an ERA of 2.40 and has only surrendered one base-on-balls in 15 innings of work. Despite his early success, Brackman and Avent are convinced he’s not yet all the way back.
“He’s not the same Jeff — yet,” Brackman said. “He still has a little bit more to go, but he’ll definitely get there before the season is over. And he’ll probably be even better.”