Mauer Feeling Good, Hoping To Move Foward From Concussion
FORT MYERS, Fla. (WCCO) -- The Minnesota Twins beat the Boston Red Sox 7-4 on Wednesday in their first Spring Training game. It's these early games make Spring Training fun for fans, especially those who have traveled from Minnesota to watch their favorite team.
It's also gives them a chance to see what progress the players made in the offseason.
One of the big questions every year is how is Joe Mauer doing? It's especially important this year as he continues recovery from a concussion that forced him to stop playing the position he loved, the one he knew best, catcher. Mauer saw first-hand how a concussion derailed a promising career of a former teammate in Justin Morneau.
Morneau was having an MVP caliber season when he got a concussion taking a hit to the head sliding into second base in Toronto. He hasn't been the same since. Mauer's own concussion issues forced him to move from catcher to first base, and it's also left a bit of a divide between Mauer and management last year.
In a sport dominated by numbers, Joe Mauer has accumulated some very impressive ones over his 12 major league seasons: The three American League batting titles, the six All-Star Game appearances, a league MVP award and the third-highest batting average among active players in the majors.
But at 32 years old, Mauer still has so much to prove to quiet his critics. Mauer's average dipped to a career-low .265 with an alarming 112 strikeouts last season. His concussion symptoms came and went, in particular trying to track the ball better in the daylight.
This spring, he's going to experiment with wearing sunglasses while hitting. The bigger issue is that Mauer withheld health information from the club during some of his struggles last year.
"The eyesight and the sunglasses and so forth, that caught quite a few people off guard including myself," Twins General Manager Terry Ryan said. "I wish Joe would've been up front and brought it to our attention. Now I understand that with concussions you're not going to be 100 percent every day coming off concussions."
"I'm excited about how far I've come along since the concussion," Mauer said. "I'm moving forward and I think that kind of got lost in the last couple weeks. You know I'm not going to lie, it was tough at times, but it wasn't something that I felt they needed to know every single day how I was feeling because it was pretty unpredictable. I try to put that behind me and I'm definitely excited with how far I've come along."