https://theathletic.com/3479747/2022/08 ... rspective/
Cole Ragans’ journey to the majors was long and winding but full of perspective
It was 2018, near the end of spring training, and Rangers’ 2016 first-round draft pick Cole Ragans and his fiance Tori — both from Tallahassee, Fla. — were excited for the season to begin. Cole was slated to start the season in Hickory, and Tori had family about an hour away. The two were planning their wedding for later that year, and they would have some family nearby to help with the preparations while Cole traveled with the Crawdads during the season. But on March 16, those plans changed when Ragans left an intra-squad game with discomfort in his left elbow.
A couple of days later, the news was announced: Ragans would be undergoing Tommy John surgery.
It was a setback, but not an uncommon one. The destruction of ulnar collateral ligaments has been near the top of the sport’s need-to-solve mysteries for years. It’s never good news, but dozens of pitchers every year find a way to get through the 12- to 18-month recovery process. In fact, in the young couple’s case, there was a silver lining.
“In hindsight, it was kind of nice,” Tori says. “Because I got to spend way more time with him than I would have if we would have been in-season. So it was just a day-by-day thing — we got to eat dinner together every night at a normal time and not at 10 o’clock. So it had its perks, even though it was not the most ideal situation. We persevered through it and it wasn’t terrible, like you would think.”
By May 2019, the process was nearly complete. The couple, who met in high school when Cole was a junior and Tori was a sophomore, were married partway through rehab, though they didn’t get to go home once the season ended — there’s no offseason in rehab. While staying in Arizona full-time, the pitcher spent his between-workout time going to the lake with fellow rehabbers Colin Wiles, Nick Gardewine and Alex Speas, among others.
By May, Ragans was nearing a return to affiliated ball. He and Tori had just bought a house in Tallahassee, assuming they would have a “normal” offseason once the minor-league season ended. The southpaw had one live bullpen left before shipping out. But during that final bullpen, he felt a familiar pain in his pitching elbow.
“I remember him coming home that day and saying, ‘Something’s wrong, something hurts.’ They were sending him to get an MRI,” Tori recalls. “‘I really don’t think this is going to be good. It’s a possibility that I’ve torn it again.’ And I was like, ‘Oh. OK, you know what, whatever happens, happens; there’s nothing we can do to control it. So we’ll just keep grinding it out and figure it out. But we’re not going to freak out yet until we get that information.’ We kind of just sat with it.”
The next day, Ragans sat down with Rangers rehab pitching coordinator Keith Comstock and the rest of the medical staff, who delivered the bad news that Ragans would have to undergo a second Tommy John surgery.
Another lost season. Another 16 months in Arizona.
“It’s not (the same as) a death in the family,” Comstock says. “But it was kinda close to that. That same kind of mournful feeling.”
“There were days where I was like, ‘I hope it works,’” Ragans says. “‘I’m doing all this work, I hope I come back healthy and ready to go.’ It’s always in the back of my mind. But it’s harder when it’s the beginning because you’re in the brace, you can’t really do much. It’s monotonous, you’re doing the same thing. You’re coming in, you’re getting your range of motion, you’re doing your little exercises you can do.”
Knowing the mental toll the second consecutive surgery was having on the young pitcher, Comstock says he gave Ragans the option to hang ’em up.
“We gave him that option,” Comstock says. “And nobody would have held that against him … (But) I didn’t want to use the word ‘retire.’ I’m not a big fan of the word ‘retire’ when you’ve only had a couple of years in baseball. I like to use the word ‘quit’ because he knew he wasn’t a quitter. I knew he would have hated that word — which he did, because it’s just not in his DNA. Had I maybe used the word ‘retire’, I don’t know if that would have eased him into it or not — I doubt it. But I knew the word ‘quit’ would really spur him the other way.”
He didn’t quit. With the help of Tori, and with new fellow rehabbers Mason Englert, Owen White, Jake Latz and A.J. Alexy, he ground out another 16 months of rehab and Comstock played his usual role of psychologist and cheerleader.
“Commie keeps you sane,” Ragans says. “He’s awesome. Whether it’s talking trash to you to get you out of your phone … he’s awesome.”
Ragans is quick to point out that he wasn’t the only one who had to endure the process. Tori also had to find ways to keep herself occupied during the extended stay in Surprise, Ariz.
“There’s a saying that we have lived by, since his injuries,” Tori says. “‘To be content with where our feet are at.‘ It can be so easy in this lifestyle to be looking into the future. For example, with the first TJ, we were like, ‘We just have to get to the end of the first TJ, then the season can start and you can start climbing the ladder again.’ And you just have to stop and pause. And we really did, we leaned on each other, Some days, I would obviously have a breakdown, like, ‘I would love to just be at home for this offseason, spend that time with our family and our friends.’ But you really just have to slow down and be content with where your feet are at. Because you’re setting yourself up for the possibility of something going wrong and being upset with it not going the way you planned.”
Oh, and they bought a dog — a miniature Schnauzer named Marley.
“I mean, a dog can’t talk to you,” Ragans says with a chuckle. “But also when you’re by yourself and you have a dog, it’s still someone that makes you (say) ‘All right, I gotta get up. I gotta take her to the bathroom. I gotta feed her. Make sure she’s good.’”
It was Marley, in fact, that led to a special moment.
After missing the 2018 and 2019 moments to rehab, Ragans also lost any opportunity to return in 2020 when COVID-19 scuttled the minor-league season. (“It actually worked out perfectly,” Tori says. “Because he was missing a season that everyone else was missing, and we got to go home for that … We got to really go home and enjoy our house for once, we hadn’t had that in two years.”) After 45 months out of game action, Ragans returned in May 2021, finally pitching for Hickory. He worked his way up the ranks over the following 15 months, posting a 3.32 ERA in 43 1/3 innings over eight starts with Triple-A Round Rock after a June 14 promotion.
On Aug. 2, the team was in Sugarland, and Cole and Tori were staying in a different hotel since the team hotel wasn’t “pet-friendly” and the couple had Marley in tow. Tori pulled into the players’ parking lot to pick up her husband. Cole called her as he poked his head out of the clubhouse door, in her line of vision.
“I see you,” Tori told him. “I’m parked. I’m good, I’m right here whenever you’re ready.”
“Can you come here for a second?’ Cole asked.
After so many hard conversations and bad news, Tori admits she was scared to learn what was coming next.
“You think about this moment for so long, what it’s going to be like and what your emotions are gonna be like,” Tori says. “I had tears in my eyes but I wasn’t sobbing like I thought it would. I think I was just in complete shock, like, ‘No way. You finally did it. We’re going.’”
On Aug. 4, Ragans made his big-league debut. While he says he was calm once he took the mound, he admits that there were some pregame jitters.
“I picked up like a bottle of water one time and I could see the water shaking,” he laughed after the game. “I was like, ‘Oh boy.’ And then as soon as I got on the field and started doing my stuff, it kind of went away and I just tried to tell myself, ‘Relax, it’s another baseball game. You’ve done this, it’s just on a bigger stage.’”
He went five innings, allowing just one unearned run against the White Sox, working around a bases-loaded jam in the first inning. His composure didn’t come as a surprise to Matt Hagen, whose first game as a manager was in Spokane in 2017 with Ragans on the mound, and who is currently managing in Triple-A Round Rock.
“I look at that kid (from 2017) compared to the young man now,” Hagen says. “And there’s so many similarities, but there are some differences that have come through that perseverance — just a laser-like focus where when things start to go wrong in an inning, they don’t snowball … I have to think that part of the reason is because he’s managed much bigger setbacks and letdowns than a two- or three-running. So yeah, he’s resilient for sure, and that shows up on the mound.”
After the game, Ragans struggled to describe the payoff for the years of hard work.
“I literally don’t even have words to explain,” he began. “All the people that have stuck with me, believed in me, to finally have this day where all the hard work that I’ve put in over the years has finally paid off and I can officially say I’m a big leaguer. It’s unbelievable … Words, I don’t know if I can put it into words. It’s just— to know that all those days where I was sitting in rehab and I was like, ‘Will I make it?’ Watching guys that I got drafted with — same year with different teams, flying up the minor leagues, healthy, all that kind of stuff.”
He paused.
“I just, it’s awesome. It’s awesome.”
He wasn’t the only one for whom it was a special night.
“It was rewarding,” Comstock says. “Probably more so just because I know what he went through, as opposed to watching another rehabber or anybody else I would watch on television. But yeah, I took the time to tape that game because I wanted to watch it in my man cave. I took that time to really enjoy it.”
Tori, likewise, savored the moment. Hopefully, Ragans has a long big-league journey ahead of him, but it will be built on the perseverance forged over three lost years.
“You just have to embrace and be content with where you’re at, and take a moment to stop trying to rush it,” she says. “Enjoy the process and the journey of it all. People kept saying to us after his second TJ, ‘When you make it, this is gonna be an awesome story.’ And now we’re at that point. He’s living his dream.”