SURPRISE, Ariz. — It is early morning in the desert, and there is every reason to be half-asleep right now. Gray skies. Chilly rain. Dog days of spring training.
But inside the Texas Rangers clubhouse, Prince Fielder is wide awake. He rags Mitch Moreland about the day's impending trip to Goodyear to face the Reds. Laughs. Checks on NCAA brackets. Smiles. Sits down to talk about his new lease on life. Smiles some more.
Big, big smiles.
The plate appearances don't yet count. But Fielder, feeling like a new man, is again having fun on a baseball field. And those who know him best cannot wait to see him in action this summer.
"He's going to have a big year this year, I promise," says Colorado Rockies closer LaTroy Hawkins, a teammate of Fielder's in Milwaukee in 2010 and 2011 and a friend ever since. "He's in a good place."
"The energy level he's brought this spring has been infectious," says first-year Rangers manager Jeff Banister. "He's been fun."
Before the hitting becomes for real next month, that's the best barometer of all, perhaps, by which to judge Fielder as he prepares for the most pivotal season of his career.
Almost a year ago, Fielder's prospects felt quite different.
Was he done? At the age of 30?
He pondered this as his milestone birthday approached last May 9. Seriously. Pondered it a lot, as a matter of fact. At the plate, he was deteriorating. With a bat, he wasn't the same. In his head, he was scared.
Pain, like electric shocks, would shoot down his left arm. Then the arm would go numb.
"Yeah, it was getting pretty serious, man," he says. "Obviously, I've played through injuries for a lot of years in a row. But I was like, 'Aw, crap, I've got no power.' I was weak in the hands."
He underwent surgery to fuse the C-5 and C-6 disks in his neck, similar to the procedure that gave NFL quarterback Peyton Manning an athletic rebirth.
Though he played in only 42 games last summer before the surgery (hitting .247/.360/.360 with just three homers and 16 RBI in 178 plate appearances), the time away from the game allowed him to regroup in his personal life. His marriage to Chanel, on the rocks during his last season in Detroit in 2013, again is happy. He has reunited with his father, former major leaguer Cecil Fielder, after years of estrangement.
He declines to speak of any details regarding those two enormous and happy changes in his personal life, other than offering another jumbo smile and saying, "It's cool."
As for the baseball end of things, that's cool again too.
"I really did think I lost my skills when I turned 30 last year," he says of those dark days before doctors finally gave him a specific diagnosis and strategy for a way back.
"Granted, maybe I overreacted. But when you can't do what you're used to doing and what you want to do.... It wasn't just the slump. When you can't hit home runs in batting practice, and I was trying, I was worried."
For a slugger with six consecutive seasons of 30 or more homers until his last summer in Detroit, home runs always had been the least of his worries.
Yet his total declined to 25 in 2013, the lowest count over a full season in his career.
And by last spring, he was frustrated and aching.
It was Sept. 27 when he was cleared to start swinging again after the surgery, and you bet the first steps back were tentative. All sorts of questions, concerns and worries were renting space in Fielder's head.
"It was more my shoulder, because my neck obviously was hurting, but with that nerve causing sharp pain, I had started to hold my shoulder wrong," Fielder says. "That was my fear, if I would get that electric shock feeling or if it would go numb again.
"I definitely was worried at first."
A few swings in, he no longer was quite so tense. Oh, no, it's fine, he thought.
A few more swings. Oh, yeah, it's fine.
So here he is this spring, neck good, shoulder sound. He worked out hard during the winter and looks as slim as he's been in a long time. And he cut his hair. The flamboyant dreadlocks from Milwaukee and Detroit are history.
The other day, he even beat out an infield single and received a standing ovation.
Banister, who spent 29 years in the Pirates organization before the Rangers picked him to succeed Ron Washington over the winter, saw plenty of Fielder in the NL Central—especially in 2010 and 2011 from his vantage point as Pittsburgh's bench coach before Fielder signed a nine-year, $214 million free-agent deal with Detroit before the 2012 season.
Sure, he says, everyone knows about Fielder's ability to homer. But what he remembers most is 2009, when Fielder collected a career-high 141 RBI, and even 2011, when he produced 120 RBI.
"He's an RBI master," Banister says. "He's hunted the RBI, and the home runs have showed up."
That's what the Rangers most want to see out of Fielder, who always was going to be under the spotlight as the son of Cecil and, even more so, with that gaudy price tag hanging from his uniform jersey.
Now, where the rubber meets the road, that part of the story will begin to play out the first time Fielder steps to the plate on Opening Night in Oakland on April 6. Both his on-base and slugging percentages have declined in each of the past four seasons.
Granted, the painful 42 games he played in last summer are not a fair comparison, but the trend line is there nevertheless. The neck surgery ultimately will wind up either as a mitigating factor for the previous couple of years or as another reason for further erosion in this five-time All-Star's game.
"He clearly was dealing with this all of last year, and it's a safe bet to say it probably started in 2013, if not before," Rangers general manager Jon Daniels says. "With that in the back of my mind, my expectation was that I had full confidence he is going to get back to where he was—that's what doctors have said—but given how long it had been, I thought it might take a little time.
"He's probably even ahead of where I expected him to be at this point, how free he is swinging the bat."
Fielder did not pay special attention to Manning during the football season despite knowing that the quarterback went through a similar procedure. Though he quips, "I did realize if he was hit by a 260-pound linebacker after that, the neck can take playing baseball."
And so he is, like a guy making up for lost time.
"He's a grown-up man playing with a kid's heart," Banister says.
"He's in good spirits, he looks healthy and he's having fun," third baseman Adrian Beltre says. "He looks like the Prince we saw playing in Milwaukee and Detroit."
"He and Beltre are going to be the best one-two punch in the league," shortstop Elvis Andrus says.
Even the fact that's in play on this rainy spring morning is cause for celebration. Done at 30? Who knows, maybe Fielder is just getting started.
"Everything is healthy, and I get to play baseball with no worries," says Fielder, who had a consecutive-games-played streak of 547 at the time he went down last May. "You just like playing the game. Results don't matter. They'll come if you're out there.
"Just the fact that you can come out here again and do this for your job, and be in the clubhouse with your second family. That's the part I missed the most."
Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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