Faces on the Field: A.J. Van Slyke

Even as he threw down his bat and ran to the mound, A.J. Van Slyke thought to himself, "What am I doing?"

It was July 24, 2005.

Van Slyke, the starting first baseman for the New Jersey Cardinals of the short-season New York-Penn League, had homered in his first at-bat of the night against Vermont Expos starter Carlos Martinez.

Now he faced Martinez for a second time, and the first pitch whizzed past his head. The second sailed behind it. And the third plunked him on the arm.

"My dad had always told me that if a pitcher has to throw at you, then you've already beaten him and you don't have anything to prove," said Van Slyke, whose dad Andy was a three-time All-Star and five-time Gold Glove winner over a 14-year Major League career. "It means he doesn't want to pitch to you."

Unfortunately for A.J. Van Slyke, he remembered these words of wisdom while he was charging the mound in that fateful third inning.

"I got about halfway out there and I thought to myself, 'What are you doing?,'" he said. "But you can't stop and go back."

Instead, Van Slyke, Martinez and a few of their teammates brawled for a bit. When the dust had cleared, both players had been ejected and Van Slyke felt a searing pain in his right shoulder.

He would be suspended, but those league-imposed missed games would prove to be irrelevant.

Van Slyke suffered a torn rotator cuff and labrum that would end his first pro season, one that had been going very well up to that point.

Drafted in the 23rd round in 2005 out of the University of Kansas, the 6-foot-2, 210-pound first baseman started his career at Johnson City of the Appalachian League, hitting .380 with two homers and 14 RBIs in just 13 games.

He was quickly promoted to New Jersey, where he was batting .343 in nine games, making the transition from outfield to first base, and had already earned a spot in the upcoming New York-Penn League All-Star Game when he went down.

And just like that, the scrappy kid who would be happy playing baseball 365 days a year found himself sidelined for six months.

Now, just over a year later, Van Slyke is back in the New York-Penn League, this time as a State College Spike (the Cardinals' new locale and team name). Once again he is tearing up opposing pitching to the tune of a .318 average in 29 games, and coming off an appearance in the league's All-Star Game last week in Aberdeen.

But this current success did not come easily. Just dealing with the inactivity, let alone the rehab, was a huge revelation for Van Slyke.

"All my injuries to that point had been minor: sprained ankles, broken fingers, stuff that happens on an everyday basis," he said. "But I couldn't pick up a bat for five or six months. The physical rehab was brutal. The mechanical rehab, getting back into playing the game was tough."

But for Van Slyke, the hardest part of all was the mental rehab.

"You lose your confidence, you lose your edge, you lose a lot of things, and I'm really only now just starting to be back to the kind of player I was before it happened," he said.

"When you rehab physically, you have a goal. You know where you're going, you know where you've been. It's black and white," he explained. "But mental rehab is gray. You can't remember what you were like before. It's not something you can recapture in a day."

Van Slyke discovered this when he started the 2006 season with the Cardinals' full-season Class A club at Quad Cities in the Midwest League.

"You can fix your swing and you can fix your body, but your mind is fragile," said Van Slyke, who hit just .223 in 63 games with the Swing, splitting his time between the outfield, first base and DH.

Van Slyke had thought he was ready to make his full-season debut when he broke camp with the Swing in April, but in retrospect he sees that he wasn't.

"I might have been almost ready physically, but my mind definitely wasn't ready to compete at that level yet. And the organization can't see your mind, they can't see if you're timid when you go to the plate. My approach wasn't good, my swing wasn't good."

By mid-July, Van Slyke rejoined the Spikes club with no regrets or bitterness.

"That time in Quad Cities taught me a lot about myself and about learning to fail, because that's really something I'd never done before at any level athletically," he said. "I'd never been anything but the best, so it was hard for me mentally, but this year, hopefully this little journey down here is going to help me in the long run."

The time off gave him a chance to digest everything that had happened in the year since he'd heard his name called in the draft.

It had been a big day in the Van Slyke household. Both A.J. and his younger brother Scott, a high school senior in St. Louis, had been drafted, with Scott going to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 14th round.

Scott, currently playing for the Dodgers' short-season club at Ogden of the Pioneer League, is considered by many to be a five-tool type of talent. A.J. considers himself more of a hard-nosed scrapper, much like his dad.

"My brother is a real laid-back kid who is very competitive, but not on the surface," he said. "I play a lot more like my dad, full-tilt all the time. I would say I'm a lot more like my dad than Scott is, but that Scott has more talent, way more talent than I do. He's got size, power, arm strength and speed. He's got it all. I'm kind of a grinder."

This year, while A.J. has been in Iowa and Pennsylvania and Scott has been in Utah, their dad has been on a journey of his own, as the first base coach for the Detroit Tigers. And while Van Slyke can still call his dad for advice, just as he did when he was a kid, he's also learning that some of the learning has to come through first-hand experience.

"You can only learn certain things by being on the bus, going on the road, playing every day," he said. "He can give me advice and help me out when I'm down, but it's really something I have to control myself."

With the New York-Penn League schedule coming to an end in a few weeks, Van Slyke feels like he's only just getting started. He's keeping his fingers crossed that fall ball or instructional league action will be on the horizon, though he hadn't heard anything officially yet.

"I'd play 365 days a year if they'd let me," he laughed.