TAMPA — Hours before the Yankees’ spring home opener at George M. Steinbrenner Field, Anthony Rizzo couldn’t stop smiling.
Even as he answered questions about the post-concussion syndrome diagnosis that derailed his 2023 season for the umpteenth time, the first baseman beamed. The Yankees’ lineup had just come out, and it had Rizzo batting fourth.
“It’s been clear for quite some time,” Rizzo told the Daily News of his head before doubling in his first at-bat since Aug. 1. “I feel great.”
We love non-concussed Rizzo pic.twitter.com/ekaE3crY03
— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) February 25, 2024
Rizzo, who also picked up an RBI groundout in the 12-6 win over Toronto, collided with San Diego’s Fernando Tatis Jr. on a pickoff play last May 28 before slumping for two months with undiagnosed concussion symptoms. When the Yankees finally placed him on the injured list on Aug. 3, Rizzo said he experienced “cascading” effects, such as “fogginess” and trouble timing and locating pitches as they approached the strike zone.
Rizzo slashed .172/.271/.225 with just one home run and nine RBI in 46 games after the collision.
Yankees get a strike em out throw em out double play but Rizzo is in a lot of pain pic.twitter.com/ibu6e0myVA
— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) May 28, 2023
“I would have played through it if I could have,” Rizzo said, echoing sentiments that he shared last year. “I wasn’t very productive, so that part’s frustrating. But when you can compete, you want to compete with whatever you have, and that’s how I’ll always be. Obviously, I wanna play at a high level and I was playing very behind the eight ball with being cognitively slower with reaction times. But we only have so much time left in this game. We only have a window in this game for so long, and you earn the respect of your peers and every one of your teammates by playing every day.”
Rizzo said that hasn’t had any issues since the end of last season, and he enjoyed a normal winter.
The 34-year-old is no longer following up with doctors; he hasn’t had a checkup since November. They told him not to worry about symptoms returning due to the type of concussion he had.
Brian Cashman said the Yankees were told the same thing.
“The doctors have told us he’s 100 percent clear [and] that the type of concussion he had, once he’s passed it, will not return,” the general manager said in January, though he noted that brain injuries are always “tricky.”
For Rizzo, reaction and cognitive testing has been an encouraging indicator that he’s back to normal. While he said he never had a baseline to compare to, “I was below what a normal person’s baseline was.” However, results improved with each test.
“The last one I did was just sky-high,” he said. “Compare that with how you feel every day, I kind of just knew it was in my past.”
According to page 273 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, “all players” are to “undergo neurocognitive baseline testing during spring training or when they join a club each season.”
Rizzo said that doctors told him he could have come back at the end of last season at 85-90%. But a setback would have sent him back to “square one” and prevented him from having a normal offseason, so Rizzo and the Yankees proceeded with caution.
Now months removed from his diagnosis, Rizzo’s perspective hasn’t changed much. Players want to stay on the field, and he didn’t feel bad enough to pull himself from the lineup right away.
Rizzo has also said that the Yankees were not at fault for failing to detect his symptoms right away. He and the team have said that proper protocols were followed.
“It’s hard because it’s our livelihood and we want to go out there and play, and you can’t make a livelihood if you’re not playing. The symptoms that I had were normal symptoms that you have throughout a season,” he said before noting that the collision happened right before a cross-country flight to Seattle. “It could have been a perfect storm of going out west, and then you come back, and then you’re tired as well. It was entering the first-half, dog days of June. And then two, three weeks go by and you feel fine, right? It’s not like I didn’t know where I was.”
Rizzo would have changed one thing, though.
While he did talk to a doctor and went through Major League Baseball’s standardized testing after the collision and in the days that followed, he said that he didn’t undergo an Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing (ImPACT) evaluation right away.
Those 20-minute, advanced computerized tests can assess multiple aspects of an athlete’s cognitive state, including verbal and visual memory, brain processing speed and reaction time, according to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The tests alone do not diagnose concussions.
“Maybe that’s the only thing I would have done different, is take the ImPACT test right away,” Rizzo said.
The left-handed hitter went on to say that taking the ImPACT test right away “is the protocol to have.” However, Rizzo stopped short of saying MLB or its teams should have designated concussion spotters, a la the NFL.
“I know [the NFL] has them, but do they really have them?” Rizzo said. “But as far as someone coming and pulling you out, this isn’t the NFL. We’re not bashing into each other.”
While Rizzo cast doubt on how serious the NFL takes head injuries and doesn’t think a spotter is necessary in baseball, he didn’t rule out the possibility of the MLB Players Association getting behind the concept.
“Well, I mean, player safety is a huge thing,” he said.
Rizzo will surely keep that in mind going forward, even if his instincts say to play on. Sunday’s return to action represented another benchmark in his concussion journey, even if symptoms subsided a while ago.
Suffice to say, he’s looking forward to more opportunities to hit with a healthy head.
“I’m just excited for the progression of spring,” Rizzo said, “and to kind of check the boxes of just getting ready for Opening Day.”
