Earlier this week, Rob Bradford of WEEI reported that former Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies reliever Daniel Bard, a veteran of seven major league seasons, threw a bullpen session attended by scouts from approximately ten different teams, with a view to getting back to the bigs for the first time since 2023.
Bard fell out of baseball in 2024 spring training. A member of the Rockies at the time, the hard-throwing right-hander suffered multiple injuries – first a torn meniscus, then surgery on his flexor tendon – that ended his 2024 season before it began. Still not healthy come last season’s end, the Rockies did not retain Bard, and he has been a free agent ever since.
Given that it was the second and final season on the two-year, $19 million contract he had signed with the Rockies in the summer of 2022, and that he turned 39 years old mere weeks after the surgery, it seemed likely that the injury would spell not just the end of his season, but the end of his career. Bard, though, is not a stranger to comebacks.
Red Sox Peaks And Troughs
Bard, famously, is a former MLB Comeback Player Of The Year. He won the award in 2020 for the way he battled his way back to the bigs after what appeared to be a terminal case of the “yips”.
When Bard broke through with the Red Sox in 2009, he was a fearsome relief pitcher. In 2010, his first full season in the majors, he recorded 3.1 Wins Above Replacement by pitching to a 1.93 ERA in 74.2 innings, throwing 100 miles per hour of hard-to-hit gas.
Over the next three seasons, however, a loss of control set in. Bard’s always-hit walk rate struck the moon in 2012, when he walked 15.5% of opponents he faced and suffered a noticeable dip in his velocity. With his stuff went the results; with the results went the confidence.
Going to the minor leagues did not help. In 15.1 innings across three low-level minor league Red Sox affiliates in the 2013 season, Bard walked 27 batters, and in a mere 0.2 innings of A-Ball the following year, he walked nine batters while hitting seven. It had completely, totally, comprehensively gone.
It got to the point that Bard, by his own admission, resorted to searching the internet for the term “how to control the yips”. But control them, he did.
Do Call It A Comeback
Time away from baseball helped Bard, who had initially retired in 2017 after three more unsuccessful truncated seasons in the low minors. No longer with the Red Sox, he was picked up by the Rockies for spring training of 2020 – and he had both his control and his stuff back.
In the 2020 season – his first in the majors for seven years, and his first full season in nine – Bard become a fearsome bullpen arm again. In 24.2 innings, he struck out 27 and walked only 10 on his way to a 3.65 ERA, and while a slight regression happened in 2021, he fought back again in 2022 to throw to a 1.79 ERA in 57 outings.
Control problems crept in again in 2023, when Bard walked a hitter an inning in 50 outings, and then 2024 was entirely lost with the aforementioned injuries. Nevertheless, with nothing to lose except opportunities, Bard is trying to make yet another comeback with whoever will take him. After all, low expectations can be the best thing for the yips.
Turning 40 next month Bard – if he makes it back to the big leagues – will be the fifth-oldest player in the majors. Comeback attempts are limited by Father Time, and Father Time is not a man who looks too favourably upon meniscus repairs. If he still has his fastball, however, Bard will draw interest for his stuff and his experience – of both the good and the bad.
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Former Comeback Player of the Year Makes Another Comeback