Kris Bryant is healthy again. Can he regain his All-Star form in Colorado?

Rowan Kavner

MLB Writer

Early last season, a balky back made it tough for Kris Bryant to get out of bed. Late last season, a foot injury made every step excruciating.

The physical afflictions would come and go. The mental hurdles, however, lasted throughout the first season of the four-time All-Star’s megadeal with the Rockies. The new face of the franchise played in all of 42 games, most of them spent in pain.

“It’s constant up and down, like, ‘Man, when is this ever going to be just, like, I can go out there and play,’” Bryant said this week to FOX Sports.

He did try.

While teammates Ryan Rolison and Tyler Kinley went under the knife last June, Bryant attempted to chart a path forward with lingering issues that weren’t quite as serious — or as straightforward. Neither of Bryant’s injuries required surgery, but neither seemed to go away.

The Rockies were 10-6 when a late-April back injury first put Bryant on the shelf. He needed a cortisone shot to mask the pain. Bryant would miss almost all of May, returning for two games that month only to go back on the IL with the back strain.

By the time he was activated on June 27, the last-place Rockies were 11 games under .500. His team had dropped 30 of the 44 games they played without him in that stretch.

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“I think for Kris it was hard because he signed the contract with us, and I think he wanted to come in and make a really strong statement about his desire to be a Rockie and being a leader on this team,” manager Bud Black said. “It was frustrating for him because he couldn’t play, and I think his health was compromised. He was not 100 percent when the season started.”

Or, really, at any point.

The injuries seemed unrelenting. When his back pain finally subsided, left foot pain followed. Bryant had never experienced plantar fasciitis or a bone bruise in his foot before. Any contact with hard surfaces hurt, and playing in cleats only made things worse. Everyday tasks became debilitating.

“For me, it was just a matter of getting to a point where I could feel comfortable waking up in the morning and going to the bathroom and progress from there,” Bryant said. “When it first happened, I had to crawl to the bathroom after one of the games. I was like, ‘This isn’t normal.’”

Through all the agony, the former MVP was still producing.

Bryant wanted to make his mark in his first year in Colorado, to earn the seven-year, $182 million contract he signed last March following a brief stint with the Giants and superstar run with the Cubs. Every game he missed bothered him, let alone entire weeks and months.

“As I kind of went about the season and got to know a lot of guys here and the staff, it was a little easier to put that worry aside and focus on getting better,” Bryant said. “But it’s always in the back of your head.”

So, he persisted as long as he could.

Bryant didn’t have a home run through his first 20 games, but what he lacked in power he made up for with elite contact skills and an exceptional strikeout rate. Though his hard-hit rates took a dive, he still finished the year with a career-best .306 batting average and a 126 OPS+.

“There definitely were games I was playing and things were not right, they were hurting, but it’s kind of hard because I felt like when I was on the field I was performing,” Bryant said. “I was doing everything I can. It’s kind of hard to be like, ‘Man, this hurts, but things are going really good.’”

Surprisingly, he was at his best when his foot hurt the worst.

All five of his home runs were hit during July, shockingly all away from Coors Field. From July 24-31, Bryant went 10-for-25 with five extra-base hits. But the pain reached a point that he had to speak up.

“Eventually, when things aren’t feeling right, it’s going to catch up to you,” Bryant said. “You could even hurt it worse, and that was something we all didn’t want to deal with.”

The only solution was rest. On Aug. 1, he returned to the injured list. He sported a walking boot. Later that month, he opted for a PRP injection, hoping that would promote healing. He’s still not sure whether it worked.

With that, Bryant’s season effectively ended. And so did the Rockies’. They were 20-22 in games that Bryant played; 48-72 in those that he didn’t. After his final game of the season on July 31, Colorado went 22-37 the rest of the way.

“I haven’t had any imaging since then, but it’s kind of something that it might flare up again,” Bryant said. “You don’t know, just because it’s one of those things, it’s on the bottom of your foot and you could take a weird step, overuse of it could flare up. I mean, Albert Pujols had it for years, and he had to deal with it until he eventually had surgery to cut it. I don’t want to go that route. But, you’ve just got to stay on top of it.”

At home this offseason, that meant a combination of heat, ice and rest.

He enters the 2023 campaign in a better place physically, though even with a healthy Bryant, most projections don’t see Colorado elevating out of last place in the NL West. Rather than listen to pundits and predictions, Bryant, who has a stellar .864 OPS for the 3-4 Rockies through Thursday, has found that sometimes it’s better to turn off the television, turn off his phone and go play.

“For me, it’s just about exceeding peoples’ expectations, exceeding our expectations,” the former World Series champion said when asked what he’d consider a success this season. “That’s how I’ve always approached baseball in general. I have expectations of myself in the year, throughout the year, and my goal is to always be better than those.

“I feel like that’s a very attainable goal. That could mean winning a record-breaking 117 games; there’s a lot of different meanings. For me, you see other peoples’ expectations of ourselves, and that’s not something we really pay attention to, but really coming out playing good teams hard, surprising a few guys, I mean going to San Diego and opening up the season winning the first two games, just doing stuff like that consistently and kind of having that attitude and seeing where we’re at at the end of the year.”

Rowan Kavner covers the Dodgers and NL West for FOX Sports. He previously was the Dodgers’ editor of digital and print publications. Follow him on Twitter at @RowanKavner.

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