DUNEDIN, Fla • On Friday afternoon, Blue Jays reliever T.J. House took a line drive to the back of the head that hit him so hard it travelled most of the way back to home plate.
On Saturday afternoon, with a stitched-up scar barely visible on his head beneath his dark hair, House said he actually felt OK.
“For the most part, I feel fine,” he said in the Blue Jays clubhouse in Dunedin. “Which is crazy to me, I still don’t understand it.”
“It was definitely a rough day yesterday and a whirlwind experience, but I’m doing a lot better than I thought I would be doing today.”
It was the bottom of the ninth inning in Lakeland, Fla., when Detroit’s John Hicks hit a House pitch right back to the mound. The pitcher turned his head slightly before the ball hit him squarely. He ended up laying on the infield grass, with his feet on the mound, for about 15 minutes as trainers waited for paramedics to arrive.
Asked what he remembered, House said: “Everything. I remember, exactly, letting the ball go, it coming back to me, getting hit and trying to stand back up. I remained conscious through it all.”
House said the period when he was waiting for an ambulance felt “like a million years.”
“I was just asking (trainers) when they were going to be here, when I could off the field,” he said. “That was the worst part, not knowing what was going to happen to me. There’s so many different thoughts going through your mind. You just want to be OK.”
House passed the tests he was given at hospital on Friday but stayed overnight as a precaution. He was released Saturday after more tests. He said there was no fracture and he will be monitored for a possible concussion. He won’t participate in any baseball activity for “a few days” and then have concussion testing before possibly resuming work.
House, who has major league experience with Cleveland from 2014-16, said he has seen players be hit in the head before and it’s scary just watching it, so this was something else altogether.
“You don’t know if you are going to be OK, if you are going to survive this,” he said. “It’s not fun, because you just don’t know.”
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House, 27, who is in Toronto camp on a minor-league tryout, said his mother was listening to the game while at work in Picayune, Miss., and told her son she “almost had a heart attack” while trying to find out how he was doing. He said he remembers asking the Blue Jays to please contact her and let her know he was OK before being transported to hospital.
Before Saturday’s game against the Philadelphia Phillies, Toronto manager John Gibbons was asked whether baseball could do anything to prevent the rare incidents of a pitcher taking a comebacker to the head.
“I don’t know how you’d do anything to fix that,” he said. “I know they have talked about padding or something, I’m sure they will continue to look at that.” Toronto’s Francisco Liriano took a liner off the head in last season’s ALDS against Texas. J.A. Happ had it happen in Tampa during his first stint with the Jays in 2013.
“You know, the game’s been played for so many years, it’s sad, terrible, when you see it happen, but it’s just one of those things,” Gibbons said. “I don’t know what they can do.”
House says he has hundreds of texts and messages to return from friends and former teammates and said the support was “awesome. It makes you feel a little better.”
He knows it certainly could have been worse.
“I got hit, I don’t know how fast it was going, but at least 100 miles an hour, right in the head,” he said.
I walked out of it today, the hospital, smiling, so I can’t be too upset about anything.”
sstinson@postmedia.com
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