Culture
'F— no, I don’t baby it': Red Sox's Liam Hendriks moves slowly, confidently back from Tommy John
BOSTON — Liam Hendriks had his pants down as he spoke. His undershorts were on, but his uniform was down to his knees. He’d just thrown his first bullpen of the year last Wednesday, a momentous step forward for any pitcher returning from Tommy John surgery. Yet he stood in the Boston Red Sox clubhouse refusing to treat the occasion as serious, or even notable.
How did his arm feel?
“Attached,” he said.
Was there some added adrenaline getting on a mound?
“Not really,” he answered.
What stood out about the rehab process?
“How boring it is,” Hendriks deadpanned.
None of this came across as dismissive. It was played for laughs, a break from the monotony for Hendriks, his teammates, and even the gathered reporters. He was speaking to a full scrum with TV cameras and microphones, all because of a 15-pitch bullpen three hours before game time. Give Hendriks credit for not rolling his eyes. He didn’t travel from Australia, through years of baseball obscurity and rounds of cancer treatment to celebrate a few pregame fastballs in the bullpen.
“I don’t know whether the trainers love me or want to kill me,” Hendriks said. “Every day is a struggle telling them to let me do more and having them try to hold me back into a normal stratosphere.
“Which sucks.”
He’s longing for moments of greater consequence and is confident they’re coming.
Liam Hendriks has faced intense physical and mental challenges over the past 20 months but has managed to maintain a sense of humor about it all. (Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
There are numbers to help tell every baseball story and Hendriks’ career is told through his three All-Star Games, two Reliever of the Year awards, and 116 career saves. His backstory is chronicled through the 14 teams and six major-league organizations that saw him come and go before anyone trusted him with the ninth inning. He’s the one and only graduate of Australia’s Sacred Heart College to ever play in the majors, and he was designated for assignment four times and traded three more before most people had ever heard of him. Yet, here he is, a survivor in more ways than one.
Hendriks’ past 20 months have been all about four rounds of chemotherapy, a six-game rehab assignment in the minors weeks later, and his emotional big-league return last May. He had four good outings in June before season-ending Tommy John surgery in August and then entered free agency.
“Theoretically, I’ve got a new elbow,” Hendriks said this spring. “So, I’ve got another 10 (years) in me.”
Now 35 years old, Hendriks is hellbent on proving himself yet again. He signed a two-year deal with the Red Sox, in part, because they promised him two things: They believed he could pitch this season, and they wanted him to spend most of his rehab process with the big-league team. So, that’s what Hendriks has been doing. On the road, at home, throughout spring training. He hasn’t been rehabbing at some fancy, far-flung facility; he’s been throwing on the field, sitting at his corner locker, and making jokes on the bullpen bench. Cancer treatment kept him away from people for far too long last year. But he does not wallow. He does not question.
GO DEEPER
Inside the Red Sox trainer’s room with Lucas Giolito and Liam Hendriks
“I’ve never been a big ‘why me’ person,” Hendriks said. “I think it was inevitable that I was going to have something to do with my elbow. Unfortunately, it was in the same year that I dealt with a lot of other things, but it is what it is. There’s nothing I can do to change it. All I can do is show up to the park every day with a positive attitude and hopefully rub off on some of the younger guys here.”
When Hendriks reported to Red Sox camp, he’d been given a target of 64 mph, as in, a pitcher who typically throws a 95-mph fastball should be throwing roughly 64 mph when he’s seven months out from Tommy John surgery. In his early days of spring training, though — “My surgeon is probably not going to be happy about this,” Hendriks said — he was throwing in the mid-70s.
“Not consistently!” Hendriks clarified. “Consistently low 70s. But it’s still, the jump from where I was the time before that was a little too high. … A couple of times I was a little too strong in the paint. But I prefer to go too far than not do enough.”
Such is the Liam Hendriks Experience. Numbers don’t do justice to what he brings on the mound and off the field. He is a vein-bulging, obscenity-screaming, trash-talking wildman, but also a Lego-building, caregiving, joke-making teddy bear.
Within those extremes, a cancer diagnosis in December of 2022 was a shock. Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Doctors told Hendriks to expect six rounds of chemotherapy. He’s proud of the fact he needed only four. He can’t remember the exact date his last round started, only that it was the Chicago White Sox’s home opener, and he was supposed to be in their bullpen, not in some hospital. He had a bone marrow biopsy at the end of April and began a rehab assignment the first week of May.
His elbow lasted a little more than a month after that.
The truth is, Hendriks knew his elbow was in trouble long before it popped. He’d first learned of a small tear in his UCL in 2008. He’d pitched for more than a decade without snapping it, but as he ramped up in his return following cancer treatment — after a full six months off — he could tell it wasn’t right.
“He didn’t care,” former White Sox teammate and current Red Sox teammate Lucas Giolito said. “A lot of guys would be like, ‘Oh, this hurts,’ and in the training room or whatever. He was like, ‘I’m just going to go until it breaks.’”
Was there ever any thought of protecting it after going through so much to get back on the mound and a club option looming?
“No. F— no,” Hendriks said. “I don’t baby it.”
Hendriks said he’s come to believe he’s most susceptible to injury when he holds back.
“The elbow was gone no matter what,” he said. “So, I’m not sitting there to try to rehab another six weeks potentially and not come back. If it goes, it goes. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I was pretty sure it was already done, but I was holding out hope that it was maybe a little (bit) of scar tissue, and if that snaps off at the right time, I’ll be fine. It wasn’t that.”
This offseason, the White Sox declined a $15 million club option, making Hendriks a free agent. It’s not unusual for pitchers recovering from Tommy John surgery to sign two-year deals with an eye toward truly contributing in that second year. When Hendriks talked to interested teams this winter, though, he clarified that it wasn’t a 2025 negotiation.
“We made it very abundantly clear that if you’re coming in with that attitude, it’s a no-go,” Hendriks said. “There were some teams that reached out and just faded away straight from there.”
Hendriks expects to be pitching for the Red Sox this August. He signed a two-year deal that guarantees him $10 million but includes a $12 million mutual option for 2026. By the time he signed, Hendriks had begun playing catch with his physical therapist, and Hendriks said he was less worried about his elbow and more worried about spiking a throw to a non-baseball player. But Hendriks hit his partner in the chest, and the instant feedback was that Hendriks wasn’t “muscly,” meaning he was staying loose and not getting tense. The motion was as natural as ever.
When Hendriks talks about limits, he talks only about breaking them. From Australia to the All-Star Game. From being on waivers to signing long-term contracts. From Stage 4 cancer to a faster-than-expected recovery. From Tommy John surgery to having too much oomph on his fastball in spring training. Now a 15-pitch bullpen and a tongue-in-cheek miniature press conference.
Does the light at the end of a Tommy John tunnel look different than the light at the end of a cancer tunnel?
“Ehh, in my mind, it’s the same,” Hendriks said in spring training. “There’s still an end goal. There’s still a goal that I need to get back from. It’s just a little bit more of a slow-moving process.”
Hendriks doesn’t have a sit-back-and-wait personality, and he’s had to do exactly that for much of the past year and a half. He’s wired to pitch the ninth. Check with him again when that finally happens.
“It’s not that (rehab) is long. I can handle long,” Hendriks said. “I can’t handle slow. And it’s the slowness that’s really pissing me off.”
(Top photo of Hendriks in May 2024: Maddie Malhotra / Boston Red Sox/Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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