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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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