TAMPA, Fla. — Two weeks after he twice crashed into an outfield wall, Clint Frazier could not keep the names of his cats — Papi and Phoenix — straight. He gave up driving to work at times because his depth perception was off. And when he swung a bat, his head became muddled.
“Foggy,” Frazier said last week when asked to describe how he felt. “It’s the word of the day.”
The symptoms did not change the prescription for the young Yankees outfielder: keep on swinging, running and throwing, and get back on the exercise bike, which he estimated riding 30 miles in the previous week.
“I’m killing it on the bike,” he said.
Such a recovery program is a reflection of how rapidly knowledge of brain injuries is increasing and how treatments for athletes are evolving.
“It’s not just go sit in a dark room anymore,” said Michael Collins, the director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center sports medicine concussion program.
There are six types of concussions: vestibular, ocular, fatigue, anxiety/mood, migraine headaches and cervical. Each of those concussions’ symptoms has different triggers. For example, symptoms of an ocular concussion, which affects visual tasks and the ability to track moving objects, can be prompted by being in the bright light of a cellphone or being in a long passageway, Collins said. The Yankees, citing privacy laws, have not said what type of concussion Frazier has.
Each type of concussion has distinctive therapies.
“If you can have 30 different types of knee injuries, why do we think there’s one type of concussion?”
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