Manoah throws first mound session in return from Tommy John

DUNEDIN, Fla. -- There finally comes a moment, deep into any rehab from Tommy John surgery, when the joy bursts through.

Alek Manoah climbed a mound Friday morning, near 10:15 a.m., for the first time in nine months. He was already smiling. His cleats, a crisp white and gold, hadn’t touched dirt yet.

As Manoah began to throw, first a quick game of catch as he inched up the mound to the rubber and then 15 straight fastballs, you could see a young man who was finally home again. Manoah was finally standing where he belongs. After one of his pitches to Alejandro Kirk, Manoah started to chuckle and shook his head.

“I missed that, Kirky,” Manoah said, mimicking Kirk’s glove stealing him a strike.

Speaking moments after his mound session had finished -- and after the applause from his coaches and teammates had quieted -- Manoah sounded as free and joyful as he’s been at any point in his pro career. He called it a “whirlwind of emotion,” and while there’s still a long road back from his hybrid Tommy John, which included an internal brace procedure, this is one of those moments that has been glowing in the distance for Manoah.

“The first time you play catch, it feels like Christmas Day,” Manoah said. “Then, that three-month process, you really enjoy it and you work on so many things to get everything back to where you need it to be, but the last thing is missing. ... It’s like, ‘I need that slope. Give me that slope.’”

Nothing about the 15 pitches, themselves, mattered. This is another “Step 1” in a process filled with dozens of those, and simply by climbing that mound Friday morning, Manoah has unlocked the home stretch of his rehab.

This is still Alek Manoah, though, the grand showman who finished third in AL Cy Young Award voting in 2022 after posting a 2.24 ERA over 196 2/3 innings. This is still the competitor who beats his chest, howls into the stadium air and once suggested that, if Gerrit Cole wants to do something about it, he can walk past the Audi sign painted on the grass in front of the Yankees dugout next time.

Rehabbing from Tommy John is a million miles from that. It requires patience, slow days and a lot of frustration. You need to push, but not too much.

“I would rather be a guy who needs to be held back than a guy where ... ‘We need to get this thing moving,’” Manoah said. “Every time I hear a coach say, ‘Hold it back,’ I know I’m throwing the [crap] out of it. That’s a good thing. There’s a lot of confidence in the arm and in the body. Me having to be held back, that’s a blessing. We have a great training staff and great coaches. They know where I need to be at every step. They’ll keep putting the reins on me when they need to. Otherwise? I’m going.”

Now comes the fun part.

Manoah is wise not to slap a timeline on this -- even at this stage -- saying only that he wants to come back and help the Blue Jays in the second half. This could mirror what his close friend and teammate, Hyun Jin Ryu, did in 2023 when he returned from Tommy John to make 11 key starts down the stretch.

From here, Manoah will continue to slowly ramp up and see the mound more regularly. His intensity will creep up. Slowly but surely, his velocity will creep back up through the 70s and 80s. Things will start to feel “normal” again, but that starts with what happened Friday.

“Being able to see life in the bigger picture, sometimes you’re so emotional and so excited that you need to slow down and see the bigger picture,” Manoah said. “Sometimes these injuries and down time give you the time to go searching. Unless you go searching, you don’t find. I’m super happy with what we have found.”

This is who Manoah is, bouncing between answers that sound like song lyrics after he throws. He wears a full beard now with long hair spilling down to his shoulders and has never looked better, physically, than he does today.

All of the pieces are there again for Manoah, who is still just 27 years old. Standing 6-foot-6, he’s always had a fine view, but his joy lives 10 inches higher, atop that mound.