Healthy Helton Helping to Lead Rockies' Turnaround

Baseball News - Stan McNeal - SportingNews.com

Todd Helton stands and excuses himself. "Bad case of heartburn," he says before walking away. Hmm, I wonder. I think my questions aren't sitting well with the Rockies' first baseman.

Helton is as accommodating as any superstar, but he isn't into this little sit-down chat. Maybe he'd rather be spending his morning preparing for the early afternoon game. Maybe he is tired of talking about the recent firing of longtime manager Clint Hurdle. Maybe he doesn't want to explain the Rockies' modest winning streak because, well, there is no great explanation.

Definitely, he is bored with talking about his back. I don't blame him.

Helton's back woes built for years, eventually eroding his status as one of baseball's best hitters into that of a declining veteran heading for the end quicker than expected. Helton finally gave in to a bulging disk in his lower back last July when he was hitting 62 points below his .328 career average. He batted only twice -- both strikeouts -- after the All-Star break and finished the 2008 season with career lows across the board.

"There was one swing against the White Sox when I knew something was really wrong," Helton says. "It was like something was wrong with my hamstring. That one swing put two and two together. My back was causing my (left) leg to go numb."

Helton had surgery two days after last season and -- presto -- he has become Todd Helton again. Well, presto is easy to say for anyone who didn't go through an offseason of rehab. Helton says he didn't start feeling strong until sometime during spring training.

But after a slow start to the regular season, he has his numbers (.314 batting average/.381 on-base percentage/.881 OPS) far closer to his norm than last season. He has played in 53 of Colorado's 57 games and ranks among the N.L. leaders with 41 RBIs. He isn't likely to live up to the remainder of his contract -- he is owed $16.6 million this year and next, $19.1 million in 2011 and a $23 million club option in 2012 (with a $4.6 million buyout) -- but he is producing and feeling better than he has in years.

"I've had my days," he shrugs. "Sometimes you feel like you're 18 again, other days you feel like you just had back surgery."

To help stay fresh, Helton has been sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber when at home. "A lot of the everyday soreness is not there when you get up," he says.

A veteran scout says Helton is moving better in the field -- "He would go sit down in the dugout during pitching changes to rest his back," the scout says -- and looks better at the plate than last season. Helton still doesn't possess his old power, but the scout says that's likely a result of losing bat speed because of age, not injury. Helton, who turns 36 in August, has not hit more than 20 home runs in a season since 2004. So far this season, he has seven, his total for last year.

Last month, Helton reached 2,000 hits -- the fourth player to do so in fewer than 6,100 at-bats -- but he isn't ready to talk about the next milestone. "That's a long ways away. Let's just say the next thousand will be a lot harder to get than the previous two," he says.

While Helton needed a few weeks to get his season going -- his average didn't reach .300 until late April -- his team took nearly two months and one managerial change to find its stride. The Rockies were 10 games under .500 when Hurdle was fired on May 29 and replaced by Jim Tracy. Typically weak away from Coors Field, the Rockies bring a five-game road winning streak into Milwaukee tonight for their final stop of an 11-game trip.

Finally, Rockies hitters seem to heeding the club's advice to be more aggressive. In a four-game sweep of the Cardinals at Busch Stadium, the Rockies outscored the Cardinals 33-9 and out-hit them 44-25.

Is the Rockies' improved play -- they're 7-4 since the managerial change -- merely a coincidence or more the impact of Tracy, who had been brought in as bench coach before the season? Tracy has tweaked the order and taken advantage of the hot bats of Clint Barmes and Ian Stewart, who has hit his way past Garrett Atkins into the starting lineup at third base. Rockies starters also have done their part, improving their collective ERA to 4.40. Each starter earned a win in the streak that has lifted Colorado out of last place in the N.L. West.

Tracy says his message is a continuation of what Hurdle and Co. had been preaching all along.

"When you are trying to get young people to a certain plateau, I don't think you should ever feel like you can say something one time and think that it's going to cement itself in there," he says. "The more you say it, without being a pain in their rear end, their thought process becomes, 'I think this guy thinks this is pretty important. We need to stay with this.' Eventually, they get results and they say this is going to make me a better player. That's called teaching."

Helton's explanation, at least on this morning, is a little different.

"I don't have to explain it," he says. "That's the beauty of it. I just go out and play."

Indeed. That certainly beats talking, especially when he is playing like he has this season.

Stan McNeal is a writer for Sporting News. E-mail him at smcneal@sportingnews.com.

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