On March 10, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association reached a new collective bargaining agreement. After 99 days of no contact between teams and players, the owners’ lockout was lifted, allowing a delayed spring training to commence amid a flurry of excitement. Essentially overnight, months of uncertainty were replaced with the comforting rhythms of a dawning baseball season.

It was a moment Lance McCullers Jr. had been privately dreading.

“I honestly felt for a long time I just wanted the lockout to go forever,” he said during a conversation in late August. “Because I didn't want to face that truth of being out again.”

Heading into the 2021 playoff run, McCullers was the Houston Astros’ ace. Two years removed from Tommy John surgery, he’d signed a five-year, $85 million contract extension in spring training and proceeded to have a career year: posting a 3.16 ERA while allowing the fewest home runs in baseball across 162 1/3 innings, by far the most he’d thrown in a season. He delivered as the Game 1 starter in the Division Series against the Chicago White Sox, spinning 6 2/3 scoreless innings. The team would go all the way to Game 6 of the World Series before eventually succumbing to the Atlanta Braves, but McCullers would throw only four more innings in those playoffs. He left his second start of the ALDS with an injury initially labeled forearm stiffness and spent the rest of the postseason, and then all winter, wondering what would have happened if he’d stayed healthy.

And as the calendar turned to March and the industry leaped back to life, he knew that as soon as he showed up to camp in West Palm Beach, the team, his teammates, media, and fans would all find out: “I'm not going to be ready for spring. I'm not going to be ready for months, actually, and maybe not at all this year,” McCullers said.

“So it's like the reintroduction factor of 'I let people down' again.”

'I let the team down'

There were two outs in the fourth inning of the game that would eventually send the Astros to their fifth consecutive championship series when McCullers threw a backdoor slider to Gavin Sheets, who had homered off him earlier in the game, and felt “a little mini bomb went off in my forearm area.”

He finished the frame on pure adrenaline but as soon as he got to the dugout, he told then-pitching coach Brent Strom that he was done. A year later, Astros manager Dusty Baker told the media in that moment, “My heart sank.”

The initial review by the doctor was inconclusive and when McCullers called his wife, Kara, she encouraged him to wait for further testing. But he could already tell what an MRI would soon confirm: “In my heart, I knew that I had a really bad injury,” McCullers said.

And maybe it’s because he’s the oldest of three siblings who prides himself on always setting a good example, always being reliable, but even though he knew his teammates wouldn’t think less of him, “I feel like, personally, I let the team down. I let the organization down and the fans down.”

It was more than just that. As this year has proven, the Astros were built to win again (and again and again) and McCullers won’t be a free agent until after 2026. Start shortstop Carlos Correa, however, probably wasn’t coming back. And what McCullers wanted most of all, was to win another ring with the teammate that had become his best friend.

“I really wanted to give him that,” McCullers said, “because he deserved it.”

It’s easy to forget that sports are only ever truly timeless for the fans. The laundry stays the same, but the clubhouse changes year to year. Every elimination ends not just a season but a communal experience, a specific chemistry, a chapter of someone’s life.

The other Astros tried their best to include him as they battled through the remainder of the playoffs. Kendall Graveman asked him to create personalized scouting reports (“Whether he needed it or not,” McCullers said) while Correa and catcher Martín Maldonado continued to include him in their planning meetings. Until Game 6 of the World Series, when eight exhausted Astros pitchers failed to contain a barrage by the Atlanta Braves’ lineup. And suddenly the season was over, leaving nothing left to do but rehab.

“You give us Lance, we might have been a different team,” Baker said recently. “Might have been world champs.”

Whereas Tommy John recovery follows a well-known timeline, McCullers spent the winter languishing in a sometimes-far-too-stagnant process with no particular end in sight. The passage of time no longer felt like it ferried him necessarily closer to return, like it had after TJ. Rather, it would all be for naught if the flexor tendon injury still needed surgery at some point.

“Mentally this is the hardest rehab that I've ever had,” he said.

He reported to spring training “80% [sure] I would have surgery.” Even through the first few months of the season, that remained a possibility. When the Astros received their AL pennant rings, it made McCullers sad. Never one to put much stock trophies, it felt less like a testament to what they had accomplished and more like a reminder of the what if that haunts him.

The hope was that he could return this year. The fear was that if they waited too long to commit to surgery, it would cost him part of next season as well. Late June or early July was the deadline to decide. The gamble — and months of rigorous rehab — paid off, and on Aug. 13, McCullers made his 2022 debut.

He posted a 2.27 ERA in 47 2/3 innings across eight starts. On the eve of his first postseason appearance since the injury, McCullers is no longer their ace — which says more about the Astros’ pitching staff than it does about his abilities — but still a battle-tested veteran. Saturday in Seattle, he’ll take the ball against a charmed Mariners team playing postseason baseball at home for the first time in 21 years. It’ll be his 17th playoff appearance and eighth with an opportunity to advance on the line — just like that fateful ALDS game this time last year.

“Baseball players are superstitious beings, so I don't like too many parallels drawn,” McCullers said Friday afternoon. “But we'll go out there tomorrow and we'll give it our all.”