How Kansas City Royals prospect Michael Massey made it from pain and doubt back to joy
Michael Massey’s childlike enthusiasm, ear-to-ear smile and blissful demeanor during the Kansas City Royals’ mini-camp/open complex workouts are telling of his journey.
There’s a reason he bounded around like a kid living out a dream on a baseball diamond. It’s because not long ago the dream seemed cloudy, at best, through a fog of pain and doubt.
Massey started his professional career hindered by a debilitating back injury he suffered in college. That turned baseball into a daily slog and robbed him of both his athleticism and his infectious joy for the sport.
Yet he fought his way through and found success, perspective and a rejuvenated love for the game.
“Does anyone want to herniate some disks in their back? No,” Massey said last month at the Royals training facility in Surprise, Arizona. “But it’s going to teach you something on the other side of it. You’ve just gotta get to the other side.
“Going through it, you’re like, ‘Man, this sucks.’ But looking back on it, I don’t know that I’d change it, because I really enjoy coming out here and I enjoy what I do.”
Massey, 23, made it to the other side with support from family, help from the Royals medical and training staffs, patience from the organization and an unexpected watershed moment that came in the form of the global pandemic.
Last season, not only did he tie for the batting average crown in the High-A Central (.289) but he also ranked among the top five in the league in RBIs (second, 87), slugging percentage (second, .531), doubles (second, 27) and home runs (fourth, 21).
In the field, he won a Minor League Gold Glove as the best defensive second baseman at any level of the minors.
“To know that he won a Gold Glove, to me, that’s tremendous work by our player development guys and by him because I can’t tell you from a scouting perspective that I could put fair grades on him when we drafted him,” said vice president/player personnel Lonnie Goldberg, the head of the Royals amateur scouting department when they drafted Massey.
Then there’s his joy.
It was absent for some time, but it returned and it was unmistakable.
“He was having fun, and I see that smile back on his face like we used to see before that back injury,” Massey’s mother Lisa said. “This is a kid that loves the game. You could see when he was playing his junior year of college, it was so painful to watch.”
A baseball love affair and a painful injury
Baseball was in Massey’s genes. His father, Keith, played second base at the University of Illinois from 1983-86. His older brother, Andrew, played baseball at Concordia University.
It didn’t take long to notice the sport was also in his heart.
Massey, a native of Palos Park, Illinois, gravitated to the game starting at the age of 3. His mom and dad pitched to him in the backyard as did his aunt, uncle and grandmother.
If nobody had the time to pitch to him, that didn’t slow him down.
“This child has played and loved the game ever since I can remember,” said Lisa, who was in Arizona recently watching the first minor-league intrasquad scrimmage of the spring. “He would go out in the backyard and have a make-believe game all to himself, and I’d be wondering who is he talking to out there? He’s talking to himself like he’s the announcer. ‘And it’s gone!” And he’s running the bases, making paths in my backyard, losing grass as he goes along. …
“So let me tell you when that back issue hit, I couldn’t sleep. I was devastated.”
A Baseball America and Collegiate Baseball Freshman All-America as well as an All-Big Ten third-team selection in his first season for the Fighting Illini, Massey followed up that season by earning All-Big Ten second-team honors, ABCA/Rawlings All-Region first-team honors and a ABCA/Rawlings Gold Glove Award at second base as a sophomore.
While working out in the weight room at the end of his sophomore season before heading to the prestigious Cape Cod League for the summer, he hurt his back doing a deadlift.
An MRI revealed herniated discs. He played on. He would’ve played through the summer if not for a ball off the foot that broke a toe.
In the fall of his junior year, his draft year, the back started to flare up and severely limited his movement.
“I wasn’t even sure I was going on the first trip to Wake Forest,” Massey said. “It was two days before and I had no idea if I even had a plane ticket. I ended up DH-ing and we just kind of played it by ear.”
As a team leader in what he expected to be his final season and with the team struggling out of the gates, Massey lobbied the coaches to let him back in the lineup as the everyday second baseman.
A left-handed hitter, he led the team in hits, batted .317 earned All-Big Ten first-team honors.
Despite the relatively-productive statistics, Massey’s father noticed the toll the injury had taken. Keith had coached Massey in travel ball all the way up to the age of 18.
“The reality is if you watched him in the on-deck circle, he couldn’t even bend over to pick up an extra bat,” Keith said. “He had to squat like a catcher to pick up the next bat just to lob it into the dugout. You could tell he was really laboring. It affected his swing his junior year.”
A chance at his dream
If not for the questions about his long-term viability due to his back problems, Massey might have gone earlier in the draft. Instead, he was still available when the Royals picked in the fourth round (109th overall).
That still made him the highest drafted infielder in Illinois history and the fifth-highest drafted position player.
That moment still resonates in Massey’s mind, a combination of skepticism and determination, as his parents broke into tears.
“I don’t think I can do it right now, but dammit my mom and dad are crying because I just got drafted,” Massey said of his reaction. “So I’m going to frigging do this thing. I’m going to go in there and I’m going to do my stuff and whatever happens, happens. I’m going to show up everyday and go get it.”
The Royals knew about the back issue, and their scouts had seen him play both before and after the injury.
Goldberg said the Royals drafted Massey with the “long haul” in mind. The fact of the matter is when Goldberg saw Massey in person, Massey struggled to even bend down to field ground balls.
“We were trying to time our scouting ventures in there to when he was actually going to be taking ground balls or potentially playing in a game,” Goldberg said. “We thought we might actually be going into the draft just being able to evaluate the bat, not even knowing if the back was going to be ready to play.
“The good part was once we did select him, our training staff and people had so much knowledge because we had so much history.”
Massey’s back problems plagued him through his first season in the minors at the Rookie League level. He still batted .272 with 47 hits and 25 RBIs in 42 games, but he just wasn’t right.
“My first year in Burlington, I could barely tie my shoes half the time,” Massey said. “I think I played 42 of the 80 games. So just the program and the patience that they’ve had with me has been second to none honestly because there’ve been a lot of times in my own head that I didn’t think I could do it.”
Massey continued to play, but doubt had taken hold. Could he get to that 96-mph heater up? Could he rotate his hips the way needed? Would he have the range he needed in the field?
“That was a tough time, trying to fight through those (thoughts),” Massey said. “I would say that was almost tougher than the physical.”
The pandemic provided a reset
Massey prided himself on not having one defining characteristic to his game. Keith had always schooled his boys that their biggest value would come from being an all-around player able to do whatever was required to win games in the field, at the plate or on the bases.
“I couldn’t tell you how many calls we had where he would call frustrated about just some of the things he was going through, knowing what he was capable of — everything from stealing a base to making a diving play to really cutting it loose on a swing — and he knew inside that he really wasn’t able to do that like he used to,” Keith said. “Knowing that you can’t go full throttle, he was really frustrated by that.”
That frustration carried over into the offseason and into the spring of 2020 before the coronavirus outbreak halted the season.
When the season went into shutdown, it marked the first time since before high school that he’d had any extended time off from either playing or training.
So enthralled by the game from a young age, Massey began trying to will himself to his baseball goals as soon as he got to high school. He’d shunned other sports he’d excelled at growing up in order to solely focus on baseball.
As a high school kid, he often passed up going out with friends in order to spend the majority of his free time playing or training. Bo Jackson’s Elite Sports in Lockport, also known as the Bo Jackson Dome, became his home away from home.
He’d gone non-stop through high school in order to get to Illinois. In college, he’d gone non-stop through the daily grind of being a full-time student and a full-time ballplayer to get to the minors, fighting through the herniated discs in his final year.
Then the pandemic hit and camp broke with no certainty when it might resume.
He went home to Illinois, weary and ready to get away from the game for the first time in his life.
“Yes, he was different,” Lisa said. “I’ll be honest. I think he was down in the dumps. He worked so hard. He just didn’t understand. Why him? I always told him in life sometimes things happen for a reason and we don’t know those reasons yet, so you’ve got to stay strong, stay committed and see this through and let’s see where this takes you. Don’t give up. There were times he was pretty low, but we were always here for him.”
Ultimately, the time away rekindled Massey’s internal fire.
He credits being around his family and friends throughout the pandemic as a major factor in his rejuvenation. He claims he learned to take baseball off the “pedestal” it had been on for so long in his mind.
He realized the game could be gone in the snap of a finger, and he simplified his daily life to spending time in his Bible, with his family and friends and working on getting healthy and mobile — not lifting heavy weights like a bodybuilder or powerlifter as he had done in college.
Finding his way back
By the time the Royals minor-league players reconvened en masse for the organization’s Fall Camp in Kansas City, he’d started to regain confidence in his body. Just getting through the camp healthy was a huge confidence boost.
The offseason going into 2021, Massey cut way down on the amount of baseball training and continued working on mobility and functional strength. He even integrated boxing workouts into his training regimen and started to learn to play guitar.
“Just stuff to get away from the game, stuff I knew was going to keep me healthy and also, even with the boxing, stuff to challenge my body and my mind a little bit,” Massey said. “Something I know I’m not good at, how quickly can I learn a new skill that I’m not good at so that when [hitting coordinator] Drew Saylor or [senior director of hitting performance] Alec Zumwalt tells me something hitting-wise that I don’t know, how quickly can I process that.”
The 6-foot tall Massey actually reported to camp this year having bulked up to 210-pounds, but running faster and feeling more flexible than in recent years.
He heaped praise and credit upon the Royals staff for guiding him through his back recovery. The training staff was “super creative” coming up with exercises he could do. The strength staff has been “super adaptive” in coming up with a training program that eliminates exercises that might hurt him more than they help.
“I almost feel like I’m getting a second chance at it, which is nice,” Massey said. “A lot of guys would be like your back hurts at 21, imagine how it’s going to feel at 40. I honestly feel like it’s going to be better when I’m 40 because I’m going to take all these precautions right now for the next 20 years that are going to help me throughout my career.”
Last season, he helped Quad Cities win a league championship, and he earned a spot on the High-A Central Postseason All-Star Team.
Defensively, he led all minor-league second basemen with a .989 fielding percentage and committed three errors in 284 total chances.
MiLB.com named Massey an organizational All-Star for the Royals. Baseball America ranked him the No. 15 prospect in the Royals system heading into this season.
“I don’t think I have a word for it,” Lisa said. “There were just days I sat there when I watched him hit home runs when I was able to be there at that field and just tears come down your eyes and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God. Michael, you’re doing it. You’re back!’ It’s a proud moment, a very proud moment for a parent. But even more so for Michael because he did all the work.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
