Thursday, August 28

TAMPA -- Mother’s Day has always conjured complicated emotions for Brewers slugger Rhys Hoskins, who was five days shy of his 16th birthday when he lost his mom, Cathy Reynolds, to breast cancer.

This year, those lingering feelings of loss will be accompanied by a new sense of joy. Hoskins has delighted in watching his wife, Jayme, embrace motherhood since giving birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Rory Jane. 

“I married my wife because I love her, I’ve always thought the world of her. But you learn quick that you have a different appreciation for women when you see them become a mother,” Hoskins said. “It’s not that I’m surprised, by any means, to how she’s taken to being a mother. But it’s just an amazing thing to find that you have no clue what it’s about because you become a parent.

“It’s almost indescribable. Just the way she nurtures and puts everybody before herself. It’s always about Rory or about us as a family. That’s just been an amazing thing to watch, that nurturing side of her comes out instinctively. I couldn’t be more grateful.”

Hoskins knows better than anyone what a mother means to a child. He’s spoken often over the years, including a lengthy discussion during a recent episode of the Brewers Unfiltered podcast, about the lessons of perseverance he learned from losing his mom. She battled breast cancer for 14 years before passing away. 

With age and experience, those lessons are clearer to him now. As a teenager, they were understandably more difficult.  

“My sister and I always have a great conversation on Mother’s Day,” Hoskins said. “Sometimes short, sometimes long, but always reminiscing. As we’ve gotten older, we talk about, ‘What would mom think now?’ Or, ‘What kind of qualities do we see in ourselves that our mother had?’ 

“I think initially, the holiday was not great. But as I’ve grown older, I just have learned to appreciate it differently. It has brought things into my life. And now, it’s a different perspective because I get to watch on a daily basis somebody who is a great mother to our baby girl.” 

It took a team effort to get Brewers catcher William Contreras back on the field for Friday’s series opener against the Rays, with the All-Star determined to continue despite a fractured left middle finger. 

Brewers coaches Néstor Corredor and Charlie Greene spent the past three days performing surgery on Contreras’ catcher’s glove, coming up with a solution to reduce the wear and tear that injured his finger in the first place. While Corredor and Greene worked on gloves, the Brewers’ equipment staff and medical team wrapped his bats with extra padding near the knob, since hitting is what causes the most pain. 

And speaking of the medical staff, Contreras also underwent an injection to reduce the pain and swelling in a joint that he showed off in the dugout prior to the Brewers’ three-game series against the Rays. 

“I’m thinking like I don’t have anything wrong with my finger. I want to keep playing the whole season,” Contreras said. “I worked too hard in the offseason to be on the [injured list]. I’m going to be with the guys. I’m going to be playing. I’m going to be good.” 

He was a lot more optimistic on Friday than he was Tuesday night, when a couple of dropped pitches showed just how badly Contreras was hurting, and prompted the Brewers to take an X-ray to confirm the continued existence of a fracture that dates back to last season. On a scale of 1-10, Contreras said, the pain was at an 8-10 level that night. 

By Friday, he was feeling significantly better. The pain was only in the 3-5 range, he said. 

“He didn’t want to get the X-ray, but the reason we did that is it started to affect his mindset,” Corredor said. “When you see balls clanking off the glove, and when you see William Contreras, three at-bats in a row, swinging at one pitch and taking the other two, that bothered me a lot. He was willing to do the X-ray, but he was making clear that, ‘I’m not going to stop playing.’”

The Brewers figure that the problem originated from the unique way Contreras wears his glove, with his index finger in the slot where the middle finger usually goes, and the other three fingers in a slot designed for two. It helps give Contreras the feel he likes to frame pitches, but the side effect is that when he catches a foul tip or takes a foul ball off the pinky side of his glove, it tends to severely bend back those three fingers, with the middle finger particularly exposed.

So, Corredor and Greene went to work. The solution was to remove the stitches from the outside of the wrist all the way up to the fingertips and insert a stiff material to match what is already on the thumb side of catchers gloves.  

“Charlie and Néstor have taken apart more catchers gloves in the past three days than you can believe,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.

Contreras applauded the effort. 

“That was crazy because they were trying to find different things to put inside the glove,” Contreras said. “And they fixed it. They found the spot to put something.”

“I’m telling you, nobody in baseball has a glove like that,” Corredor said. “I said we have to sell this to Rawlings and make some money off it.”

The real reward would be a return to form for Contreras, who led Brewers regulars with an .831 OPS last season and finished fifth in NL MVP Award balloting. His OPS entering Friday night was sitting at just .689. 

“He’s going to feel it the rest of the way,” Corredor said, “but we did everything humanly possible to try to keep him on the field.”

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