After Tommy John, Aaron Barrett adds ankle surgery to his rehab

Late Sunday afternoon, with Jayson Werth sitting on his lap, Aaron Barrett came barreling down the cement floors of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on a motorized scooter. The two zoomed around batting cages and slides on their way to an autograph session while fans hurried to snap pictures.

Though highly entertaining, it wasn't a skit planned for Winterfest. After a tough season of injuries, Werth is healthy. But Barrett needs the scooter after undergoing surgery to repair bone spurs and bone chips in left ankle on Dec. 3. The 26-year-old right-hander revealed that his ankle has been bothering him since the end of the 2014 season.

"There wasn't like a pitch or something I did where it rolled and all of a sudden it happened," Barrett recalled. "I decided to get it looked at last year - during Natsfest - in Baltimore. Then just finally decided under the circumstances that I'm under now, might as well get everything fixed moving forward so I don't do anything with my throwing program or anything like that."

The circumstance Barrett currently is facing is recovery from Tommy John surgery, performed by Dr. James Andrews on Sept. 3. He's in the early stages of the rehab, which is expected to last 12 to 16 months, making this perfect time for the ankle procedure.

"It doesn't affect anything," Barrett said of last week's surgery. "That's the biggest reason why I got it done now because I start playing catch in February and I'll be back to working out in two more weeks. This is an easy rehab. Just the timing of everything, it just makes sense to get this fixed now."

Barrett isn't sure if pitching through the ankle soreness led to his right elbow problems.

"I was getting it taped every day, every game," Barrett said. "I can't sit here and say maybe I didn't have as much mobility on it when I was landing and that's the reason why through the kinetic chain maybe I started having some elbow problems."

But Barrett does believe excessive throwing throughout the season directly caused his need for Tommy John surgery. He isn't the only reliever that has taken issue with how former skipper Matt Williams mismanaged the Nationals bullpen in a detrimental way.

"Warming up, not going into the game and then pitching the next game," Barrett explained. "And then warming up in the sixth inning and then the seventh inning and then pitching in the eighth inning ... things like that over the course of the season. I think I pitched in 30 of the first 60 games and then was hot in 15 additional of those. So when you're hot in 45 of the first 60 games, I think that's a pretty heavy workload. Obviously, I was trying to manage that as best as I could, but it eventually caught up with me."

The life of a young major league reliever can be brutal - have a bad two weeks and you find yourself quickly back in the minors. After an impressive 2014 rookie season where he posted a 2.66 ERA with 49 strikeouts and 20 walks over 40 2/3 innings, Barrett felt the pressure in his second year.

"In my situation, I felt like I didn't have as much leverage to say no when you're kind of the young guy on the totem pole," Barrett said. "And all of us down there (in the bullpen) are competitors and we get the ball every day. You want to be that reliable guy to take the ball every day. You watch Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen and Matt Thornton take the ball every day and you're trying to establish yourself in the big leagues. When you're kind of a younger guy, you kind of don't have that benefit to be able to say no unless you have that five- to 10-year tenure. So it's a fine line to be able to say no. Obviously, it's a learning process for me and I definitely learned that there are times when I'm going to have to say no."

Barrett ended up with a 4.60 ERA and 35 strikeouts across 29 1/3 innings over 40 appearances in 2015 before his season ended prematurely.

"I thought overall I had a pretty good year. Besides, if you take a couple outings out, especially my last outing, I think my ERA is a little bit inflated," he said. "But I was happy with strikeout numbers and my walks were down."

Barrett says he's feeling great with actually more range of motion already than before he had the Tommy John surgery. His recovery is on track with a throwing program scheduled to start in late January or early February. It usually takes pitchers somewhere between 12 to 16 months before they return to the mound in the majors following Tommy John.

"Personally, I'm not circling Sept. 3, which is a year exact from my surgery," Barrett said. "I'm not sitting there saying, 'I have to be in the big leagues by Sept. 3,' because I think I'm going to set myself up for failure. Just because you just don't know if I'm going to be able to come back in 10 months or 14 months. But my goal in mind is that I'm going to work my tail off to get back in the big leagues next year."