Lowrie back, optimistic about wrist rehab

Jed Lowrie was sporting two new accessories when he made his first appearance in the Fenway Park clubhouse since his April 21 wrist surgery: A cast on his left wrist to keep everything immobile while he's not rehabbing -- and a goatee.

Neither is likely to be featured on the bobblehead doll that will be given to Portland SeaDogs fans on June 17; Lowrie, who hadn't yet been told that the promotion was officially on the schedule, said he's just hoping that his bobblehead would be more accurate than that of Jacoby Ellsbury -- a bobblehead that was "righthanded and blond," he said.

Lowrie could see for himself if he wants, but he might not be available. Doctors have told him he'll need between six and eight weeks to recover enough to play again, and June 17 will be the day after he hits the eight-week mark.

For now, he's working on strength and range of motion; he's been getting massages and doing stretching exercises to work on both of those things. If all goes well, he expects to start swinging a bat by the end of the month.

"That's really dependent on how it feels," he said. "That's not something that's they can set in stone; it's really how my body reacts to the operation and the procedure and the rehab."

He had a chance to watch the Red Sox on TV a couple of times while he was in Arizona -- and that often was as much torture as it was fun.

"I want to see how everybody's doing and I want to keep updated," he said, "but it was hard watching. My stomach's churning because I want to be out there."

The big question, of course, remains unanswered: Is the wrist issue that plagued him last fall and into this spring fixed for good?

"You can never be 100 percent sure with surgery," he said. "But I feel confident going forward that what I did was the right decision considering that I tried every other option. I tried rest. I tried rehab. I tried cortisone. They worked, but I don't have the luxury of waiting for six months or a year to let the scar tissue form around that bone. I feel like after all of my options were extinguished, this was the right choice."

In theory, surgery could have fixed the issue over the winter so he wouldn't have to be doing his rehabilitation during the season.

But that's not something he's thinking about now.

"It looks like that now, that it would have been a lot easier to do that then," he said. "But surgery is not something I want to just jump into. I hadn't tried the rehab and rest over the offseason, and that worked. It was getting better. But I didn't have the luxury of waiting as long as it takes for it to completely heal.

"Regretting what I did this offseason is a waste of time at this point. All I can do is go forward from here."