Braun, whose combination of power and speed helped him put up some huge numbers in the first six years of his career, believes he’s at the height of his physical powers despite his age and recent injury issues.
“I’ve never been more athletic than I am right now,” said Braun. “I can say that objectively because I do a lot of the same things as far as running, jumping, speed-wise, all that stuff. I’m easily as athletic as I’ve ever been.
“Overall I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything.”
Actually, the whole article does read like a Best Shape of His Life article in that Braun talks about how he laid off the weights due to his offseason surgery and focused instead on agility and core strength and stuff like that, which is classic BSOHL material. Except for when the player in question works on weights and adds “X pounds of muscle” and then claims that he’s in the BSOHL for that reason. It just depends on who the player is and what he claimed last year.
In other news, the beginning of the article includes Braun talking a lot about how, these days, there aren’t as many players over the age of 35 in major league clubhouses and talks about baseball as a young man’s game. Which is accurate. A pity then, that neither subject nor reporter mentions a fairly obvious factor going into the changing aging curves in baseball. Which, given the player here, would probably be apt.