Scottsdale, Ariz. -- Baseballs are jumping off Buster Posey's bat again. The sound is thundering, the distance impressive.

Bang! Hard grounder up the middle. Bang! Drive off the right-field wall. Bang! A ball disappears over the left-field fence.

The sound would be music to the ears of Giants fans if they heard it.

It's 9:30 a.m. on a back field at Indian School Park, and Posey has greeted a warm desert morning wearing a T-shirt, shorts and a loud pair of running shoes designed for Jonathan Sanchez.

His audience Wednesday consists of several Giants trainers, outgoing managing general partner Bill Neukom, who happens to be in town, and four senior citizens who alight from their bicycles on an adjoining path to watch the 2010 National League Rookie of the Year hit.

More than five months have passed since a home-plate collision with Florida's Scott Cousins broke Posey's left leg, tore ankle ligaments, ended his 2011 season and wounded any realistic hopes for the Giants.

Those who saw Posey all summer in a cast, then a boot, tooling around the clubhouse on a wheeled contraption that allowed him to walk on his good leg, would be pleasantly stunned to see him look like a baseball player again, four months before he expects to catch the first pitch of the first Cactus League game not far from this park.



He is encouraged by his progress.




Giants head trainer Dave Groeschner provided the reality check.



Posey plans to hire a physical therapist in Georgia to stretch him out before his workouts and has a friend in that line of work, a back therapist. Posey might see him, anyway.

"My back hurts from picking up babies," he joked.

On Aug. 14, Posey's wife, Kristen, gave birth to twins, son Lee and daughter Addison. In their tiny faces, Posey sees the only blessing to his terrible injury.

He got to spend more time than any player ordinarily would helping Kristen before the births. Better yet, he was in the delivery room and got to bond with his babies for the first two months of their lives. Were he healthy, Posey would have had to satisfy himself with smart-phone video chats from the road half the time.

The Giants were in Florida on Aug. 14 and Posey would have missed the twins' entrance into this world were he not in San Francisco nursing his leg.

Kristen had scheduled a C-section when the Giants were back in San Francisco. Lee and Addison said to heck with that and arrived five days early.

"This is definitely the good thing to come out of this," Posey said. "Obviously, our kids aren't going to remember that. It's more for Kristen and more for myself to be able to share those first few weeks and months with them.


The Poseys have lived in an apartment in Arizona during his rehab and look forward to their homecoming in Georgia, largely because most of their relatives have not met the babies.

Kristen Posey shares Buster's appreciation for the extra home time afforded by an injury "we never would have chosen to happen, by any means."

She also believes the children helped Buster keep a more level head about the fate that befell him. Both said there were no histrionics around the house, no "woe is me," no instances in which Kristen had to go to the movies to escape a Buster perma-scowl.

"Buster is a very tough guy mentally and physically," Kristen said. "I think he's handled it well, but it would have been harder (without the twins). We were able to put things in perspective a little more with the birth of healthy babies."

She sees her husband as "definitely anxious" to play again, but not bouncing-off-the-walls anxious.






Visualizing the past gains him nothing. There is no point dwelling on the collision, and he does not think about how his loss hurt the team.

Posey heard the populace say that his absence killed the Giants' playoff chances, though he is not so sure.

They won until August, he noted, and missed Freddy Sanchez's consistency at bat just as much.

By any reckoning, though, for the Giants to win in 2012, they will need Posey to kiss his babies on the cheek and say so long as he boards team flights for road trips.

The conversation always comes back to Lee and Addison. Asked what his low point was during the last five months, Posey said, "It's hard to have a low point when you have kids born."

All right, then, how about physically?

"Probably one of the most frustrating things," he said, "was when I was getting closer to getting ready to walk and I had a month to go, and I was still scooting around on my scooter or hobbling around on some crutches. There were a few weeks there it was definitely getting frustrating.

"Overall, I think I've been pretty fortunate. I've been in a good mind-set the whole time. It's a credit to the training staff here. I've been lucky."

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