John Lackey is a giant in a very small universe: It includes his wife, and it includes baseball — and even then, it includes just throwing a baseball, really. When a man defines his universe so narrowly, his own range must also become smaller. He has only two possible paths. If he achieves greatness, it will be that rare sort of greatness that only single-minded men can achieve. The risk is that not much has to go wrong for it to seem as though everything is falling apart.

This season, a lot has gone wrong for Lackey, who was supposed to be the always reliable and sometimes spectacular fourth starter for the Boston Red Sox. "Everything in my life pretty much sucks right now, to be honest," he said after losing to the Toronto Blue Jays, 9-3, on May 11. He caught himself before he spilled out much more onto the locker room carpet, but his brief confession still made the rounds. Baseball players don't often open themselves up like that, especially not baseball players in Boston. And worse, no one could tell John Lackey that he was wrong.

His wife, Krista, has been fighting breast cancer.

And now his right arm had failed him, too.

Lackey looked like a man who had just learned that all that he loved in the world was threatening to leave him. "Everything went wrong that could go wrong," he said of the game. "It's pretty much the story of the whole damn year," he said of everything else.

On Saturday, Lackey was back in front of his locker in Toronto, exactly a month removed from his postgame breakdown. In the meantime, he had served a 15-day stint on the disabled list — to give his strained elbow time to rest, and with a cortisone injection to reduce the swelling in the joint — and had returned to pitch a single start, a 93-pitch, 5 2/3-inning victory over the Oakland A's. Now he had just won again, over the Blue Jays, 16-4; Lackey threw 112 pitches over six innings, giving up four runs on six hits. For Lackey these days, that sort of start is a light ...