It was March 21 when Luis Castillo stepped into the on-deck circle at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers, Fla., for some practice swings, took one cut and watched the weighted donut fly off the end of his bat and smack Twins hitting coach Joe Vavra in the side of the head.
Vavra downplayed the severity of his injury, but the puddle of blood coming from a cut on his right ear kept getting bigger. He went to a hospital, underwent tests, received stitches on his ear and was back throwing batting practice in the cage at the ballpark by the end of the game.
In subsequent days - weeks, even - Vavra began to feel the effects of his head injury more and more. Vertigo set in and lasted for more than a month, and Vavra said it has been just more than 10 days since the dizziness subsided.

While the vertigo lingered, Vavra's thoughts were clouded and his patterns skewed. Nothing seemed right, not simple everyday tasks and not his job as hitting coach. Certainly the Twins' offensive tailspin in recent weeks can't be traced to one particular thing, but that sunny afternoon in Florida knocked Vavra out of his routine, and when his went, Vavra believes some of his hitters' routines suffered as well.

"We had a lot of routines going last year," Vavra said while sitting in the Twins' dugout at the Metrodome last week, "and everybody was locked into a pretty good one, whether it was five, 10 minutes a day. Maybe at the start of the year when I wasn't physically functioning as well as should have, maybe a couple of them backed off."
A few days after the incident, which actually fractured Vavra's skull and caused a deep cut on his right ear, he started feeling nauseous and dizzy. He took a spring road trip or two off and tried to rest, but that's not his nature.

He was back in the clubhouse quickly, with a bandage on his ear to cover the cut and a façade that made people think he felt fine.
For the first two weeks, Vavra said he didn't want to drive at all. When he did, his vertigo would put his world in an uncomfortable spin. At a stop sign, Vavra would put both feet on the break as the cars around him, though stationary, seemed to keep moving.
"I was very unsure of my surroundings," he said.

"Everything seemed to be moving around me. I felt like I could control my balance, but it was like everything else was just a little off-center."
It wasn't just driving. Vavra would reach into the bucket of balls during batting practice, stand up, and things around him would start moving. Or he would turn around too quickly and, again, nothing would stand still, forcing Vavra to sit until the room stopped spinning around him.
Throwing batting practice, he said, provided the biggest challenge.
"I wasn't necessarily out of the strike zone," Vavra said, "but I couldn't control exactly where I wanted to go, which is half of the battle of early batting practice, locating the pitch so that you can work on a certain area with some consistency.

"From analyzing to physically doing the work, it was like I didn't feel like I had the confidence to do any of it. It was pretty strange."
Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said the team's problems at the plate surely stem more from players' injuries than Vavra's vertigo. It was hard to know, he said, when to spell the hitting coach because Vavra never let anyone know he wasn't feeling well until a bout of dizziness had passed.

Gardenhire and his staff easily recognized Vavra's most obvious symptom, though - occasionally he would start talking to himself. He had such a difficult time trying to reach a conclusion that he sometimes talked things through aloud.