Before Wednesday’s game against the Baltimore Orioles — the Blue Jays’ 133rd in the last 151 days — Josh Donaldson posted a goofy photo on his Twitter account.

Donaldson, flanked by team trainers George Poulis and Mike Frostad, sat like a little kid with his legs stretched out in front of him inside a pair of thigh-high compression boots.

The boots look like something an astronaut might wear, but they were designed by a company called NormaTec to aid recovery in athletes by pulsing and massaging limbs to stimulate blood flow and circulation.

It’s one of the many tools utilized by the team’s training staff to help players endure the rigours of a 162-game schedule.

“We like to throw the kitchen sink at them to make sure we’re doing everything possible,” Poulis, the Jays’ head trainer since 2003, told the Star earlier this week in Baltimore.

Donaldson is one of the most durable players in Major League Baseball. He has played 158 games in each of the last three seasons and is roughly on pace for that total again this year. Only four players have appeared in more games since 2013. “The training staff here do a great job of helping me get my body ready,” he said recently.

As a non-contact sport, baseball is not as bruising as hockey or football, and it’s less aerobically intense than basketball or soccer. But no sport can claim to be a tougher day-in, day-out grind. Thursday was the Jays’ 22nd day off — for players who didn’t participate in the all-star game — since the first full-squad spring-training workout on Feb. 26. Some of those “off” days involve several hours of travel.

“Everybody is dealing with something right now,” Poulis said. “Nobody’s 100 per cent. Of course they’re good enough to play — they’re not in harm’s way — but everybody has some kind of nagging tightness or minor injury that they’re dealing with.”

Donaldson, for instance, tweaked his calf muscle back in April in the second game of the season, which has made this year more trying for him than most. But while he is not running the bases as aggressively as he did last season, Donaldson has managed to limit his time on the bench and has produced at a level on par with last year’s MVP campaign.

Poulis and Frostad are likely familiar to most Jays fans, given their nightly appearance in the dugout alongside the players. But what the training staff, which also includes Jeff Stevenson, does behind the scenes to keep players on the field is less well known.

“I’ve been in the game 27 years and even my mother-in-law and my own mother still think I show up five minutes before first pitch and watch a ball game and then go back home,” Poulis said, laughing.

Poulis and Frostad are often the first ones at the ballpark, arriving six or seven hours before the first pitch and at least an hour before most players. The treatments they perform as part of a player’s general maintenance are mostly geared towards increasing blood flow to the injured area. The oxygenated blood helps quicken healing while washing away any fluid that has built up, Poulis said.

The treatments range from electrical stimulation via laser or ultrasound, hot and cold whirlpools and hands-on therapy where trainers “dig in” on a muscle to loosen it. The team also employs a massage therapist and consults with chiropractors and acupuncturists.

“A lot of it is just maintenance, even if they’re not hurt,” Frostad said. “If they just let their little aches and pains go, then it catches up to them to the point where they might have to sit out for a couple games or more. Our job is to try to keep them on the field for as many as those 162 games as we can.”

They’re also on-call 24/7 for players’ needs, ranging from middle-of-the-night food-poisoning scares to common colds and flus.

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Poulis and Frostad, who have worked in professional baseball for 27 and 21 years, respectively, say they ride the highs and lows of the season with the players, sharing in the victories and defeats.

“But it really comes down to the players,” Frostad said. “They’re the ones that really need to take credit for maintaining their bodies all the way through. We’re just a piece of the puzzle.”

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