No team pampers its pitchers more than, or as much as, the New York Mets. Limits on innings, games, pitches, skipping starts, giving them an extra day of rest between starts – the Mets do it all. Yet all of the Mets’ starters get hurt, spend time on the disabled list, even have surgery and miss entire seasons.
As if on cue, on the Mets’ second day of spring training last week – the second day! – Zack Wheeler, who missed the past two seasons following what has become popularly known as Tommy John surgery, sat on the sidelines, not throwing with the other pitchers.
The Mets didn’t seem concerned, suggesting Wheeler’s problem was only scar tissue, which pitchers who have had surgery often encounter. The incident, however, clearly signaled to the Mets how fragile their starting rotation could be.
Except for Bartolo Colon, the Mets’ oldest and fattest pitcher, who has since defected to Atlanta, the Mets had only one pitcher last season who started 30 games. That was Noah Syndergaard. Jacob deGrom started 24 games, Steven Matz started 22 and Matt Harvey 17.
Harvey, Matz and Wheeler have all had Tommy John, a.k.a. elbow ligament transplant, surgery, all when they were in the Mets’ organization.
With all of the unwanted experiences they have had with pitchers’ injuries, I asked Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, on the telephone, have the Mets figured out a way to avoid them?
“That’s a good question and I don’t think we or anyone else has figured out the answer to that. We’ve had a lot of injuries. We’ve had a variety of injuries, most dissimilar. We’ve gone from Tommy John to other elbow injuries like spurs and chips to a more recently identified problem, thoracic outlet syndrome.
“I think there’s a general epidemic of injury. The fact that we have some hard throwers may put them in a higher-risk category but in terms of what we do in the off-season, what we do in spring training to prepare pitchers, how we use them during the season, we have been pretty cautious. We’ve used different approaches, like skipping starts, putting a guy on the d.l. before a problem became really serious. But none of those things seem to have inoculated them against these arm and shoulder things. We haven’t had much of the shoulder things, which is a good thing. Elbows tend to be fixable.
“But the bottom line and the succinct answer is no, we haven’t figured anything out to any great degree and we don’t have any answers. We continue to ask ourselves questions about it and look at things.”
This is not the Mets’ first experience with mass pitching injuries. Elbow operations wrecked the so-called Generation K in the mid-1990s. Bill Pulsipher, Jason Isringhausen and Paul Wilson were never able to pitch up to their potential with the Mets.
Alderson wasn’t with the Mets for that debacle, but he can sympathize with the general manager of that time, Joe McIlvaine, now. McIlvaine, in turn, can sympathize with Alderson. Sympathy, however, will not solve the problem.
“In one sense, the answers are going to come from broader studies and larger number of pitchers and their injuries.
Major League Baseball, he said, is studying the problem, as is Dr. James Andrews, the noted Florida orthopedic surgeon, who is considered the ranking expert on elbows since the retirement and death of Dr. Frank Jobe, who created Tommy John surgery in 1974.
“But there’s nothing definitive at this point. There’s some speculation about how these injuries occur and how they foster in teen-age years and in youth baseball, some times before they get to professional baseball.”
Dr. Glenn Fleisig knows more about elbow and other arm injuries than all of us put together. He is not an orthopedist or an orthopedic surgeon but has a doctorate in biomedical engineering, is research director for Dr. Andrews and has researched arm injuries with Dr. Andrews for 30 years.
“What is the No. 1 reason for elbow injuries?” Fleisig asked me in the middle of our telephone conversation last Friday. We were talking about youth injuries.
Having no idea, I guessed that kids damage their elbows by trying to throw too hard and succeeding in throwing too hard.
“That’s the No. 2 answer,” Fleisig replied. “No. 1 is they’re playing more. When I was a kid, we played baseball in summer and other sports the rest of the year. Now, if the weather is good, kids play year round. Travel teams, independent teams have cropped up. Showcases. Now you have travel teams that play 75 games a year.”
Speaking of arm injuries generally, Fleisig said, “There’s a growing number of elbow surgeries and a lower number of shoulder surgeries. It used to be more shoulder surgeries. Then it got to be about 50-50. Now there are more elbow surgeries than shoulder surgeries.”
Elbow operations, he added, have a greater return rate than shoulder operations. “Medically,” he explained, “the elbow joint is less complicated than the shoulder. Elbow surgeries have a greater rate of returns than shoulder surgeries.
“In general,” Fleisig added, “about 80 percent of pitchers make it back after elbow surgeries. About two-thirds make it back after shoulder surgery.”
The increase in the number of elbow operations, “particularly Tommy John surgeries, in the major and minor leagues,” Fleisig said, “has followed a trend that Dr. Andrews and I and others have seen in amateur baseball.
“Since the 1990s we’ve seen what you see in the papers and blogs about where do these epidemics of elbow injuries come from in professional baseball. It’s not a surprise to us in the medical and science community because we saw it 10 years earlier in amateur baseball. Things that were making injuries 10 years ago in amateurs are now making them in professional baseball.”
Despite what appears to be a bleak picture of pitchers and injuries, M.L.B. has produced figures that appear positive. The number of major league pitchers who have undergone Tommy John surgeries has dropped each of the last two years, from 40 in 2014 to 33 in ’15 to 20 in ’16.
In addition, M.L.B., in conjunction with USA Baseball, has created a website, PitchSmart.org, providing tips and guides for young pitchers in an effort to keep their arms healthy.
“M.L.B. is not innocent in this,” said Alderson. “We pay for velocity. So there’s a motivation for kids to throw harder and we play into that.”
As for the Mets’ pitchers, Alderson was optimistic but expressed a cautionary note. “We shouldn’t have any problems,” he said, “but we have to wait to see what happens in the next six weeks as they progress from throwing easy to bullpens to pitching in games and ultimately stretching out in games. That remains to be seen. But right now we’re optimistic and expect they are healthy and ready to go.”
And then the realistic Alderson added, “I was looking for it to happen last year and it didn’t happen. Hopefully it will this year.”
BRING BACK LOU, BILLY AND EARL
Commissioner Rob Manfred finally has said something that I agree with. He said he wants to reduce the time managers take to decide if they want to challenge an umpire’s call.
“I think field managers should be forced to decide more quickly,” he told reporters in spring training last week.”
Managers take an inordinate amount of time now as they wait for their replay specialists in the clubhouse to watch replays and decide if the team has a chance of winning the challenge. If a play is especially close, the replay specialist takes longer.
I can offer Manfred an idea to reduce the time it takes. Eliminate the replay gimmick, and games won’t be delayed at all.
Well, the absence of the replay challenge would bring back managers’ arguments with umpires, but fans enjoy those, especially if the manager is out of the Lou Piniella-Billy Martin-Earl Weaver school.
We don’t know if those types exist among today’s 30 major league managers because replay has eliminated arguments.
If Manfred wants to eliminate dead time, eliminate replays and encourage managers to be like Lou and Billy and Earl.
ILITCH DOESN’T GET HIS WORLD SERIES TITLE
Mike Ilitch, long-time owner of the Detroit Tigers, died Feb. 10 without getting the World Series championship, or at least appearance, he wanted.
Ilitch, the 86 years old, fired Dave Dombrowski in August 2015 after he had served as president, CEO and general manager for 14 years. Ilitch presumably made the move because Dombrowski had failed to produce a World Series champion, and the owner felt time was running out.
Two weeks after Ilitch fired him, Boston hired Dombrowski, and the Red Sox won the American League East title in his first full season. The Red Sox, however, were swept by Cleveland in the division series. The Tigers finished second in the American League Central.
Under Dombrowski, the Tigers reached the World Series in 2006 and 2012 but won only one game while losing to St. Louis and San Francisco.
PITCHER LIKES YANKS’ MONEY BUT NOT THEIR WORDS
Salary arbitration began 11 years before Dellin Betances was born so maybe the New York Yankees’ relief pitcher can be excused for not knowing what the process is like.
“They took me in a room and trashed me for about an hour and a half,” Betances said after losing his case. He wanted $5 million; the Yankees won at their proposed salary, $3 million.
Hearings are conducted privately so we don’t know what the Yankees said about Betances, but clubs will use any negative statistic or other fact they can find, especially when a player seeks a salary Iike $5 million. It’s part of the arbitration game.
The Yankees are not the ones to blame here. It seems as if the pitcher’s agent, Jim Murray, and Murray’s firm, Excel Sports Management, did not properly prepare Betances for the hearing, warning him that he would hear things he wouldn’t like.
In the early years of salary arbitration, which began in 1973, people on both sides were uncomfortable with the hearings. The clubs didn’t like degrading their players because they didn’t want to anger them, and the players didn’t like hearing negative stuff. But salary arbitration was here to stay, and everyone got used to it and accepted it. The players did, especially if they adopted Mike Norris’ view.
Norris was a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics and went to arbitration in 1981. He filed for a salary of $450,000; the Athletics countered with $325,000. Those were pretty hefty figures for that time.
But when Norris was asked on the eve of the hearing how he thought he would do, he remarked, ”Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, and I’ll be rich or richer.”