An aside about recovery from injury and its impact on the player and game
It is the time of Spring Training when people begin to think they know the outline of a team, who the top performers will become, and how the season might go.
It happens every year. This isn’t meant to be any kind of judgment or comment or snark, what have you. There just aren’t many things you can take for granted, and especially not elbow health. Jeff Passan wrote in The Arm that any team that figures out how to keep elite arms healthy is pretty much going to crack the code (paraphrased heavily). Looking up and down the Guardians’ roster and reflecting on the number of Cy Young winners under the knife across baseball recently makes his 2016 book feel prescient. It also doesn’t seem like any organizations are close to figuring it all out.
Here are the current Guardians pitchers suffering from injuries of various sorts:
Shane Bieber (UCL)
Trevor Stephan (UCL)
John Means (UCL)
Franco Aleman (hernia)
Sam Hentges (shoulder)
Nic Enright (lat)
Daniel Espino (rotator cuff/anterior shoulder capsule)
I think that’s it. I might be missing people.
And those are the players who felt something, realized it wasn’t worth trying to pitch through or that they wouldn’t be able to hide it, who said something, and went on the IL.
Throwing things very hard over and over again is a leading cause of repeated stress injuries to the arm. This shouldn’t be surprising to anybody. I just wonder if the demands placed on pitchers now make this level of injury and length of recovery inevitable. Conversations from the mid-2010s occasionally included a joke that every pitcher got Tommy John surgery eventually. It felt edgy then but as time continues to pass it is starting to feel like an actual truth.
Should that be required of every Major League Baseball pitcher who isn’t Nolan Ryan?
What if Tommy John’s original UCL reconstruction surgery wasn’t one of the most successful? Would we still reach for leg tendons or cadavers when a critical part of the body tears or snaps? Might pitchers take a more sustainable approach, whatever that could look like, or would the pressure and financial incentive to record outs however possible have pushed things to this point no matter what?
It’s just something I think about as I read and listen and watch players try to come back from traumatic injury for fifteen months at a time. While I’ve never broken a bone or suffered an injury worse than head stitches (which I’ve managed four times…) there were incidents in my life that felt like season-ending injuries in a different way. While they didn’t start from physical pain that certainly became involved because brains are fiercely strange. The universe will, from time to time, level a life. Recovery from that is exhausting, and whether the initial cause is physical or mental they are never wholly separate phenomena.
Coming back from something that sidelines you for a year or more is brutally difficult on its own. Forget the pain or the nagging voice that maybe a little bit of a different approach or more thorough preparation might have prevented it; there is moment-to-moment work as one tries to climb back to their prior performance after the equivalent of a falling rock smashed into them. And you are aware, the entire time, exactly how you used to feel and perform.
Can’t waste time worrying about falling rocks. That’s just a thing that happens. But what happens if young athletes start to decide that the risk of repeated injury and lingering issues after a two or three year relief career (after five or six or seven years in the minor leagues) isn’t worth it anymore? Money is money, baseball is fun, but life is larger than anyone ever really grasps. Self included.
For now it does not seem like there is any shortage of players willing to take the mound while bracing for what continues to feel more and more inevitable. I wish players did not miss as much time due to reconstructive surgeries or severe non-contact injury, but throwing things very hard over and over again is a leading cause of repeated stress injuries to the arm.