The Nationals’ comments raised a question in the mind of one man who knows more about reconstructed elbows than anyone. Dr. Frank Jobe did the first such operation on a baseball player, Tommy John in 1974, and hundreds more after that. Commenting on the Nationals’ announced plan to shut down Strasburg after his Sept. 12 start, the 87-year-old Jobe, now retired, said, “They may just be saying that if he has symptoms. If he has no symptoms, they may say ‘let’s try a couple more.’ They can change their minds if they want to.” ···
A reader offered a different plan the Nationals could have used.
“I went through the Nats schedule,” he wrote, “and worked out that they could have made Stras a Saturday-night-special pitcher (once a week), and not affect the rest of their rotation (no one pitches on short-rest).” Using any other day, he added, would not work.
That schedule would have given Strasburg 26 starts for a total of approximately 156 innings, leaving enough innings for the post-season.
However, the member of the organization who told of the Rizzo report on post-surgical pitchers said the Nationals had problems with the various ideas that have been proposed. “They don’t want to mess with him,” the person said.
“He feels great, but they want him to feel great next year. If he’s not pitching, he can’t get hurt and they don’t want him to get hurt. They want him to be healthy next year.”
But looking at the issue from another angle, he added, “The World Series doesn’t come around every year.”
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1. Walt Davis Posted: September 09, 2012 at 05:00 PM (#4231086)Hold on ...
Chass is brilliant. He knows if he writes something that isn't absolutely ridiculous, he won't ever get read anymore, so each column is dumber than the last.
That's the Strasburg argument in a nutshell, people who don't knw what the Nats did to come to this decision, pontificating about it, and misrepresenting his value to make their points.
Agreed. I think, in the absence of hard knowledge, the Nats are just covering their asses. Their "bad luck" the games matter this year.
Murray and Ray; they ain't doctors, but they play them on the internets.
4 is enough?
Fixed.
In all seriousness, it would be tough to root for a team that wasn't thinking about winning the World Series.
They matter every year.
No doctor can say on the basis of medical reports "He is healthy to pitch 160 innings, but you run a significant injury risk now or later if he pitches 200." No MRI or physical or medical examination can possibly conclude that to that degree of specificity, certainly not with implications of liability to the team if they don't follow the 160-inning plan, as KT has claimed.
So we are left to conclude it from this much ballyhooed 50-page study that apparently says "X pitchers had TJ surgery and Y of them pitched 200 innings and Z of them got hurt."
I wonder how big their sample was of pitchers coming off of TJ who pitched only 160 innings.
And frankly, we know so little about pitcher injuries at this point that we don't even know that the time off in the off season matters to a pitcher's health. The entire issue is viewed in IP "per season," but how useful is that cutoff, actually?
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