On the Lerners
“Then again, they’ve got an owner that is more like Arthur than George Steinbrenner.”
On Strasburg’s father talking to Mike Rizzo
“Do you need your dad to talk to the general manager? You know, that’s sad to me. Is Scott Boras gonna come out? If he talks about Stephen Strasburg, so help me God, I’m gonna go bananas tomorrow night, because this kid is a man. He’s 23 years old, he’s married, he’s making $4 million a year. Speak up for yourself….Nobody’s dad gets involved in their Major League kid’s career. It just doesn’t happen. But it shows you, Tony Gwynn pitched him once a week, every Friday at San Diego State. He goes to Washington, the PR people walk him to the bullpen, almost hold his hand to walk him out there. I mean, it’s just been one thing after another.”
On Strasburg not speaking up
“The one thing that is the resonating idea here is you only get one shot at that ring. And you either want to take it, or you just say, you know what, I’ll do what somebody tells me to do.”
On the J-Zimm comparisons
“What the Nationals are doing, they’re doing it on their own, and they don’t have any kind of data to back it up. And to keep on bringing up Jordan Zimmermann, I’ll bring up [this]: Jordan Zimmermann was rushed to the Major Leagues. Strasburg, rushed to the Major Leagues. Even Drew Storen, rushed to the Major Leagues. All three of them got hurt. So don’t tell me you were protecting them before they got hurt and needed Tommy John surgery. Now after the fact, oh, now we’re gonna hold them back and we’re gonna bring them along cautiously. It doesn’t hold water, the whole argument.”
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Microbrew:
facepalm
What a turd Dibble is. My favorite quotes:
If this were true then pitcher injuries would never happen to anyone. Since every pitcher was once at a point where they had not yet hurt their arm.
Yeah, #### you Rob Dibble.
I don't know what kind of inside info Dibble has, but THAT would make some headlines!
Because everyone knows that Doc Gooden wasn't burned out in anyway whatsoever.
Until you hurt it, 'cause then it's already been hurt!
/yogi
Sooner or later just like the world first day
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away
History will teach us nothing
History will teach us nothing
annnnd diet tab to #11.
I don't think they've revealed all that they know (or at least all the data they're going on), but, from what they've indicated in the press, Dibble's kind of right about this. I've only seen the sports doctors quoted for broader approval of erring on the side of caution, but nothing really firm.
This is all that I'm aware of as well. However, I'd note that I don't see any feasible way for any data to have been collected. The Nationals are essentially in uncharted territory with their approach. The lack of data shouldn't really be that discouraging - they are the data point. Maybe it won't work at all, but I'd rather a team be trying something that's backed with sound reasoning (even if there's no yet data) than just saying, "well, we don't know how to do better than the normal approach, so normal approach it is!".
Adam Kilgore reported out a pretty solid piece on the attitude towards the impending shutdown in the clubhouse a couple of days ago. He said the unanimous opinion from them, both on and off the record, was "we understand why it's happening and we accept it, but obviously we're not thrilled." Jordan Zimmermann has also made it a point to speak up on behalf of the idea, pointing out how critical he now feels his early shutdown last year (under identical circumstances save for a pennant race) was to his remarkable success this year. Paraphrasing him, he said "I hated it with a passion last year, but in retrospect it was the right thing to do."
My guess is there are quite a few players frustrated by it but that their frustration is with the organization, not with Strasburg. He's been pretty clear with the whole "rip the ball out of my hands" stuff that he wants to keep going so unless he's doing a 180 when he's in the clubhouse I doubt the criticisms are of him.
In addition -- and this point has been made by a number of writers already -- it gives the Nats a GOOD reputation with agents and players, not the opposite. The message they're sending here is "we will care more about your long-term health and career than our short-term interests. You are not just a piece of meat to us." The father of Lucas Giolito (the HS pitcher the Nats drafted and surprised the industry by managing to sign) specifically said the other day that the main reason he okayed the idea of his son signing onto the Nationals is because of the rep they had acquired for caring for young pitching arms -- important because Giolito already had an elbow problem that caused him to fall several slots in most teams' draft estimations.
Leaving aside purely ethical & moral considerations, that's a damn good reputation for the Nats to have in the game. Especially given the fact a number of teams -- Red Sox, Mets, Pirates -- have developed toxic reputations for the indifference/incompetence/quasi-malevolence of their medical staff.
The Nationals have used fellow starter Jordan Zimmermann as a model for their approach with Strasburg. Zimmermann had Tommy John surgery to replace his torn ulnar collateral ligament in 2009 and pitched 1611 / 3 innings last year in his first full season back, just over his prescribed 160-inning limit. While that proved successful for Zimmermann, who has emerged as one of the league’s best pitchers, Strasburg won’t be held to the same number.
Did Dibble call out Dibble during his career? Per Deadspin - http://deadspin.com/5620583/rob-dibble-is-trying-to-destroy-stephen-strasburg - Dibble spent the entire 1994 and 1996 seasons on the DL due to injuries which eventually ended his career.
Very true. But that's pretty much Dibble's point. They're making this up as they go along. Maybe they're right, but they're not guided by any real data (that's been revealed) that firmly suggest that this is the way to proceed. (It wouldn't be a big issue, of course, but for the status of the Nats as significant contenders for it all.)
So Dibble raises an interesting point, however inartfully as he might raise it. Let's say the Nats continue to pitch him throughout the playoffs. That might be negligent in some sense; there's a chance he'll get hurt (now or in the near future). But there's nothing willfully negligent about it -- they're not going against all data and logic. How far, then, has the industry come? Wasn't the whole point of pitch counts/PAP/all that stuff a reaction to baseball management willfully riding their pitchers (young ones, especially) into a higher potential for injury? Now we have a team that is so cautious that it has adopted essentially the opposite approach.
Baseball teams now are playing it safe (and coddling their players), while the statheads are saying go for it (because it's all about winning now).
If I were Strasburg, I would also demand to pitch in the postseason, and I would probably be upset with the regular season shutdown if my team were not in such a good position in the standings. If winning a champoinship isn't the most important thing to an athlete, well, I just don't know how to identify with that.
As for the future, what is Strasburg's ceiling now? Its taken him 41 career starts to surpass 230 IP, and he's not particularly economical with his pitches despite excellent control and low hit totals.
Excellent point, I forgot the article already (and it was only a week ago!). It's really a must read for anyone who wants to be well informed on the Nats reasoning. It's from Jayson Stark and can be found here: http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8253442/shut-stephen-strasburg-just-let-pitch
Here's where the important bit comes in (or, at least important to me):
What follows is strong endorsement from some very credible people.
Back to Esoteric:
I concur wholeheartedly with this. That people focus on the effect on player's psyches is entirely reasonable, but the focus being almost entirely on the negative seems somewhat absurd. It seems like almost everyone actually around the team accepts the reasoning behind the decision and grants that it's about doing what's right for the player in the long run (even if we can't know with certainty what that is). The point is, the Nats are trying to do what's best for Strasburg's long term health, and that's sure not something you'll get from every team (as you note).
Alternative read: Giolito signed with the Nationals because they centered their entire draft strategy about carving out the maximum amount of money possible for him to sign. Sure, maybe it was the team's history with recovery that pushed them over the edge. But it was also likely 98% that giant dumptruck full of money.
(related prickish rhetorical kinda question: should an organization get credit for successfully rehabbing all the injuries that seem to pop up in its organization? wouldn't it be better if their players didn't get injured in the first place?)
Also, and to be cold-blooded here: the interests of the doctors are different than the interests of the team. Frankly (and this is just the nature of sports), Mike Rizzo shouldn't care whether or not Stephen Strasburg can still lift his arm above perpendicular in ten years. He shouldn't really even care about that in five. That's not to say you do something that was so obviously abusive as to what happened with Prior. But this is almost to the opposite extreme.
Didn't he also say that he'd have hated it even more if the team had been in the race last season?
They're not planning to shut down Zimmermann. That was last year.
I'm guessing you don't have kids. You never stop wanting to protect your kids. I'm in my fifties; my dad's 92; he's still trying to protect me.
The thing that I don't feel like I'm hearing enough in all of this is that while everybody gets to have an opinion, only one guy actually has the responsibility of making the decision. We don't have to agree with Rizzo to appreciate that distinction.
Oh, keep listening. He's all too happy to tell you himself that he's the decider.
That, and nothing else, is why none of the medical experts quoted will state "yes they should shut him down" or "no, they shouldn't." It would be grossly unprofessional of them to offer an opinion on that matter -- and their peers would most certainly notice.
The low innings per start thing isn't mostly driven by him not being economical; it is driven more by the Nats not letting let him pitch as many pitches per start as other successful pitchers thus far in his career. His ceiling is best pitcher in baseball.
This take might not be relevant any longer, but Joe Sheehan painted an interesting scenario on the Rany & Joe podcast that was taped a few days ago: Rizzo says, "No, that 180 IP (or whatever) limit was for the regular season." Trickeration!
I think most agree that you don't want to drive Strasburg into the ground. And that pitching him too much this year could do that. COULD do that. Not WILL do that. But what are those odds? And what are the odds that even by sitting him, that he won't get injured any way. I hate how much of this argument rests on a single data point: See what they did with Zimmermann?! But see what happened with Joba? What about with Strasburg himself? The team babied him the first year they had him, and he still got hurt. Crap happens sometimes, even if you try to control it. And in this case, we just don't know one way or another what those various percentages and odds are.
Rizzo's banking that the odds of contention this year won't diminish that much, and that the odds of future contention will increase. That may be true, but without knowing or being able to assess the odds for other scenarios, it's not a question that anyone can really answer definitively.
I'm rambling here, but I guess that that's what bugs me the most about this. Much of the pro-shutdown argument IS being framed as if it is definitive. As if those odds have been assessed, and that this definitely IS the right thing to do. It's probably that, more than anything, that chafes me.
I refuse to believe it's as simple as them counting innings. Are they counting pitches? Are they weighing pitches by pitch type and situational stress? Are they tracking pitchFx for bite on his pitches or changes to release point?
There are any number of ways that you COULD track Strasburg to monitor how fatigued he is to help assess a decision to shut him down. The team, for whatever reason, refuses to talk about it.
(For what it's worth, I pulled down some data on Strasburg's curves from brooksbaseball last night. I don't know if you can draw broad conclusions, but his curves are getting much less bite on them now than they were at the beginning of the year.)
Is there some kind of "magic number" of pitches or innings or total stress factor within a given time period beyond which the chances of a guy getting injured go up dramatically? There almost certainly is, but I don't think that there is any possible way to ever scientifically prove what that magic number is for any particular individual pitcher. It's nothing but a guess backed up by some anecdotes from the past.
Not sure how much Joba is relevant because Pudge Rodriguez caused the injury that derailed his path to stardom. Though I suppose you could use it to say "sh!t happens, so might as well get the good while you can."
I keep reading this 10-years line. Sure, it's a hypothetical. But he's only under contract for 4 more years. Again, don't go Prior on him. But where he is in 2019 shouldn't matter to today's decisions.
Maybe the guy is the biggest jerk in the history of jerkiness, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a lot easier to spout off about this on talk radio or a message board than it is to actually make the call.
So Stevie has two daddies? :)
Isn't it more likely that they'd gladly issue a policy and cash the premium checks, but then refuse to pay a claim if you hadn't followed doctors' orders?
There are any number of ways that you COULD track Strasburg to monitor how fatigued he is to help assess a decision to shut him down.
Why would they need to look at game data? The team can examine his pitching arm directly and see how it develops during the season.
If the Nationals think they have the inside track to resign him past those 4 years (and obviously they do think that), then it very much matters how he'll be in 2019. Having Boras for an agent implies that they won't be getting any sort of discount on resigning Strasburg, but it's entirely possible that they'll have the first shot at paying market value.
I'm the last person to make claims for medical certainty after my own experience with cancer stats and outcomes, but then again, the flags fly forever argument seems to assume much greater certainty for the Nats' post-season outcome than the crapshoot doctrine implies.
Too late!
You also get only one shot at $200 million. I'm sure every single player in baseball history, including Dibble, would trade a shot at a ring for a better shot at the huge payday.
I think it's actually a savvy media strategy, and not at all the bloviating self-importance that you're so quick to characterize it as.
It's far too early to conclude that the approach has "proved successful for Zimmermann." The "Joba Rules" had proven successful for Joba Chamberlain, too -- until the very moment his right elbow blew.
There's a lot of psuedo-science afoot with this Strasburg decision.(*) No one really has a clue about the relationship between workload, surgery, and pitcher injuries. As in most areas where there's money in pretending one does, there's plenty of pretending going on. Tommy John pitched 207 and 220 innings his first two years back from surgery and pitched another 2500 innings, and the doctors were -- definitionally -- making it up on the fly.
(*) The blithe and seemingly unquestioned conclusion that overuse definitively caused Mark Prior's and Kerry Wood's injuries is simply nonsense. The case isn't close to proven and the pretense of proof that surrounds so many of these baseball debates is tiresome.
It wasn't too long ago when it was all about Strasburg's inverted W mechanics, and that it was just a matter of time before he broke down, well he did, and now you're supposed to work him more than before? What changed? If anything, shouldn't they be paying even more attention if they can, and being more careful? Ignoring the recovery needs, ignoring the increase in workload, and gambling on just pitching a guy like nothing's happened for the sake of a small percentage advantage in the playoffs is also short-sighted. The difference between Detwiler and Strasburg is what? It's impossible to know. It's impossible to know if he would get hurt after 185 innings too.
Didn't convince Dibble! ;-)
You make a good point. But he could've asked Boras to do him (and Strasburg) a solid by shutting up. There is an element of this where it looks like it's a decision coordinated with (by) the player's agent.
Things snap. Also, pitchers are put on the DL as a preventive measure all the time before things get worse.
It's not like they're going to MRI him after every game.
Do it once a month, you still get a time series to look at.
Poke him with needles maybe? "Does it hurt when I do this? On a scale of 1-20, how much?"
I humbly submit the idea that there may in fact be practitioners of sports medicine that aren't worthless quacks.
If we're trying to get beyond the myths to actual data, can we start by debunking the idea that Prior's injuries were caused by anything 'abusive' done in 2003 (more specifically, the idea that it was the 132 pitch game late in the season)?
He was out for 2 months in 2004 with an Achilles tendon problem. I don't know of any reason to connect that with one game in 2003. He didn't start getting elbow problems until 2005, and the main problem that year was the injury caused by the comebacker off the bat of Brad Hawpe. His shoulder problems first manifested themselves in 2006.
That doesn't mean that Prior was handled correctly in 2003. Just that there is nothing 'obviously abusive' about his treatment that year.
Nitpick -- he's under team control for four more years; his contract is up after this season. The Nats can renew him for 2013 -- I think for around $3M (80% of the AAV of his previous contract) -- and then he's arbitration eligible for 2014-2016.
Tony Rasmus says hi.
-- MWE
Yes.
Mark Prior pitched 211 innings for the Cubs at 22 after pitching 116 innings for the Cubs at 21. Greg Maddux pitched 249 innings for the Cubs at 22 after pitching 155 innings for the Cubs at 21.
Debunked.
Well, sure. But if Zimmermann gets hurt again in 2014, it won't be correct to conclude that the approach failed.
The Joba rules were successful in allowing the franchise to get reasonable value out of a fragile pitcher while gradually transitioning him to the role of full-time starter in MLB, and it kind of ticks me off that this point always seems to get lost. OTOH, if the purpose of the Joba rules was to prevent a recurrence or exacerbation of his pre-existing elbow injury, then they pretty clearly failed miserably.
Then the validity of the approach can't be falsified. That's why the whole area is a psuedo-science.
The Joba rules were successful in allowing the franchise to get reasonable value out of a fragile pitcher while gradually transitioning him to the role of full-time starter in MLB, and it kind of ticks me off that this point always seems to get lost.
If the Joba Rules didn't have as a primary goal trying to ensure that his right elbow didn't blow, they were even more pointless than they appeared on the surface.
If the goal is simply to ensure that his elbow doesn't blow, then you just shut him down. The primary goal was to have him continue to pitch while also reducing the risk of his elbow blowing. And at any rate, the "rules" only existed in August and September of 2007. So if you want to parse things that closely, they succeeded, since he pitched very effectively and his elbow did not explode in 2007.
I wonder if the Nats will let Strasberg sit on the bench when he's shut down in the post season. That would be some fun TV. The guy who's pitching when Strasberg would have pitched is getting pounded, the camera pans to the dugout to see Strasberg sitting there stone faced, then a quick cut to the executive box where Rizzo is checking his Blackberry. That would be awesome. Think of the things Joe Buck could monotone over that sequence while he thinks about the Cowboys-Eagles game he's working on Sunday.
You know, like an adult.
I wish people would stop saying this. The difference between Joba! and ...Joba had nothing to do with Joba Rules and whether they worked or not and starting/relieving. He was injured on a Pudge Rodriguez throw to 2B and has never been the same since.
Minor nitpick, but Prior pitched 167 innings (majors and minors) at age 21, and 234 innings at 22 (regular and post season). Maddux had no minors or post season during the years in question.
Of course, Chicago has had excellent success keeping players, and especially pitchers, healthy. Their handling of Chris Sale, other than the minor blip of sending him to the bullpen for a week in June, has been masterful.
I have to think that there are better ways to go about this, and the Nats are just being stubborn.
Fair enough. Maddux pitched 27 innings at Iowa at 21, so the corrected totals are:
Maddux at 21: 182 IP
Prior at 21: 167 IP
Maddux at 22: 249 IP
Prior at 22: 234
Still debunked.
I missed the Maddux minors numbers. I assumed he didn't and thus didn't check. My bad.
Still, unless I'm missing some sarcasm here, I don't think that even you believe one counter-example is proof of anything.
Pitchers with similar age and use as prior with similar outcomes:
Dontrelle Willis
Oliver Perez
Scott Kazmir
Jeremy Bonderman
Steve Avery
Jaret Wright
Dave Flemming
Jair Jurrjens
And there's probably as many dramatic counter examples like Maddux. C.C comes to mind.
The absurd idea that it's somehow "obvious" and "proven" that Mark Prior's arm injuries resulted from "overuse" and/or "abuse." We've seen it on this thread and it was in a long story in the NYT in the last few days.
Nothing of the sort has been remotely proven. It's troubling to see nonsense so carelessly accepted as wisdom bordering on canonical.
This entire exercise is nothing more than hindsight, data mining, and backfilling. The Nationals have no real clue about the future impact on Strasburg's health and performance of any particular level of IP in 2012. None.
The impression I get is that seemingly the Nats are saying no pitching in September and most certainly no pitching in October. They'll win the division with or without him, but it's tying one hand behind your back to go into the playoffs with your ace on the shelf.
I didn't realize that Strasburg gives up so few unearned runs, but basically close enough.
I see where you're getting the "certainly no pitching in October" part, but if they let him go to 180 he will most definitely be doing quite a bit of pitching in September. Personally, I'd put him in the bullpen for the post-season. And probably use him as a pinch-hitter, too.
This is not Verducci Effect, per se. But I wonder how much of a medical concern is raised going from less than 50IP to over 150IP? If Strasburg were to have thrown 80IP last year, would it change the medical opinion of him pushing 200IP?
Like I said, someone may have written this, I just wonder if there is something to not quintupling his IP from one year to the next
In order to have thrown 80 innings last season, he'd almost have to be a couple of months further removed from his surgery, so I'm going to guess that it would change the calculus (but maybe not for the reason you're thinking).
Wouldn't a team be better served pushing the recovery up front as a means of accelerating his return to 'normal'? (Assuming the team wants that arm back as soon as possible). Isn't a big part of the debate dictated by what is considered a reasonable increase in IP by a pitcher?
If they're not being guided by real data they're idiots. The data is out there for anybody willing to take the time to gather it. It might not be enough data to provide a very good estimate, but all you need to do is:
a) track down the history of TJ surgeries -- if teams don't already have full (major) injury databases, they are idiots; if they don't, hire some interns to go through newspaper archives. C'mon, DL stints are an "official" record.
b) performance before and after TJ surgery.
c) analyse controlling for innings before/after and age.
The sample might not be big enough to tell but TJS is not exactly uncommon.
Then the validity of the approach can't be falsified. That's why the whole area is a psuedo-science.
Sigh. It's probability. Every pitcher has a probability of being injured. The best you can ever hope to do is to reduce the risk. The approach is perfectly valid and not pseudo-science -- the question is how much power does the sample size provide to detect how big of a difference. And then weighing that risk reduction (if it exists) against the cost of that reduction (i.e. the risk of missing the playoffs or not succeeding in the playoffs from the team's perspective or the lost future salary from the player's perspective).
Unless you're going for the generally pointless and obvious point that even if we have strong evidence it works on average in the population, we don't know if it will work for Strasburg. In which case pretty much everything except gravity is pseudo-science.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/08/17/lavar-dukes-rob-dibble-gets-defensive-during-spirited-interview/
Then by all means, let's push this guy as hard as we can.
From day 1 we dont have Morse until late June
Then we lose Werth in May for 2 months with a broken wrist
Then Zimmerman misses two weeks in the spring
We just got Desmond back tonight after missing 3 weeks
Davey finds a way' he plugs in a Lombardozzi in LF for Morse; Bernandina/a-called-up-early Harper for Werth.
When Morse comes back and Desmond goes down Davey then sticks Lombo in at 2B and Espinosa moves effortlessly to SS (he came up as an SS).
And it all works spectactularly; much better than it does in real life most times.
There's a sense that this current group of players is so cohesively glued to one anothers true outcome its almost eerie.
That said, I'm in Rizzo's camp on his call.
He's being cautiously prudent with a very valuable potentially long-term asset of the team.
I wish more GM's valued their assets the same way.
This 2012 Nats team will find a way to win without Stras in late September and into the playoffs.
Unless jackson and Gonzalez turn bad at the last minute, a Zimmermann/Gonzalez/Jackson playoff rotation looks just fine.
If the need a fourth starter, Mr Detwiler will do just fine thank you.
If they lose ground and the race gets close again, they can re-evaluate again. This is assuming that IP/6 months is the quantity most important to limit.
Strasburg's age at MLB debut: 21
Zimmermmann's age at MLB debut: 23
Storen's age at MLB debut: 22
Palmer's age at MLB debut: 19
He had some heart trouble which had been really sapping his energy. He had surgery last year I think, and came out of it feeling much much better and more like his old self. He also had some trouble with family, one of his children died I think.
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