Let me count the e-mails asking me about Pedro Martinez’s arm slot and velocity during the game tonight…and probably more on the way. It’s a bit of a change for me, but after working with Tom House this off-season, I’m not worried about arm slot. If everything else is in line, the arm slot will find itself. Pedro’s velocity is only important in relation to his other pitches. He certainly didn’t look great on Sunday night, but one start isn’t something that should start a panic.
It wasn’t long ago that a new stadium meant a new outlook. With Baltimore and Cleveland as the standard-bearers, almost every baseball team sought to use a new stadium as the road to riches. Of course, they’d gladly tell the taxpayers and signatories that the road to riches would lead to competitive, even championship teams, but it’s seldom turned out that way. New stadiums mean something to medheads as well, but there’s a very small sample size to work with, and it appears that there’s a very small window as well. New parks mean more injuries. This is true in almost every park, but only for a short three-to-six month adjustment period. The effect is scattershot; one would expect it to involve people running into walls or something park specific, but that’s not the case. Instead, it’s just something to note as we get two new parks from which to collect.
For the last decade, pitchers have not feared elbow surgery as they once did. Advances in surgical techniques and rehabilitation have made what was once a career-threatening condition a routine procedure with a predictable outcome. Return from Tommy John surgery has been reduced from two years in the late ’70s to a mere nine-to-12 months today.
The same cannot be said for shoulder injuries. Instead of surgical repair, the best techniques have been those of prevention. Dr. Frank Jobe’s “Throwers Ten” program has led to a reduction in the number of rotator cuff injuries at all levels of baseball, but at the same time, there has been an explosion of a new type of injury–the labrum tear.
Some of the players that the Tigers brought in have some risk to them. Bobby Higginson may not have a light, but he does have a history. He’s another of the Pilates and core performance proponents, but his problems have been in his legs. Dmitri Young has had minor problems, including his back and both Achilles tendons, but again, he’ll be protected since he’s one of few true threats in the lineup. Even Carlos Pena has had problems, but the mysterious sluggingfirstbasemanitis of the wrist hasn’t affected him over the past few seasons. And that’s just the green lights…
The Rockies have become more like a puzzle than a baseball team. While the intellectual exercise is good, the fact is that the problem of winning at altitude has become a lot more interesting than the team itself. While baseball at a mile high should be among the most exciting spectacles in the game–tape measure home runs and plenty of hitting–this team just doesn’t look like anything more than a bad team. The Rockies head into the 2004 campaign with most of the same questions they had last season. Their best players are slightly fragile and their supporting cast isn’t enough to take up the slack when those players inevitably miss games. The pitching staff will be slightly healthier, but Denny Neagle has to be taken into account in the overall assessment of the medical staff.
While the Cubs and Astros are the consensus picks, there are smart analysts out there picking the Cardinals. There are reasons to believe this, but in the immortal words of The Dude, “The Dude cannot abide.” This lineup is not only bright Cardinal red, but a whole bunch of yellow. The second base situation is so bad that comparing it to an Ed Wood movie is an insult to Ed Wood, fuzzy sweater or not. Simply put, this team has the talent to win, but probably can’t keep that talent between the lines long enough to really challenge the Astros and Cubs. As Walter Sobchak would say, “You’re about to enter a world of pain.” Every position player has a light on the Cardinals, something I didn’t think had happened before. I checked and there’s never been more than six lights for the position players, even for AL teams where the DH is included in my lineups. The Cardinals can abide almost any injury as long as it’s not Albert Pujols. Pujols is gaining distance from his sprained elbow, but it remains a concern. His injury risk is reduced at first, but he remains yellow… and yet he’s the least risky player on the field.
The Diamondbacks may not look deep, but they’re one of few teams with solid upper level pitching prospects, they’ve got a deep bench, and they develop pitchers well, if slowly. As they unwind some of the financial machinations that brought them a ring, they’re slowly becoming the type of team fans like to root for–homegrown, but recognizable. Is that good enough to win this season? They should be healthy enough to find out.
For all the criticism that the Devil Rays take–deservedly–for their on-field misadventures, they do medhead well. Over the past three seasons, no one has done it better. How can a team be so bad in most areas and so good in another? The simple answer is commitment. At some point, the Rays management decided that losing players to the DL was unacceptable. With trainers Jamie Reed (now of the Texas Rangers) and Ken Crenshaw and team doctors James Andrews and Koco Eaton, the Devil Rays did the medical equivalent of signing Alex Rodriguez and Pedro Martinez. From the simple to the technical, the Devil Rays’ medical staff has become second to none. It shows. While their dollars lost to DL stats are skewed by the fact that they don’t spend many dollars, they were among the best in days lost to the DL. The question is, do they get enough advantage from what seems to be their one area of excellence? For now, the answer is no. Keeping mediocre-at-best players healthy only keeps a team from plumbing the depths of replacement level.
The biggest question mark on the Angels’ postseason hopes is the back of Vladimir Guerrero. He’s the new poster boy for trunk and core strengthening, coming out of a specialized program to counteract the effects of a disc problem. Like Ivan Rodriguez before him, Guerrero worked hard and showed no signs of any recurrence. He’s been wearing a brace throughout spring training, but it’s merely precautionary. The worst-case scenario is a recurrence which could be treated through similar conservative therapy or surgery. The downside given his value isn’t that great. The biggest actual concern is Troy Glaus. His shoulder, repaired in the off-season, might force him across the diamond. That slot is now held down by Erstad, who’s better off in center according to pretty much everyone not employed by the Angels. For now, Garret Anderson, who has a bum right shoulder, takes center field and faces a situation similar to Bernie Williams’ last season. The injury causes Anderson trouble both throwing and extending his arms and could eat into his power slightly. Anderson moved over to make room for Guerrero and Guillen. Yes, Virginia, it is possible to have too much talent sometimes.
The Red Sox and Yankees are trying to get all of their injuries out of the way…or at least it seems that way. It’s doubtful that these early-season injuries are all that the two teams will have. The pressure of being very evenly matched throughout the season could keep some players on edge and–knowing every game is important–could lead to more diving, sprinting, and colliding in order to get that little extra edge, and potentially more injuries. I’ve said throughout the spring that one of these teams will collapse and miss the playoffs, but I’m not sure which one. Like Vladimir Guerrero last year, a minor disc herniation is becoming a major problem for Trot Nixon. Nixon is following the same protocol–therapy, then injections, then surgery–so the Sox are hoping that like Guerrero, the cortisone injections and a core-strengthening regimen will get Nixon back in mid-May. Use Guerrero as the comp here and you’ll likely be able to spot exactly where Nixon will be back. We’ll know shortly whether the injections worked.
Hiring a state-of-the-art General Manager does nothing to change a team’s health.
Or does it? Is there any evidence that teams like Oakland, Toronto, and Boston suffer less injuries? Is being medically state-of-the-art different than being front-office smart? It’s a good question, and impossible to answer completely. Due to the hidden nature of most of the data, we’re left looking at imperfect measures like Days Lost to DL and Dollars Lost to DL. In these, there is simply too much luck and the data is too easily skewed.
When the Dodgers lost Darren Dreifort and Kevin Brown in the same season, they doomed themselves to the bottom of the Dollars Lost charts even if the entire team had been healthy. There’s an argument that more progressive management never would have given those contracts to those players, but the Yankees are always at risk with the big-money players they have at, well, every position.
Enough debate. Let’s just go ahead and put Leo Mazzone in the Hall of Fame. Coaches of all sorts are criminally unrepresented in Cooperstown, so Mazzone’s decade of instruction in Atlanta is as good a start as any. While Mazzone may only be teaching what he learned from his coach, Johnny Sain, I don’t think Sain would mind. Each year, the question is asked how the Braves will overcome the loss of this pitcher or that pitcher. We look at a bunch of no-names and retreads in the bullpen and through his alchemical abilities, Mazzone and manager Bobby Cox end up in the playoffs again. This year, let’s not debate–Leo Mazzone is the best pitching coach inside the game, bar none.
What will Mazzone work with this year? Once again, he’s asked to overcome the loss of talent as Greg Maddux has moved on. Only John Smoltz is left from the core of the Braves dynasty. Instead of Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Smoltz terrorizing hitters, the Braves will send out Hampton, Ortiz, and…Jaret Wright?
The Royals head into the season with four lefties potentially in the rotation, definitely an oddity. From a health perspective, does this mean anything? Digging into the data, the answer is a simple “no” with the usual caveat of small sample size. Across age spectrums, lefties and righties tend to be within a few percentage points of each other in risk. At times lefties are higher, and at others, righties take the lead. The differences are near random and point to this as something that Royals fans can ignore.
What the Royals cannot ignore is their continuing downtrend when it comes to their medhead stats. They were near the bottom in days lost do the DL in 2003, and were saved by their budget from being near the bottom in dollars lost. It always strikes me as penny-wise and pound-foolish when teams operating under real or imagined budget constraints don’t do more to make sure that the money they’re spending stays on the field.
A change last year from long-time trainer Kent Biggerstaff to a new staff makes it difficult to assess with statistical certainty, but many of the more bizarre medical stories last season came from Pittsburgh. Whether it was the ‘sudden discovery’ of an injury to Jason Bay or the saga of Brandon Lyon’s shoulder, the Pirates’ medical staff raised questions around the league. Coming into the 2004 season, the Pirates will be facing the same challenges. Most of their offense last year was expected to come from the bats of Brian Giles and Jason Kendall. While Kendall remains, his name continues to come up in trade talks. Giles was dealt for, among others, Jason Bay and Oliver Perez, two players with significant injury concerns. While contention in the NL Central probably isn’t possible in ’04, health could be the difference between being bad and being the Tigers.
There’s a number of ways to indicate the bipolar nature of this team, but looking above you’ll see that there’s one big problem that the White Sox face heading into 2004: not enough innings on the board. The bullpen is again supposed to be a strength of the club, but Guillen is again an open question. He at least should have a healthy bunch this season, assuming he doesn’t tax them when his starters aren’t able to go as deep as he’s expecting. PECOTA doesn’t have high hopes for Shingo Takatsu, but at least this pen is deep. In fact, instead of looking for the innings in the rotation, this is where Guillen should be looking. If he could overcome ‘the book’ and start using this deep and potentially very effective pen for longer stretches, he’d be placing his team in a much better position to win.
Every March, there’s some college basketball team that climbs on the back of some player and makes a run deep into the tournament. It happens nearly every year and probably always has, but it’s burned into my memory with the Kansas Jayhawks’ championship run behind Danny Manning. Now known as “Danny and the Miracles,” Manning simply carried an inferior team to the top. Baseball has similar runs from time to time–Orel Hershiser’s amazing run through the 1988 season comes to mind. But as the Giants essay in BP04 shows, General Manager Brian Sabean and Assistant General Manager Ned Colletti are expecting more from Barry Bonds, even as he becomes less likely to be able to deliver. Bonds’ homers may defy gravity, but there’s a point where his body will no longer be able to defy age.