GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
he was good for the Marlins last year before the trade with him and Anderson to TB for Stanek and probably others
Friday MLB Discussion Thread
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he was good for the Marlins last year before the trade with him and Anderson to TB for Stanek and probably others
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Yea I was surprised when I looked and saw he started so many games, I can’t remember him for shit. Maybe there some truth to drugs and memory loss. Lol
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
wait what? I don't play totals anymore, but SF was the best under park in the game for a long time and i only vaguely remember some changes in the RF wall. Please explain
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
i urge you to reconsider and play the full game over. Why give up the chance at free runs in extra innings the way it's set up now? Same reason if you're going under you can only go 1H
Timh
CTG Psychiatrist - Dr. Tim
Pitcher injuries are piling up, raising a new concern for teams early in MLB’s delayed season
By
Jesse Dougherty
August 14, 2020 at 1:03 p.m. EDT
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NEW YORK — Sam Freeman fired a pitch inside Citi Field on Wednesday, didn’t like how it felt, and immediately waved an athletic trainer out of the Washington Nationals’ dugout. Freeman, 33, a lefty reliever gripping the end of a winding career, blew a huff of air through tight lips. He rubbed his neck in frustration. He soon told the trainer, Paul Lessard, that he had felt a pop in his elbow, the words no pitcher wants to speak. Then he walked off the field, out of sight, into a rehab program that will unfold like everything else this season, far past the boundaries of a now-forgettable normal.
So far this summer, the Nationals’ transaction log reads like a sign-in sheet to a pitchers-only training room. Freeman is on the 10-day injured list with a mass flexor strain in his throwing elbow. Before him was Will Harris, who had a right groin strain and was activated in Freeman’s place Thursday. And before Harris was Max Scherzer tweaking his hamstring, Stephen Strasburg dealing with nerve irritation in his right thumb, and Roenis Elías going to the 45-day injured list with a flexor strain in his left elbow, a similar injury to Freeman’s.
This is not confined to Washington. The Ringer recently tallied up 30 pitcher arm injuries in the first 10 days of the season, shattering the previous record of 12. That doesn’t even account for lower-body injuries — like Harris’s groin strain — or arm pain that doesn’t lead to an IL stint. Corey Kluber, Mike Soroka and Shohei Ohtani likely won’t throw another pitch this year. Justin Verlander might not, either. Tommy Kahnle, a New York Yankees reliever, has already undergone Tommy John surgery.
Svrluga: Sports in the coronavirus era will require flexibility, patience — and possibly some asterisks
The sport has spent much of this summer bracing against the novel coronavirus. But the schedule it demanded — a four-month break, a three-week ramp-up, stops and starts during a truncated season — is its own, onerous challenge. One goal is to not let it reverberate beyond this year.
“I really need to know if they’re hurting, because we have to think of the future of this organization, too,” Nationals Manager Dave Martinez said Thursday. “I don’t want to get somebody hurt right now knowing these guys are part of our future moving forward. So if they need to be shut down, they have to be shut down. We have to keep an eye on all this stuff.”
Martinez has called pitcher health a “real concern.” He often wakes up and, after checking the team’s latest coronavirus test results, scans injury reports from around baseball. The problem for Martinez, for team medical staff, for the pitchers themselves, is that it is difficult to find the root of this. There’s no way to accurately connect one case to another, let alone a few dozen into a coherent web of information. At least not at the moment.
There is nothing natural about throwing a baseball as hard as possible, over and over, maybe more than 100 times in the same night. And there’s also nothing natural about winding down in the winter, winding back up in spring, hitting a surprise pause in mid-March and, from there, staging a second offseason without the benefit of communal workout facilities. That’s one commonality that’s easy to see.
“These three weeks of summer camp were not enough,” Houston Astros shortstop Carlos Correa told reporters in July. “We have a lot of pitchers that, you can tell when you face them, that they’re not ready.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Minnesota Twins Manager Rocco Baldelli said on a Zoom call with reporters last month. “Does a lot of it have to do with the long break that we had, the differing sets of circumstances that players had to get ready for this season? Probably. The short spring training? Probably. Probably all factors in one way or the other. It’s going to affect every guy a little bit differently.”
Some pitchers threw bullpen sessions in their backyard, enlisting a friend, teammate or local high school player to catch. Others, like Nationals relievers Daniel Hudson and Sean Doolittle, tossed into a net, making it impossible to get real feedback on their pitches. Strasburg pitched to Brandon Snyder, a veteran utility man with the Nationals, and felt good upon arriving to summer training. Then his hand kept falling asleep in the middle of the night.
When Strasburg missed his first start on July 25, he described this season as “kind of a mess to begin with.” That was to explain why he wouldn’t rush back, and instead keep two eyes on the bigger picture. But in the weeks since, Strasburg made his season debut, felt more nerve irritation in his hand in the fifth inning, then indicated that he wants to pitch through it.
That’s dangerous task in any season. It feels even more so now.
“It’s something where I don’t think I’m doing any long-term harm on it,” Strasburg said after throwing 69 pitches against the Baltimore Orioles on Aug. 9. “But it does have an impact on being able to feel the baseball and being able to commit to pitches. That’s something I haven’t quite figured out how to pitch through it yet.
“So I think the goal is to continue to get built up and get the pitch count up to where that won’t be flaring up over the course of the start.”
And that leads to another, ever-present hurdle: Time.
Strasburg doesn’t have much of it. No player or team does. Most clubs have played more than a quarter of their 60-game schedules. Many starters won’t reach a maximum 12 starts, due to injuries, cancellations or postponements. Meanwhile, they are trying to iron out their mechanics, get healthy, see if they can make it through summer and into the fall.
Harris, the Nationals’ right-handed setup man, is trying to tweak his delivery to avoid future issues. He’s identified a past change that led to hernia surgery in March 2019, an abdominal strain this spring, and now the groin strain he returned from Thursday. And he tried to address it during 12 days on the IL, though it’s possible the window was too small.
“I’ve been diving into this stuff every minute of every day for the last two weeks,” Harris said on Aug. 10. “I’m hoping I got something.”
Dave Sheinin contributed to this report.
By
Jesse Dougherty
August 14, 2020 at 1:03 p.m. EDT
Add to list
NEW YORK — Sam Freeman fired a pitch inside Citi Field on Wednesday, didn’t like how it felt, and immediately waved an athletic trainer out of the Washington Nationals’ dugout. Freeman, 33, a lefty reliever gripping the end of a winding career, blew a huff of air through tight lips. He rubbed his neck in frustration. He soon told the trainer, Paul Lessard, that he had felt a pop in his elbow, the words no pitcher wants to speak. Then he walked off the field, out of sight, into a rehab program that will unfold like everything else this season, far past the boundaries of a now-forgettable normal.
So far this summer, the Nationals’ transaction log reads like a sign-in sheet to a pitchers-only training room. Freeman is on the 10-day injured list with a mass flexor strain in his throwing elbow. Before him was Will Harris, who had a right groin strain and was activated in Freeman’s place Thursday. And before Harris was Max Scherzer tweaking his hamstring, Stephen Strasburg dealing with nerve irritation in his right thumb, and Roenis Elías going to the 45-day injured list with a flexor strain in his left elbow, a similar injury to Freeman’s.
This is not confined to Washington. The Ringer recently tallied up 30 pitcher arm injuries in the first 10 days of the season, shattering the previous record of 12. That doesn’t even account for lower-body injuries — like Harris’s groin strain — or arm pain that doesn’t lead to an IL stint. Corey Kluber, Mike Soroka and Shohei Ohtani likely won’t throw another pitch this year. Justin Verlander might not, either. Tommy Kahnle, a New York Yankees reliever, has already undergone Tommy John surgery.
Svrluga: Sports in the coronavirus era will require flexibility, patience — and possibly some asterisks
The sport has spent much of this summer bracing against the novel coronavirus. But the schedule it demanded — a four-month break, a three-week ramp-up, stops and starts during a truncated season — is its own, onerous challenge. One goal is to not let it reverberate beyond this year.
“I really need to know if they’re hurting, because we have to think of the future of this organization, too,” Nationals Manager Dave Martinez said Thursday. “I don’t want to get somebody hurt right now knowing these guys are part of our future moving forward. So if they need to be shut down, they have to be shut down. We have to keep an eye on all this stuff.”
Martinez has called pitcher health a “real concern.” He often wakes up and, after checking the team’s latest coronavirus test results, scans injury reports from around baseball. The problem for Martinez, for team medical staff, for the pitchers themselves, is that it is difficult to find the root of this. There’s no way to accurately connect one case to another, let alone a few dozen into a coherent web of information. At least not at the moment.
There is nothing natural about throwing a baseball as hard as possible, over and over, maybe more than 100 times in the same night. And there’s also nothing natural about winding down in the winter, winding back up in spring, hitting a surprise pause in mid-March and, from there, staging a second offseason without the benefit of communal workout facilities. That’s one commonality that’s easy to see.
“These three weeks of summer camp were not enough,” Houston Astros shortstop Carlos Correa told reporters in July. “We have a lot of pitchers that, you can tell when you face them, that they’re not ready.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Minnesota Twins Manager Rocco Baldelli said on a Zoom call with reporters last month. “Does a lot of it have to do with the long break that we had, the differing sets of circumstances that players had to get ready for this season? Probably. The short spring training? Probably. Probably all factors in one way or the other. It’s going to affect every guy a little bit differently.”
Some pitchers threw bullpen sessions in their backyard, enlisting a friend, teammate or local high school player to catch. Others, like Nationals relievers Daniel Hudson and Sean Doolittle, tossed into a net, making it impossible to get real feedback on their pitches. Strasburg pitched to Brandon Snyder, a veteran utility man with the Nationals, and felt good upon arriving to summer training. Then his hand kept falling asleep in the middle of the night.
When Strasburg missed his first start on July 25, he described this season as “kind of a mess to begin with.” That was to explain why he wouldn’t rush back, and instead keep two eyes on the bigger picture. But in the weeks since, Strasburg made his season debut, felt more nerve irritation in his hand in the fifth inning, then indicated that he wants to pitch through it.
That’s dangerous task in any season. It feels even more so now.
“It’s something where I don’t think I’m doing any long-term harm on it,” Strasburg said after throwing 69 pitches against the Baltimore Orioles on Aug. 9. “But it does have an impact on being able to feel the baseball and being able to commit to pitches. That’s something I haven’t quite figured out how to pitch through it yet.
“So I think the goal is to continue to get built up and get the pitch count up to where that won’t be flaring up over the course of the start.”
And that leads to another, ever-present hurdle: Time.
Strasburg doesn’t have much of it. No player or team does. Most clubs have played more than a quarter of their 60-game schedules. Many starters won’t reach a maximum 12 starts, due to injuries, cancellations or postponements. Meanwhile, they are trying to iron out their mechanics, get healthy, see if they can make it through summer and into the fall.
Harris, the Nationals’ right-handed setup man, is trying to tweak his delivery to avoid future issues. He’s identified a past change that led to hernia surgery in March 2019, an abdominal strain this spring, and now the groin strain he returned from Thursday. And he tried to address it during 12 days on the IL, though it’s possible the window was too small.
“I’ve been diving into this stuff every minute of every day for the last two weeks,” Harris said on Aug. 10. “I’m hoping I got something.”
Dave Sheinin contributed to this report.
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Someone brought it to our attention while back. They had to do something to keep ppl from gathering who could see in from outside the stadium I believe, and apparently that has blocked the normal wind or created some kind of effect cause the ball is now jumping there this season.
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
still too small a sample size for me to make any change in my mind, but i'll keep an eye out as i almost picked up Cueto in fantasy for today's start primarily due to the park.
the ball doesn't travel in that park because it's huge and because of the marine layer, nothing they do is going to stop either of those things without a bulldozer
2daBank
Voice of Reason
The ball is clearly traveling further this season, it had some effect. I think cueto can be good vs A’s lineup tho.
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Bottom of the order really giving them next to nothing. Davis a shell of what he used to be. The pen really good which will win ya a bunch of games. For not hitting a whole lot they in pretty good shape.
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
this matters
number2
Pretty much a regular
check out Jpicks thread I just bumped.......
brewers888
Chicken Little
Just use the mascot its not like the Brewers are capable of scoring more than a run or two off anyone.
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Fuck me. Who pitching, that sucks
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Him and stanton always hurts. These dudes can’t even make it through a 60 game season! Pathetic. Lol
Ryno14
Pretty much a regular
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Lmao. His confidence in his team is infectious!!
I didn’t wanna bother capping mills at this point so I just left it alone. I’m sure I don’t understand why the juice steeper with him opposed to chatwood who been really good other than his last start, seem to have worked out some his control issues:
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
hopefully it wasn't locked in
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
enjoy living under the bridge
Bank is in a violent mood tonight! You dealing in ammunition nowadays?
2daBank
Voice of Reason
Lol. I thought it was watching to much the old Batman tv show. Bang, boom. Pow!!
GWarner27
Meatballin' in Celtics Stadium
oh there's meister @VirginiaCavs
Guten Abend.
