Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 448: Why Can’t We Have a Healthy Jose Fernandez?

Episode Date: May 13, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the Jose Fernandez injury and talk to Corey Dawkins and Doug Thorburn about the Tommy John rehab process and why pitchers keep getting hurt.

Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure. I told you so. Sun's shining, raining, well, we've been in and been together all your life. Pain and pleasure. Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure. Yeah, yeah. Good morning and welcome to episode 448 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, last year's fastest average fastball was thrown by Matt Harvey, who just had Tommy John surgery last summer. The third fastest fastball was thrown by Matt Harvey, who just had Tommy John surgery last summer.

The third fastest fastball was thrown by Jose Fernandez, who seems likely to have Tommy John surgery imminently. And when we drafted our under-25 starting pitchers last week, you drafted a few guys. You drafted Danny Salazar, whose fastball velocity was right in between those two guys last year and has dropped scarily this year you dropped you dropped jordano ventura who has the fastest average fastball this year and nathan avaldi who is second this year and garrett cole who is fourth this year. Only Garrett Richards is in there. And so I just want to know, are you – obviously our little thing doesn't matter,

so you're not actually worried. But as these Tommy Johns mount, do you start thinking, you know, maybe baseball teams should just start going after guys who don't throw that hard? You know, maybe baseball teams should just start going after guys who don't throw that hard. Yeah, if there were more under 25 Mark Burleys and Bronson Arroyos around, maybe I would have gone for them. I was kind of rolling the dice because we're just talking about a five-year span, and I wanted the people who are burning brightest right now.

But yes, it is worrisome. I don't actually, I can't keep up on what is, it seems like everybody disagrees about everything when it comes to this with pitch counts and with which pitches and how much you can throw them and age, you know, injury nexus and all these things seem like they have their people who are believers and then their people who are discounters. So I can't ever really keep track of what I'm supposed to think is dangerous and what is actually just too paranoid. Velocity, dangerous, right?

That's still considered danger? Yes, all else being equal from what I understand from talking to Dr. Fleissig at ASMI who studies this stuff, what he told me is that all else being equal, velocity is a risk factor. If you have two people with the same mechanics or with equally risky or risk-free mechanics, the guy who throws harder is at greater risk. So it's not a thing where if you throw a certain velocity, you are necessarily guaranteed to have this injury or another serious injury, but it does seem to raise the risks.

All right, so we're going to keep talking about Jose Fernandez for the rest of this episode, but we're going to do it in three parts starting now. We're going to have a guest, and then we're going to have another guest to talk about something different. And then Ben and I are going to talk about a third topic related to this, which is sort of effectively wild-esque, and which you actually might just not want to listen to. So first up, we're going to talk to Corey Dawkins. Corey maintains the BP Injury Database. He's also a certified athletic trainer, we've got the guy that we go to

when we have health questions uh... about other people when we have health questions ourselves we go to a doctor uh... our own doctor uh... corey hi i've been a bit but you know yeah so uh... so it it's not it's not set in stone what's gonna happen with those a bernadette's uh... we don't know that he's gonna have uh... tommy john Yeah, so it's not set in stone what's going to happen with Jose Fernandez.

We don't know that he's going to have Tommy John surgery and that it's going to knock him out for a year. But at this point, Ben and I have talked about how at the first hint of pain, we just assume it's a done deal because we're sad people. And so I just wanted to find out from you what the rehab actually entails. And I have a reason for asking, which I'll get to at the end, but I'm also just curious. I basically know that a year from now, or a year from whenever he goes under the knife,

he's going to be back and he's going to be pitching, and we're all going to be picking him up for our fantasy teams. But in the meantime, in that year, where is he, what is he doing, how long does it take, etc.? Sure. Well, the process has multiple phases in it. After the surgery, the first part is really just to help decrease the pain and get the body ready for healing itself.

So range of motion is limited. They're in a brace. He's not allowed to do a lot of strengthening at that point for the elbow, just because you really need to protect the elbow. And this goes on for several weeks, depending on each surgeon's protocol. But usually for the first two or three weeks, the elbow is fairly well protected. And at around the first month, so around weeks four to seven, is when they start to kind of working towards the full motion. So really it's not until almost two or two and a half months in before they start regaining just their full motion of their elbow. And that's, you know, obviously one of the reasons why it takes a while to get back from these things.

Also starting around that, in that second month, they start doing a little bit more strengthening of the entire arm, shoulder, some elbow. But it's very light stuff. It's working with the athletic trainer or the physical therapist one-on-one. You're not going out there and picking up dumbbells. It's more just very light manual resistance at first because a lot of the muscles attach in that area where the UCL reconstruction occurred.

Moving on to phase three is generally beginning at the two-month mark, and this is really where they start to initiate a lot of some sports activities towards the end of it. But the goal in this area is just to improve the overall arm strength, power, and endurance while maintaining that full range of motion. So around this time, they have special exercises that cause a thrower's tend that a lot of surgeons use at this point. You know, the biceps and the triceps will start to be really focused on exercises to really work the neuro aspect of the rehabilitation are started around this time. And all of these are really kind of progressed on a daily to weekly basis.

It's really not until around the four to five- month mark when they start to do any bit of throwing, even just flat ground throwing. And it's a very staged interval throwing program where the first part is just flat ground, almost kind of working up to long tossing. And then, you know, the second phase, which is usually begun around the six-month, like five to six-month mark, depending on, again, the surgeon's protocol, that's when they start throwing off the mound and just gradually start working their way back up. But it's done a very methodical, slow pace. They have to perform each kind of distance that they throw from multiple

times, and it's really very deliberate, and it's done that way so that they can really monitor and see how the elbow responds to every phase going along the way. Just curious, every once in a while you'll hear about a guy who's going through this, and you'll hear that he's progressing faster than usual. There's been, for instance, with Matt Harvey at various points, we've heard about how fast he's progressing. Does that ever mean anything when we hear it? At what point in this process can you actually tell that somebody is healing faster than usual?

Well, you can tell by, you know, when they reach their milestones. You know, a lot of people, you know, when they reach their full range of motion milestone, if they're able to get that earlier than most people, that's an important part. Once they start reaching, you know, equal strength compared to the opposite arm, that's another important kind of benchmark that that we look at and then you know a lot of times when when the pitchers are going through these uh uh progressions the the throwing programs you know they have to they'll experience some soreness along the way and so they have to kind of you

know take a little bit of a step back before moving forward again and every once in a while you may get one of those pitchers who just does not experience soreness as they're progressing through and that's that's usually when we would hear that you know they're they're really coming along faster than you know most expected and yet there's always the possibility of a setback i, which is also something we hear pretty often, at least until the guy's actually out there pitching. It seems like there is still some reason to hold your breath. Absolutely. Until they've been activated off that disabled list, I always expect to have some sort of a setback along the way, just because it's so incredibly rare. And I can't even think of a picture off the top of my head

to go through each and every step of the rehab phase without having a single episode of increased soreness after throwing or having any problems during the rehab process. It's just so exceedingly rare that until they're actually on that mound pitching in a game situation again, I would just expect to have a little bit of a setback. Not necessarily one that sets them back months or weeks, but just something where you have to calm down a little bit

and then move forward again. The reason I wanted to ask about this is that, believe it or not, until maybe a year ago, I didn't really realize what a laborious process this is, how grueling it is, and really how difficult and how painful it can be for pitchers to rehab from Tommy John surgery. painful it can be for pitchers to rehab from Tommy John surgery. And, you know, I wanted to know if the ability to recover from Tommy John surgery is itself a skill. You know, Jose Fernandez, one of the reasons he got promoted so early is because he was

considered a, you know, a plus plus, an elite makeup guy, you know, really, really, guy, really great attitude, hard worker, driven, et cetera. I'm just trying to figure out whether the reason that some guys come back and some guys don't come back is about their ability to handle this rehab and their ability to do the work, or if it's really just a matter of kind of flukishness, whether you get a ligament that takes and whether the rest of your arm and your biomechanics can sort of handle it. I really hate to be on the fence, but it really does, it has aspects of both.

You know, there are some pitchers that develop more scar tissue just naturally. You know, there are pitchers who the graft does not hold and, you know, it fails because of a biological process. And then there are also those who, you know, when they're going back out there, even though the elbow has passed all the physical benchmarks, it's gone through another MRI with flying colors, but it just doesn't feel right. And, you know, pitchers, they need their arms to feel right in order to be, you know, truly successful. And that's where, you know, I think the elite pitchers, the ones who really come back from this with flying colors,

they're able to get that feeling back and believe in their arm that, yes, my arm is okay. And this is just a little bit of normal soreness, and it's not necessarily, you know, a huge setback. So I think that, you know, personal makeup has a very big role in the, you know, therapy process, especially when it can be so laborious of, you know, going through physical therapy six, sometimes, you know, seven days a week at times, and just going through the same exercises time and time again and seeing the same therapist time and time again. And last thing, you alluded earlier to each surgeon's protocol being different. How many surgeons are there that do this? Or I guess how many are there that do it for major leaguers?

For major leaguers, it's probably just a handful that most go to, but really all of the team physicians are, all the orthopedic team physicians for the major league teams are all qualified to do this. But, you know, certainly you hear people going down to Dr. Andrews, out to Dr. Jobe, his area over there, and obviously Dr. Kremchak as well are the three that really kind of stick out off the top of my head right now.

So, I mean, every major league orthopedic physician is qualified to do this, but it seems like just a handful of them are where the major leaguers are going to at this point. And the perception that guys come back better, come back throwing harder as a result of the surgery or after the surgery, is my understanding of that correct? That effect shows up because we are comparing these guys immediately before the surgery to immediately after the surgery and immediately before they might be pitching hurt to some extent. And also the fact that they are going through this grueling rehab process.

So they are possibly in better physical condition when they come back. And maybe they've had some work done to their mechanics also. So that's part of it i assume exactly you really hit the nail on the head you know it's you know the unless you have a traumatic rupture of the ligament in which you know you have a player collision and that's how you tear it the you know the ligament really degrades over time, over multiple years. So almost always the pitcher will have some change of velocity for the first few years prior to the surgery. And then after they have their surgery,

they've gone through this really hard physical therapy program to really strengthen and get their mechanics right. And now their elbow is back to where it should be. And that's why players will see their velocity increase again. It's not that the surgery itself makes you faster. It's getting everything back to your baseline. And now the pitcher is also more focused on his strengthening exercises. You know, a lot of these pitchers, when they get them, when they

have the surgeries, they're in their young 20s, and, you know, they may not have paid as much attention to their strength conditioning prior to this, but, you know, certainly after having Tommy John surgery, you're very well aware of what it needs to take in order to keep your arm in tip-top shape. All right. Thanks, Corey. We appreciate all that info. Excellent. Thank you very much. scoring and I'm also dishing. Magic long night pipe with no intermission. Put on the DL Tommy John. No more pitching. This is Queens. Watch worse just like the Persians. Giuseppe Disto. All right, so the next person we're talking to is Doug Thorburn. Doug is our mechanics, pitching mechanics expert at BP and writes the Raising Aces column, which everybody should be

reading. It's one of the most fascinating things about baseball on the internet. Hi, Doug. How are you? I'm doing okay. How are you guys? Good. And Ben has already said how he is. So, Doug, correct me if I'm remembering this wrong, but I think like a couple months ago when we were talking, as a hypothetical, I was trying to ask a question about Tommy John frequency, and I asked you which pitcher you thought had the best mechanics, and I wanted to know how often or how much safer he was because of that. And as I recall, you said Jose Fernandez. We might have limited it to young pitchers or stud pitchers or something, and that you

said not much safer. Am I remembering that correctly? I think you're remembering it perfectly correctly. Yeah, I love his delivery and young pitcher, old pitcher, whatever, he's got one of my favorite deliveries in the game. But especially among young guys, you don't see that level of efficiency and power that he's got. But to me that doesn't shield him nearly as much as the popular consensus tends to be with that

kind of stuff i feel like mechanics become the focal point whenever an injury crops up that's pretty much the only time mechanics really are a focal point it seems and everyone goes looking for the cause of injury and mechanics become the root of it and i think that's some of the biggest mistakes we as a collective, you know, a baseball community have made have been drawing false conclusions or, or putting too much stock into one theory when an injury occurs. So,

um, I guess if it's not mechanic, I mean, look, this injury is caused by him throwing a baseball a particular way. Um, so if it's not mechanics, then what... I guess this may be the question is...

I'm worried that the answer is going to be stop throwing baseballs, but what can anybody do? I mean, if you had a Jose Fernandez and your only priority was to keep him from getting hurt, you know, within reason, what would you do? Well, the thing is, when it comes to the mechanics, mechanics definitely play a role. And there are things you can do to help buffer against injury. But there's so many other pieces to the injury puzzle. That's always been my argument is that there's, there's so much to it. And there's so many things that

are double-edged swords i mean throwing hard is the one of the biggest things we look for in pitchers and yet that might just be the biggest precursor to injury you have all this extra kinetic energy going through the system the harder throwers tend to be the guys that get hurt more often and yet you're not about to stop asking guys to throw hard. And so you're always kind of fighting against that wall of potential injury because we're asking guys to do things more and more. We're favoring velocity. And yet that is something that increases the injury risk. Same thing even with mechanics.

I mean, efficient mechanics will help create a buffer against injury, but it will also allow a guy to throw harder or to throw more pitches or to be able to last longer because he's pitching well. His performance is such that we're going to go ahead and let him go a little bit longer. But that then increases the risk by having him throw more pitches and by having him throw harder. So much of it to me, I talk a lot about conditioning and how much that's wrapped up into it. And that's one of those things that we just don't know unless we're actually on the field with the players. We don't know the extent to which conditioning is playing a role. And for me as a coach, that's a huge part of it is making sure that they have the conditioning

and the physical fitness necessary to support how much throwing they're doing. And for someone like Fernandezandez there's just so many things to consider I mean the fact that he throws so hard is a risk factor the fact that he's so young is a risk factor the fact that he's on the you know on the big stage under the bright lights and all of that at such a young age he's pumping it up more than he would be if he was in the minors and they you know that's something that doesn't get talked about very often but just how pitchers really pump it up when they're uh you see it with guys whether it's their major league debut or you see it from players um just as they're reaching higher and higher levels i mean sometimes you get a positive spin on it like what we saw with garrett cole last year in his

development but for some guys you know they just kind of fall off the map and then you've got with fernandez one thing that worried me earlier in the year and i'm not saying this is the cause that would go totally against everything i'm saying here but um i was a little bit worried about his frequency of breaking balls i mean it might be the best pitch in the game as a defector but at the same time he was he had one game he threw 54 of them out of 109 pitches. Overall, his frequency isn't up a ton from last year, but it was for the first month or so. And then his last three starts, he started throwing more change-ups and everything.

But the fact that he's throwing that high frequency of breaking balls and his style of breaking ball, he has so much break on that thing. It means that he's using a high degree of supination, and that is with the palm facing more towards the body and the arm naturally pronates on every single pitch so it rotates away from the body so the more a pitcher supinates preset for a breaking pitch the more the arm naturally has to pronate in order to get to its uh release point or to get to its position after release point during the follow-through so we've always said that there's an MPA thing. It's a pitching mechanics thing that one pitch you want to limit the frequency of is breaking pitches because that does tend to be more taxing

on the arm. And that's assuming guys aren't doing the twist stuff. If they're twisting at the wrist at the end of the release point, then it's a huge risk. So when I see a young pitcher like this, who's throwing that hard and that many breaking pitches of that style, it raises a red flag, but that's all it is, is a red flag. There's so many potential red flags. And these days we're seeing pitchers who are just better and better at younger and younger ages. And at the same time, we're seeing this huge ramp up in injuries. And so, you know, there's a tie in there. But I think we have to be careful about trying to connect those dots with rules of causation that may not be true. So, I mean, it feels when someone like this gets hurt, it feels almost like someone is picking on us, is intentionally selecting the pitcher that we are most excited about and taking him away from us, whether it's…

Like Harvey last year. Right, Harvey or Strasburg or whoever it is, but it's Jared Parker. Sure. But it's not really a coincidence. I mean, what you're saying essentially is that the same factors that make us really excited about a pitcher, he he's young, he throws hard, he has a crazy breaking ball are the same factors that that make him more likely to be the guy who goes under the knife so we're not we're not that excited about the guy who's touching 90 sometimes he's not really wowing us we're not making videos of him and sharing them on twitter and maybe that's the guy who's less likely to get hurt whereas someone like fernandez we love him. He's a sensation. He's

one of the best things about baseball. And that maybe also makes him more likely to be taken away from us. I think that's a fair assessment. Absolutely. That's no fun. Well, it is no fun. You're right. The things that make them so great also naturally make them more risky. And that's been true for generations. But now we're seeing younger players be that much more dynamite. I mean, the youth movement when it comes to pitching is pretty incredible. And it's interesting. There's so many double-edged swords when it comes to the pitching evaluation development game. I think another one is workloads, how we've become, as a culture, somewhat obsessed with pitch counts to the point where we're no longer developing pitchers who are built to withstand 120 pitches. Those guys exist, but we don't know who they are because we're not putting them through the stress test. I'm not saying we

should just put everyone through the stress test, but you know, it's kind of what was, uh, Nolan Ryan was bringing up these ideas with the Rangers and he was really pissed off about pitch counts. And he basically thought we were babying guys. And there's definitely something to what he's saying. There's certain pitchers that maybe need to be babied. And there's certain ones who can withstand the rigors of that. But the fact is, I feel like pitchers are not being, uh, they're not being honed in a way that would allow them to throw 120 pitches. We look at these soft pitch counts all up through the minors, and we're looking at it. It was okay. We're saving their arms, but maybe, just maybe, we're preventing them from building up the strength necessary to throw that many pitches in real games.

And then you've got factors like with Fernandez. I haven't always loved his delivery. When he was in high school, it was pretty shaky, but then he made a lot, a ton of improvements. He worked with certain coaches who helped him out. And you know, what I see now is amazing, but there's something to be said for the fact that he's now recruiting different muscle groups to do what he's doing. So it's not like he's been using this exact same mechanical signature and the same biology behind every single pitch throughout his career. And that is something that he has changed. And, you know, pitchers tend to change year to year. He's had some small ones.

His balance and his posture aren't quite as strong as last year, but obviously he's been fine. He's actually been throwing, he's been striding a little bit more close this year, a little bit more to the, more towards the right side batter's box. And that's something that tends to be signature related. So that's just a little bit weird to me, but it's not a huge concern. Sure, it might be related to what's going on injury wise, but that's exactly the kind of thing that someone will point at and say, oh, look, he's striding more close this year. That must be what happened. And I think that's the danger we fall into.

And whenever a phenom like this gets hurt, so many people come out of the woodworks to claim that they know exactly why he got injured. To me, that sets us back as far as a scientific community and a baseball community, what we can really know going forward. You mentioned the wrist twist earlier. Is the wrist twist, is that something that guys try to do? Does it do something to the pitcher? Is that just a flaw in a delivery that serves no purpose except to put stress on the arm? taught to throw a breaking ball and I didn't learn about the supinated method until I went and worked with Tom house and he showed me the right way to throw a curve ball. And I say the right way, because once you, once you do a supinated curve, you realize how goofy the twist is. The twist is

the twist hurts even thinking about it nowadays. Um, but it's something that the thing is when you're in little league or when you're in high school ball or college ball, or I don't know what it's like to be pitching pros, but even I imagine the little minors, you can get a ton of spin on a twist or breaking ball. And batters can be fooled, but advanced hitters, the thing is it leaves the hand at a different trajectory. It doesn't come out of the hand like on a straight line fastball trajectory. It actually has, it looks like it has a little bit of a hump in it at the beginning of the flight path and advanced hitters can pick up on that. So unless you have insane spin, you're not going to get away with it at the highest level. So

typically the guys who are twisters, they get kind of weaned out through the minors, but some of them still make it up to the majors. And that's just the way they've been doing it forever. And they didn't learn any other way and it's been effective. So they go with it. But to me, that's one of the biggest risk factors a pitcher can have because it's, it's such a blatant strain on the UCL. I mean, you can feel it. Even if you just put your thumb on your, the inside of your throwing elbow and, and kind of do that twisting motion, you can feel that strain on, you know, around that knob. So it's, it's just something that some guys do and some of them never get rid of it. I mean, especially if you've got a

guy with a killer breaking ball, you're not going to try to take it away from him. Um, so it's, it's interesting to me just how there isn't just one way to throw a breaking ball. And we talk the collective, we kind of talks as if there is just one way to do it and even just one grip for it. And really there there's multiple ways to do it. And one way is safer than the rest, but even, even the safe way, the supinated way is tougher on the arm requires more rotation during the high speed forms of the delivery. So it's, you know, it's not necessarily a hundred percent safe. It's just safer than the alternative. You said earlier that obviously we're not going to tell pitchers to not throw as hard. And one of my pet ideas right now, which probably wouldn't work, but I would love to see it enacted,

is that maybe we should, that when you think about what velocity does, that the benefits are obvious, but, you know, there's, it's detrimental in so many ways. It sort of straightens out your pitches. It hurts your durability. It probably hurts your health in ways that go beyond simply Tommy John surgery. It hurts your command and your ability to repeat your mechanics and all those sorts of things. Obviously, and so obviously 95 is better than 93, but, um, I mean, are we sure that it is, is it conceivable that in fact, uh, we will learn that pitching a couple of miles below your max is actually the right way to do it. And that in, you know, 15 years or whatever, baseball will be different because of it.

For some pitchers that might very well be a better way to go about it. But until, until we get rid of the radar gun or until, I mean, you know, if you go to, especially in spring training, you know, any of the backfield games or any minor league games in the scout section, I mean, it's nothing but radar guns. And that makes up 90% of the report is looking at what their velocity is, whether they maintain velocity, whether they spike, what was the differential with their off speed, with their breaking stuff. I mean, velocity carries the discussions all the way through the system. So I think unless we had a fundamental change to the way scouts do their job and baseball teams operate as far as seeing what's happening on the field and they stop valuing velocity. I mean, the best pitchers in the game tend to be the guys who throw really hard. I mean, not all of them. And, you know, we've seen guys like Kershaw and Felix Hernandez who can continue to get better even though their velocity is moving downward. But that's still what everyone's looking for. And I don't think that's going to go away.

And even in 10, 15, 20 years, I mean, that's been the case forever. Well, you know, stories of Walter Johnson's fastball or Bob Feller. I mean, velocity has always been very valued and it's, it makes every single pitch play up. And so I, I don't think we're going to see that not for a very long time, if at all. The unfortunate thing is that when one of these injuries happens, we, we try to console ourselves by saying that there's an 85%, 90% recovery rate, and odds are any one particular pitcher will return to the level he was at before. But we've seen so many of these injuries this year that we are bound to have some of those people fall into the did-not-recover group. I mean, this is something like I think Jeff Passan tweeted

that this is the 34th professional player to undergo Tommy John surgery since mid-February. So even if it's every one and a half out of ten or one out of ten, we're still talking about three, four, or five pitchers who might never come back to the level we are accustomed to seeing them at. And we have also effectively jinxed the Marlins, I suppose, with our conversation last week about how exciting they were and how their success has been built on good pitching. Is there one young pitcher that you find yourself very excited about on a Jose Fernandez-like level

that doesn't do anything really scary? I mean, we've established now that every pitcher is scary, but is there one who you are hanging your hopes on not being the next guy on this list? Oh, man, that's such a dangerous question. It is a dangerous question because he will inevitably be the next. Seriously, yeah. So who am I about to jinx? I'm going to go ahead and jinx Madison Bumgarner.

He doesn't throw exceptionally hard. He throws hard enough. He doesn't have a ton of power in his delivery and he does it very efficiently. His ability to repeat his release point is stupid. You look at his release point graphs on Brooks and it almost looks like one solid point. I mean, he repeats like crazy. And he has a natural cut, a natural sublimation to every pitch he throws, which tells me that maybe he's conditioned that motion over time a little bit better. He might be better honed for that.

I know whether you call it a slider or a cutter or whatever, the breaking pitch he throws isn't that different from his fastball mechanically. So I feel a little bit better about him. But the fact that he throws baseballs for a living makes him not really dangerous. Thanks for coming on. We're glad you came. You got it. I'm sorry it had to be for not a better reason. Yes. Yeah, no.

We'll have you on next week when Garrett Cole and Tyjuan Walker and Yordano Ventura are all... No, we'll have you on to talk about someone just being healthy, someone not getting hurt. There we go. That'd be nice. Okay. All right. Thanks, Doug. All right.

So for the last segment, I'm anticipating a question that I'm just very confident that we're going to get in an email someday, and I'm actually shocked that we haven't yet. I was sitting around today thinking about how there's just no solution to the fact that pitchers are a part of baseball. And then, of course, I thought about all those leagues where there are no pitchers. Millions, well, at least thousands of leagues across America where there are no pitchers, where they just put the ball on a tee and they let them hit it. And so I assume someone's going to ask us this, so we might as well just answer it now.

Obviously, this is not any sort of solution to Jose Fernandez getting Tommy John surgery, but I did get to thinking about what it would look like if you had the choice between having a pitcher and having the option of letting the other team hit off a tee. So this is interesting because I actually don't know the answer to this, and I assume that the answer is completely overwhelming on one side like it's just not even close one way or the other and yet we will never know and in my head I can make a case for either one so you're a major league team the rule comes in letting you choose tomorrow well not tomorrow because you'd have you'd want to build up your roster around a t team if you choose the t but uh you But in five years, you're

going to have the choice. Do you build a team for a T or do you build a team for pitching? Yeah, we were definitely going to get this question. I mean, so explain to me how this T league would work. Well, there'd be no strikeouts and there'd be no walks. Uh-huh. I mean, unless the guy struck out. I'm guessing that wouldn't happen.

But you would get nine defenders that you could put anywhere you want because you wouldn't need a catcher anymore. Or a pitcher, obviously. And so you could put nine defenders and you'd have nine hitters now because you would no longer have to have a pitcher in your lineup. so you could put nine defenders, and you'd have nine hitters now because you would no longer have to have a pitcher in your lineup. So nine defenders, nine hitters to defend.

And yet, on the other hand, you've got the best hitters in the world who have the ball literally on a tee. So the first question, I guess, that we aren't able to answer is how far major leaguers can hit the ball from a tee. And I tried to do some research on this today. Some people saw me do the first step of research today, which is asking a non-sequitur question on Twitter. But I actually couldn't find a good answer. So the crowdsourced answer was not convincing.

It was between about 270 feet and 370 feet that a major leaguer could hit it. I saw some various attempts around the internet at physics. And I saw various players themselves in, you know, like, league message boards, you know, like high school players, et cetera, talking about how disappointing it is to hit a ball off a tee because it doesn't go anywhere. And so, I mean, obviously, if you can hit it 350 feet or maybe 370 feet, well, that wouldn't really work because they would hit a home run every time, right?

Right. And even if you couldn't, even if you could hit it less far and less hard, but you would think you could direct it better. You would think you would. Oh, you certainly could direct it better. I mean, the ball is literally on a tee. You also wouldn't really have any ground balls. You'd have some.

You'd have hard shot ground balls, but you basically wouldn have any ground balls. You'd have some. You'd have hard shot ground balls. But you basically wouldn't have ground balls. And I don't know what you would do about bunts. Because it does seem if you didn't have a catcher, then the bunt would be exposed. But, you know, bunts are illegal in t-ball. So I think that's the answer. This would be boring baseball. this would be boring baseball but well that's ultimately that's what i was i was i was wondering is um if uh i mean it does seem like one of the big problems with baseball is that all of our

all of our pitchers you know lose their arms and it's really you know it sucks to i mean it's very it's very costly it's very expensive teams i'm, I'm sure, hate it. Everybody hates it. We hate it. We're sad today. I was going to ask you, like, is this something that threatens baseball's existence or popularity? Has it reached that point where we clearly, I mean, we wake up every day and whatever young phenom we are most excited about, whatever young pitcher is throwing 95 and striking out everyone and we're super excited about him and we gif him and we talk about him i mean we could wake

up the next day and he could be out for a year or 18 months or or forever which is which is not fun i mean that's that's the way it is but it's it's a shame i don't think it's i don't think it's a threat to the game i i think that what it might be is a threat to pitching. I mean, it might be a threat to the established order of the game. I mean, you could imagine 100 years from now, 100 years a long ways from now, and you could imagine that if they haven't figured out a way to fix pitchers' arms, they might figure out a way to mimic pitching, right, and have, you know, pitching would no longer be done by a

human uh i don't know how you know it's probably not going to happen but you could sort of imagine that they would find more efficient ways to use their money in player development um and you know just create a world where the pitches are like i feel like i've seen some movie where in the future they hit like a hologram ball or something that's thrown out of like a 3d display or i don't know but um i mean that would be boring right like i i guess the the first question that i was wondering about with this is that there is there is no version of baseball that we would want to watch in which the pitcher-batter matchup was not the heart of it, right? You could get rid of the defense

way before you could get rid of the pitcher-hitter matchup, right? Yes, that is the central thing. What percentage of the enjoyment of the game is the pitcher, is kind of focused on the pitcher what percentage is focused on the hitter and what percentage is focused on the eight defenders would you say hmm well it's sort of hard to separate the pitcher and the hitter because if you left the hitter with the t situation i wouldn't find the hitter as interesting as i do probably with a pitcher pitching to him. Well, imagine that there was like an all-time quarterback sort of a situation

where the league pooled their resources and they just had neutral hitters and the game was entirely pitching. Or vice versa. Vice versa, you could imagine the exact opposite and they pool their pitchers and the league is entirely hitting. Which league would you watch i would watch the league average batter league with the with the unique pitchers yeah the pitchers are clearly the the biggest draw for me as a percentage i would say it's probably a plurality i don't know if it's a majority.

I'd say it maybe is like maybe close to 50% or something. I mean, I like watching fielding. I like watching great defensive plays. And I like watching good hitters hit too. But hitting is, I mean, pitching is probably about half of my enjoyment of the game, I would think. Yeah, I agree. I think it's even more than half for me, but it's definitely the largest portion of it. But as we've seen in the three true outcomes era, teams do not care what is aesthetically pleasing.

They care what is the winning mode of play. So back to the original question, which team wins more? And we're going to outlaw Bunce. I'm outlawing Bunce. I'm going to call an audible and say Bunce are not allowed. I'd say that the team with the pitchers still wins more. Really?

I think so. I don't know. I mean, imagine five infielders, even on a tee. Five infielders, would you do five infielders and four outfielders, or would you do like three levels of defense? So like four infielders three outfielders and then two sort of midfielders to to defend against line drives yeah i mean you'd think that in this case though if you leave any wide swath of the field open the hitter can hit it there pretty easily it's not i mean we say that with the shift and why don't batters hit it to the empty left side of the field? But it's not easy to do when you're facing a pitcher.

But when you're facing a tee, you could do it every time, I would think. So that's automatic hit. So, I mean, you'd almost have to maintain a pretty standard defensive alignment, I would think. Well, no, you're going to maintain your you're going to still have probably your four infielders and your three outfielders. The question is whether you simply

space out your outfielders into a row of four, space out your infielders into a row of five, or whether you do three levels, three layers, you know, four, two, three, basically. Move your outfielders back, but keep three of them. Keep your infield three basically move your outfielders back but keep three of them move your you know keep your infielders basically where they are uh maybe back a little because there's going to be very few choppers uh i don't even know if a chopper

is possible uh i don't know if yeah so uh or that boy that would be a skill though swinging but well right that's the thing you'd have to legislate how hard you could swing because the ball would have to clear i think the ball would have to clear some sort of like the basically 30 within 30 feet of the the plate would be foul territory i think uh-huh yeah that might work so why you want to make the argument for the non-pitcher team winning? Why? I just don't know that nine guys. I mean, the size of the baseball field is pretty small. I feel like nine guys could cover a lot of ground. I'm assuming that the home run isn't a factor.

And, of course, the walk isn't a factor. And so the question is, what kind of BABIP does a guy get off a tee? And you probably would have very few extra base hits. So, I mean, you would need a, you probably would need a 375, 380 BABIP, don't you think? Yes, probably. I'm trying to think. I think that this is a saying that they say. Oh, you know what I think they say? I think they say it's hard to hit 400 in batting practice. I don't think they say it's hard to hit 400 off a tee.

No. This is what players sometimes say. I've heard it said. You'd have to think that, I mean, I'm just imagining in my head a montage of Stanton home runs is playing playing and i'm trying to imagine stanton hitting off a tee and it seems like he would be able to yank one down the line over the fence just from a dead stop but yeah we're not going to settle that question right now down the line it does seem like down the line is probably probably. Probably trouble. I mean, if it's unrealistic to expect the ball to stay in the park,

then yeah, we just have a non-starter of an idea. I'm sorry, Bennett. It becomes unrealistic. Right. Up until now, it was really going well. What do you think, though, in 100 years, how has baseball solved this? It's going to be, what do you call those things? The little tiny robots in your cells?

Nanotechnology? Yeah, nanotechnology. It's just going to be nanotechnology. Cyborgs. It'll, yes. I mean. Well, those are, hey, wait a minute. Hang on.

Two very different things. Which is it? Well, I don't know. It'll be some sort of enhancement of your biology. It won't be like putting a piece of metal in, but it'll be like strengthening your ligaments in some sort of organic, natural way. It'll be one of those things where there's no clear line and it's all shades of gray. And what's the difference between LASIK and HGH and all of these distinctions that we are already trying to deal with. But I think that'll be it because right now it seems like the UCL is just the limiting factor.

At least that's what you hear certain people say, that you can make the rest of your body strong, but you can't make your ligament stronger. Some people have naturally stronger ones, but most people have them within a certain sort of range. And the amount of stress that is placed on them is just more than most people's bodies can handle doing this repetitive motion. So it seems like no matter how clean you make your mechanics and how well you're conditioned, this weak link will break. this weak link will break. So I would assume that if that's the case, then at some point, the weak link will be strengthened in some not entirely natural way, because we don't like to see Jose Fernandez get hurt. All right, Ben, what year will the final Tommy John surgery be performed? 20... So I'm in this century. 20... 2039.

Okay, I was going to say 2044. So we'll add it to the spreadsheet of our bets. Okay. All right. So that's it. You want to read the promo? Sure. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference.

Please go to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of 30 and please send us emails for tomorrow's show at podcast at baseball perspectives.com all right uh doug thorburn thank you very much fascinating and uh uh you know i have botched this