Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 456: The Cost of Concealing Injuries

Episode Date: May 23, 2014

Ben and Sam respond to the news about Prince Fielder’s surgery by discussing what teams can do to prevent players from concealing injuries.

Tomorrow I'll be quicker, I'll stare into the strobe light, flicker and I'll float, I'll stay, but I'm quite alright hiding today. Tomorrow I'll be faster. I'll catch what I've been chasing after and have time to play. Good morning and welcome to episode 456 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. How excited are you to be saying an out-of-sequence, or I guess an out-of- how would you say it? A non-multiple-of-five number for the last time. I was going to save that excellent news for everyone at the end of the episode.

But yes, we will be taking off next Monday's show, which means that we will be back on multiples of five. We'll be ending each week on an episode number that is a multiple of five. What's it been, seven months, eight months? Can't have been that long. It's been a while, though, but we're looking at a blissful June

of multiples of five coming up. So that's something to look forward to if you care about that sort of thing. We have many listeners who have no idea what you're even talking about. That's how long it's been. I know. We have a whole generation of new listeners who are completely baffled right now. And lots of old listeners who are still baffled that I care about this. Okay, so while we're alienating listeners,

I guess we can do our daily update on Ryan Webb and Matt Albers. We didn't get to do one yesterday because we had Stan Conte on. So Ryan Webb finished a game without a save on Wednesday, which takes him to 81 career. So he's now two behind Matt Albers, the idol Matt Albers, who has got to, you've got to think that he's rushing back to try to preserve his lead. And I also, I experienced a moment of uncertainty earlier when I thought maybe one of these guys has had a save opportunity at some point and just blew it. Because Albers has 18 career-blown saves and Webb has nine. And, of course, most of them are the kind of blown save that comes in the sixth or seventh or eighth inning.

But you went back. What did you do? Did you comb through game logs or something? Nope. Baseball reference, particular baseball reference play index trick that lets you look at a player's games and you can sort by decision,

or I guess you can filter by decision. So I filtered by blown save and just skimmed the innings that they entered, which is one of the columns, and none of them had entered the ninth inning of a game that they'd blown a save in. Yes, so they have not had a chance and squandered it. They have never had a chance.

Was there any banter that you wanted to bring? No. There isn't. Right now I'm looking to see when our last multiple of five was. It looks like it was probably December 27th. I remember it well. The last and longest show of 2013. Remember that one? Yeah.

That went like two hours. Not quite. So there was one other thing. We talked recently about running to first and the hustle scale Not quite. to Giants pitcher Santiago Casilla, who sprinted to first, trying to beat out a hit while the Giants had a four-run lead in the ninth inning, and he stumbled over the bag, and he tripped and he hurt himself, and I don't know how serious it is.

He had been ordered not to swing. Yes, so that's the funny thing. He had been ordered not to swing, and yet he not only swung, but he did his best to be at the hit. And I, I was thinking maybe he figured this was his only chance to get a hit. Maybe he wanted one career hit.

No, he already has one 2012. He had a hit. So not even that. Um, and so Bruce Bochy said that he would now make it a rule for his pitchers to jog and not try to beat out hits. So that's my recommendation.

There was a moment during the Marlins-Phillies game today when Dom Brown grounded to the pitcher Henderson Alvarez. And Henderson Alvarez very showily kind of took his time. Like he sort of, like he almost yawned. Like, he almost did a yawn and stretch. Like, he didn't, but he did the equivalent of it. Like, in a year, I will swear that he had yawned and stretched because that's so what it kind of reminded me of. And he, you know, sort of took his time.

And then Don Brown kind of took his time and jogged ever so slowly toward first base. And Alvarez finally, like, you know, wound up and flung an obligatory throw over to first. The throw was just absolutely awful. It was like 10 feet off the bag, and the first baseman had to, like, run and catch it. off the bag and the first baseman had to like run and catch it and Don Brown was just sort of like slowly jogging and jogged slowly right into the tag it was like this great no hustle off it was this incredible no hustle off between two champion non-hustlers it's really wonderful it was it was actually changed my mind about the whole thing it was delightful the best part of the cassia play and i just sent you the gif is that you know how when there's a close play at first the first base coach invariably puts his hands up in the safe side or maybe maybe

he doesn't do it anymore because now you could now you can you could actually challenge plays now so they don't have to do the safe sign and maybe they wouldn't want to because they wouldn't want to confuse their manager and tell them that they think he should review it if they don't actually. Anyway, this time Hensley Mullins, who's the first base coach for the Giants, he did the putting his arm up motion, but it was a questioning motion. He was not making a safe sign. He was just throwing his hands up and, but it was like a, it was a questioning motion. It was, he was, he was not making a safe sign. He was just throwing his hands up and shaking his head while Casilla like right on the ground.

I like every part of this, this picture. I like the umpire who sort of like, he hasn't given his out call. So he has to give his out call, but he's just sort of musely staring at this guy who just fell down. And I like that, I guess because there's two outs, the defense is just jogging toward their dugout. But I like how the second baseman just sort of seems to be jogging off into nowhere. So this is a good gif. Latest.

So this is the latest edition of Ben and Sam watch a video that none of you are watching and laugh about it. edition of Ben and Sam watch a video that none of you are watching and laugh about it. A good GIF is one where you watch it 10 times and every time you sort of hope there's one extra second. And this is that one. I just keep on hoping that they'll go one second longer this time. I'll put a link in the Facebook group so that we're not tormenting everyone. Another thing, position player pitching update. I feel like we need one because the other day I made an offhand remark that it seemed like there had been more position players pitching this year. Ben, you're stalling, aren't you?

You don't have an idea. No, I've got an actual topic. But this is quality banter. So there have been. And actually there were 14 position player pitchers last season, which was the most ever. The previous record had been 12, which had been tied a few times. And we are up to 11 already this season.

Yeah, there was a seven-inning one today, which would have been unimaginable in my youth. A seven-run one, you mean? Yeah, a seven- one today, which would have been unimaginable in my youth. A seven run one? A seven, yeah, seven. A seven run one. I actually looked at that also with the help of Andrew Koo from BP. We looked at the average deficit when a position player enters the game. And it's actually not that different this year. Historically, using like a weighted average of when these guys enter the game, the deficit in non-extra inning games has been 10.2 runs. So the team that has the position player pitcher is down by over 10 runs.

This year, it's about the same. It's 9.5. There have been a couple lower ones, but it's not dramatically different. So anyway, i don't know what do you think it means is it just the just the relief pitcher usage is there just so many relievers being used that and and facing fewer batters getting fewer outs that teams are just placed in a position where they are desperate to do this they have to do it or is it that they now acknowledge that they should do it because i mean the astros ben this is the this is look this is the astros was the tigers today

no i know but this is any worse with a knuckleball this is the culture of the astros oh i see it is that is slowly being absorbed in in different areas i mean it's the idea that now all teams are embracing it at some point or another, that there is absolutely no point in expending any resources on a game that you're not going to win or a season that you're not going to win. I mean, this is basically saying that you save all of your resources for the moment when it counts and that the point that the idea of putting on a good show for your fans is irrelevant and that might be

I don't have an, you know, that's fine these are people whose job is to win games it's also to put on a good show so that's why a lot of people are mad at this but I think it's the same basic idea. I think there's an idea that we're all our most efficient machines now. We have to be as efficient as possible.

And they don't owe us anything. They are only playing to win. And it doesn't make any sense to expend a single drop of a precious resource on a lost cause. And it's true, right? I mean, if you somehow calculated the optimal usage here, you'd probably use more position player pitchers, because whether you're down by seven or eight or nine or whatever it is in the ninth inning, your odds of coming back are just, I mean, you know, one in a thousand,

one in many thousands. So, yeah, no, it's true. If you're, you know, I mean, if you're, well, I don't quite know how to phrase this, but yeah, I mean, it is true. It is the optimal way to use things. So back in the, like, 1900s, back when baseball wasn't baseball you know back when it was some weird thing uh they played the bottom before 1980s they played they played the bottom of the ninth no matter what did you know that no yeah they they actually even if you had won the game already

they would play the bottom of the ninth and so i just read this book um that i liked a lot and then i might try to write about by sc Simkus called Outsider Baseball. And this is not where I learned that. But I thought about that fact while I was reading it because it's all about sort of all the outside of the official Major League Baseball during the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. And it's really interesting because such a huge part of these guys' careers and livelihood was playing games that didn't matter. There were just so many barnstorming tours.

Babe Ruth hit like 300 home runs that didn't count in his career because he was just constantly playing these barnstorming tours and putting together his all-star teams to go play you know negro leaguers or college teams or or whatever and um or you know like the the entire yankees team would play you know these like for-profit off-season games against some semi-pro team and it was really interesting to think that there was a lot of baseball that was played at a high competition level with a high degree of intensity that did not have anything to do with the World Series. And at this point, we live in a world where all baseball, all professional baseball played in America. Every game only matters in as much as it affects the parent organization's

chances of winning the World Series. And nothing else matters. And so that's interesting. I mean, to me, that's really interesting that we've gotten to this point where it has gotten sort of more and more serious and more and more, I guess, more and more lucrative and more and more professionalized as the game has been around. And so now we're to a point where you basically have, you know, an entire industry with like hundreds of teams. Hundreds of teams, yeah, hundreds of teams that every pitch that is thrown in every one of those games exists only to advance the parent organization's chances of winning a World Series at some point. And so I think that's why you get Don Kelly or who? Danny Worth.

Danny Worth pitching. I mean, I made a joke about it when it was 9-0 because it was like 9-0 in the third and just I already would have bet anything that there was going to be a position player pitching in that game. But we forget maybe that it was not long ago that, I mean, in 2006, there were zero position player pitchers. Not one. Not one of them pitched.

Not one of them. In 2005, there was one. So two seasons span, one position player pitcher. Huh. And in, you know, 2008, there were three or 2003 there was ones i mean it it has not been a linear rise i mean there there were years where there were more in the past 20 years ago but but there have been years up until recently where where there just weren't any year there were very few and now i mean it's useless to do on pace because i don't think we're actually going

to finish with 40 something position player pitchers this year but really not you don't think so i don't think so well that would just be a such a a sudden change you got to take out september because there will be none in september because you have expanded rosters so in in a if you did a pay a five month. Right. It would shock me. Well, it would shock me. In 2012, there were 12, which tied for the most ever. It was the third time there had been 12 in the last, I don't know, since 77 was when we looked. And then in 2013, there were 14, which was a new high, but only by two. So I'd be shocked if it suddenly tripled this year.

But this is how it works. One manager sees that sees that this is i mean this is the culture it's a cultural shift i think that if there's a if i had to guess what's the difference between 2005 and 2006 and now i wonder if it might be that it took that long for everybody to forget about jose canseco like i think there were a lot of managers a decade ago who thought it was really risky to let a pitcher do this position player do this maybe it is i don't know maybe it is it could be that it really is but my guess is that it's not very risky but that there were a lot of managers who thought it was and it was seen as being somewhat reckless that it was that it was like putting somebody at risk for

kind of like a lark. And now I don't really feel like that's the case at all. You just sort of tell the guy, well, don't know, you know, don't overextend yourself. Uh,

and you know, you very rarely see stars or even good pitchers doing it, but I feel like that was probably always pretty uncommon to see someone of Canseco's caliber at that time. Yeah, probably. Um, so, but, uh, do you at that time. Yeah, probably. But do you think that there will come a point soon where this loses its luster for us?

Is its rarity why we care so much about it? If there really are 30, 40 of these in a year, will Twitter actually go crazy every time? I kind of quit. Like three weeks ago, I quit caring. So I guess so i mean if i'm i'm a i'm i'm very quick to quit caring about something i mean i am the first person to quit caring about things that we should still care about so i'm the canary in the coal mine though right if i quit caring then yeah everybody else will quit caring soon enough um i'll care as long as the the guy

comes out and throws a knuckleball and strikes out two batters like Danny Worth did. I don't – I'm not sure what I'm – see, I think that's why I quit caring is I'm not sure what I'm looking to see anymore. I actually am – I don't really care to see the knuckleball anymore. If I saw a guy who was really dominant, I'd be interested. But more what I'm interested in seeing is the guy who gives up like 11 runs and has to wear it. And that just never seems to happen.

I kind of quit hoping to see the guy who gives up like six home runs in a row, which is what I want. I basically want to see big league hitters batting off of a toddler. And since that never happens, I've kind of lost a little bit of interest. Like I didn't click over to see Worth. I knew Worth was pitching today and I didn't click over. I think I stayed on Giants-Rockies-Rain delay instead. Game could have started again. Exactly.

By the way, there's a video of Drew Butera playing dodgeball against a group of kids and just annihilating them. I saw a reference to that, but I didn't say that it was Drew Butera. It was a segment from MLB Off the Bat, which is a show that I am DVRing and watching religiously. And even wrote about it for Grantland because I think it's really fun and you should be watching it. It's on MTV2 and it's the strangest marriage of baseball and like hip hop and it's hosted by Fat Joe and three other people. Oh, I read a New Yorker talk in the town about this the other day.

CeCe Sabathia was in it. Yes. Oh, I read a New Yorker talk in the town about this the other day. CeCe Sabathia was in it. Yes. Yeah, I read that. Very poorly edited, very poorly produced, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Who's the other guy? Who's with him? Is this Dee Gordon?

Yeah, Dee Gordon. Does Dee Gordon not destroy little kids? They didn't show Dee Gordon firing it the way that Drew Butera was. How much of an advantage do you think a big leaguer would have in dodgeball? Because I'm a pretty good dodgeball player. Yeah. And if you ask me to bet, like, okay, so Yasiel Puig is an 80 at everything, and I'm a 20 at everything in baseball. But if you ask me to bet, I would guess, like, he's a 65 and I'm a 20 at everything in baseball. But if you asked me to bet, I would guess he's a 65 and I'm a 55 in dodgeball.

I would think it's pretty close. I think I could win one out of three games. I don't think so. You don't think? I think the gap is narrower, but I mean, that arm. Plus, he's got to be more athletic. He's got to be able to get out of the way and catch everything and throw really hard.

I don't know if he... How hard... So how hard... Because how old were the kids that Butera was playing against? I think it was in elementary school. Yeah, so any adult could destroy elementary school kids at dodgeball. How hard do they throw? I think that a big part of what good throwers do in baseball, it's in the forearm.

It's in the grip. It's in the hands. And dodgeball takes out a third of your arm or maybe two-thirds of your arm. Basically, it's all shoulder. I don't know. there's a huge difference. I mean, there's so much technique in dodgeball throwing that's not forearm and grip related. I don't know. I think maybe one and three is a bit much, but I bet I could be pleased. I'd like to see that happen someday. Okay. Oh, by the way, Sean Foreman from Baseball Reference, a man with his finger on the pulse,

has added an option to the play index now in the pitching game finder where you can now search for position player pitcher games. There's a new checkbox that says typically a position player, and you can check that to find pitching games by position players. Good. Good stuff. Play index gets even better. All right. So I guess we can get to my topic now. The topic that I want to talk about was inspired by the Prince Fielder injury.

So the latest of many, many injuries for the Rangers this year. injury so the latest of many many injuries for the rangers this year prince fielder is having season-ending surgery uh to fix a herniated disc or uh cervical something or other cervical uh yes cervical yes really prince fielder has a cervix? Not the same thing. But yeah, same word. So he's having season-ending surgery. The Rangers now, by the way, if I can find this, are now up to 458 games missed or games spent on the disabled list, which is about 150 more than the next closest team.

So they have been bitten by the injury bug, as they say. So the thing with Fielder that caught my attention is that this is not necessarily a new injury. It maybe has gotten worse, but it's something that bothered him last season. So he informed the Rangers about this injury. It maybe has gotten worse, but it's something that bothered him last season. So he informed the Rangers about this injury, I guess it was last week, and he said it was just some stiffness in his neck, and they gave him a shot, and they at first didn't think it would be that bad. But during that conversation, he told them that the stiffness had bothered him some during the 2013 season, but that he hadn't told anyone.

And, you know, Ron Washington or John Daniels said that they figured that this was probably responsible for his decline in power last year, his decline in power this year. And so now he has disclosed it, but it's reached the point where he has to have season-ending surgery. he has disclosed it, but it's reached the point where he has to have season-ending surgery. And this is now, this is the third injury in recent days where this has sort of been the pattern, the player divulging something that he had not told the team about. Jose Fernandez had a similar situation where he said he felt a pinch in the start before his final start. He didn't tell anyone about it. If I can find the comments here in the million tabs that I have open here.

He said he felt sore. He felt a little pinch. He did say that pitchers feel things all the time when they throw hard pitches. But he went into pitch knowing he wasn't 100%. He said, I still did it. To me, in my mind, I said, I can't do this to my team. We're still in first place. I'm 100% out for my team.

I can't let them down right now. And he said, I was trying not to let anybody see that I was in a little pain. I was trying to pitch with it without letting anyone know, not even Jared Saltalamachia. And then he says that it's tough that it happened. Nobody can take it back. It's nobody's fault. Sad, but I don't blame nobody. If I blame anybody, I blame myself. And he said he has no regrets. It was his call. Probably wasn't the smartest thing, but this is my team and I give my life to my team. And he says, hopefully I'm going to learn from it. So that's the second case. And then Felix de Brant had a similar case. He had some sort of shoulder injury before he started a game for the Red Sox. He said

he bumped into a car door, which sounds a little bit like a Jeff Kent injury, but that was his explanation of what happened. He said it was a weird feeling. He still went out and pitched, and he experienced discomfort, and he began to show diminished velocity, and he got four innings. I think he pitched into the fifth. He gave up five runs. The Red Sox lost the game, and John Farrell said that he should have said something about it.

We can't go back. If he felt it was that severe, he would have said something about it. In his mind, he didn't feel like it was going to hinder his ability to pitch. So this is not new. We've seen this sort of thing before. Ike Davis had a concealed injury last year. And I'm, you know, we can't say in any of these cases whether whether history could have been altered whether if the player had said something earlier

he could have avoided suffering a serious injury you know if Fielder had disclosed this discomfort that he had last year and had had that surgery say in or October, he'd be back at full strength now. So you can... In Detroit. Right. Maybe, yes. So you can kind of play that game. But who knows?

You know, Jose Fernandez, by the time he's feeling pinches in his elbow, maybe it's too late to do anything about it. But I wonder what you would do if you were in a front office if you were a manager if you were a coach to foster some sort of clubhouse culture where players felt like they could tell you about these things and i asked gabe kepler about this um you know whether he had any experience with this sort of thing with what he felt teams could do and he said that as with anything related to drive team loyalty etc player behavior and inevitably club behavior is highly variable and so is the solution to the lack of injury disclosure but he said that from his personal experience he gave me eight variables that went

into his decision i love gabe kapler me too uh he gave me eight variables that went into his decision when he was feeling something about whether he would say something. So his first, and I don't know whether these are in order of importance or not, but I gather that they are. result? Second one, the needs of the club in the moment. Three, the possibility that the injured area would become more severe and what the long view was based on his personal risk assessment. Four, the time of the season. Five, the current status with the team. Would he lose his starting job? Would a long rehab assignment be necessary? Six, personal mental fatigue. Would a DL stint allow regeneration of energy? Seven, would the decision to be placed on the DL be taken out of his hands if he disclosed the injury? And eight, contract status. So you look at these variables for the three players we're talking about. I mean, for Fielder, certainly contract status is not a part of this. He has his long-term contract. For Fernandez, he doesn't. But, you know, none of these guys was really, particularly

Fielder and Fernandez, in a position where they were in any danger of losing their job or something. You can certainly understand if you're the 25th guy on the roster, then you might not want to give your team any reason to choose the 26th guy who's available to them and is probably just as good when you're at full strength. So why give them a reason? But Prince Fielder, Jose Fernandez, that is not a consideration for them. And Fernandez said that he was doing this for his team. The Marlins are contending right now. He wants to be this for his team. The Marlins are contending right now. He wants to be there for his team.

But, of course, the incentives of the player and the team in most cases, I would say, are pretty closely aligned, right? I mean, especially if it's a player like Fernandez who is, you know, going to be a Marlin for the foreseeable future. He's not an impending free agent or anything. The Marlins want him to pitch now. They want him to pitch in the future. They aren't going to recommend, you know, that he do something that would go against his interests, although he might believe that to be the case if he were not as well-informed as the team, perhaps.

But what would you do? Would you sit players down and have one-on-one talks with them? Would you, is there anything that you can do, or is this just a kind of an institutional hazard with extremely competitive people? Yeah, I'm not, I don't even know how much it's necessarily an extremely competitive people problem uh especially because you know i mean jose fernandez is he's smart enough to know that injuries beget injuries that's how pitching works and um that if he is really extremely competitive and wants to win a lot of games uh in his life then he needs to take care of injuries. Apparently not though, right? It's like –

Apparently it's not. No, I'm going to – I mean I'm going to keep talking and maybe I'll say something. But first of all, it is really interesting because you hear a lot about this in football because in football, nobody's contracts are guaranteed. Yeah. And so if you bow out with a knee injury, they just let you go. And so people just play through it. And I guess the fact that you've named three in the last week doesn't mean that this is comparable to football necessarily.

I don't know how many of these there are in football. Maybe every single player is playing through the equivalent of Felix Dubron's injury. But it's interesting because, like you said, there's no personal incentive for these guys to lie. I mean, like the most obvious answer to this question of how do you make players take care of themselves in the long term instead of just being focused on the short term is, well, give them guaranteed contracts. And there's only one person in the world with more guaranteed contracts than Prince Fielder. So that's apparently not the answer.

I think the thing about it is that you hear these guys say all the time, and particularly pitchers, but everybody, they're playing with some discomfort every day. They're playing with something that is painful or something that is uncomfortable or something that is less than optimal. And I just think that they don't know necessarily how to tell the difference between one of those suboptimal situations and another, and they don't know how to identify. And so it's basically like

not being able to tell the difference between a one-day toothache and you know needing a root canal if you need a root canal there's just no point ignoring it it's not like it's going to go away you need to get a root canal and if you don't get that root canal it's just going to get worse but everybody's had toothaches that went away that weren't root canals that weren't even cavities yeah um and so i just don't know that these guys like it seems to me that the problem might just be that the human body uh playing under a certain level of you know strain every day uh is is just gonna kind of always um have a kind of degree of uncertainty about what is natural and what is a problem.

And I don't know that these guys are able to self-diagnose. I guess if I were to think about a solution, it would really be trying to figure out a way to teach them how to self-diagnose so that they know when a pinch is more than the other pinches. that they know when a pinch is more than the other pinches. I mean, I would try to convince them not to even try to self-diagnose because the thing with going to the dentist, I mean, I understand. For most people, going to the doctor is a pain. You have to take time off from work, and you have to schedule things,

and you have to wait in the waiting room, and it costs money, and maybe you don't have health insurance, and it's a mess. There's a lot of disincentive not to do it if you are a player you have free health care you have trainers whose job it is to tend to your every need you can walk down the hall and say this hurts is that bad you know does this mean anything i'm just checking and and there's a there's probably a culture that discourages this i don't know whether it's like a macho thing or what you know i mean like occasionally you'll hear a player who gets criticized for not playing through pain like i wrote something earlier this year about dexter fowler and the Rockies. And he had a bunch of nagging injuries while he was with the Rockies. And Dan O'Dowd made some comments about how maybe he didn't really want to play.

He wasn't doing his best to be in the lineup. And Fowler defended himself and said, I was hurt and I'm not going to put my career in jeopardy and all of these things. And so maybe there's pressure from the top because because you might not want your players to take the day off every time they feel something because it's possible that if a guy just has some some soreness or something insignificant that he might still be your best option on that day you know if the fall off from him to option B is significant enough, then you might want him playing sore or tired or a bit banged up instead of the other guy. But still, you know, it seems

to me like if you could encourage people to use the medical staff and the training staff as a resource and just defer to them and let them make the decision about whether something that hurts is serious or not i don't know that i agree with you i i think that there's um i mean i think this goes to the fact that well okay so if we start with the presumption that everybody has got something uncomfortable every day and that most players are not injured most days, then what you're essentially setting up is a system for an enormous number of false positives. And then you've got a system that is strained to keep up with everybody, that doesn't quite know how to necessarily find the real positives.

I mean, there's a downside to going into a trainer every day with a non-injury and making him spend time on you, especially if the trainer is prone to be cautious. And every time you go in there with a something that turns out to be a nothing, it costs you a day of play. So I don't actually know that that's necessarily true. This to me seems like the sort of thing where false positives could be really costly and that you want to have something in place to keep false positives from overwhelming your staff. Well, have a bigger staff. You could hire five trainers for what Prince Fielder makes in a week. You could, but Prince Fielder, look, hey,

Prince Fielder probably was going to get hurt anyway. And if you're the Tigers, this worked out perfectly. For you, yes, for him it did. In this case, I guess you could say that makes Dave Dombrowski look smart again. But if he had already been traded to the Rangers or if he had stayed in Detroit, then you could say the opposite is the case. And for every false positive that costs a guy a day,

if you could have Prince Fielder operated on in October and save three to four months of Prince Fielder instead of someone much worse of Prince Fielder instead of someone much worse than Prince Fielder, that would, that would probably help you in the longterm. I would think if you could prevent one Tommy John surgery for an ace, you know, I think in October, every single ligament and joint and everything in every player should just be replaced you should just get a brand new one just new new body in october well that's the other question the the rangers have taken some heat for not finding out about this on their own which i think is probably unfair he fielder did not undergo a

full physical at the time of the trade i don don't know whether he had had one recently. Of course, they had access to his medical records and everything, and the Tigers didn't know about this. So they did not subject him to a full physical, and even if they had, he had a physical in spring training. This is not necessarily the sort of thing that a physical would pick up unless the player said something, unless he said, I'm,

I'm experiencing some stiffness or weakness or whatever it is. Um, Daniel said in this case, a cervical MRI, at least for us has not been part of our standard physical, a guy that had no history and no documentation, no treatment and no issues that anyone was aware of. Had we done a physical, we wouldn't have done a cervical MRI. And then he says, there may be other clubs that do this as standard practice. We're going to look into that. The bigger question is how do we get better? So that's the other question, I guess, is if you can't necessarily trust players to tell you what they're feeling, then do you just operate under the assumption that everyone is hiding an injury? And when you make a major move that could cost you millions of dollars, if the guy is hurt or,

or tank a season, if the guy is hurt, do you just subject him to every test under the sun to find something that he might not have told you about? Maybe. And also maybe at the risk of opening up a whole new branch of infinite false positives, maybe we're just getting to the point where a team with hit FX and field FX and all the other FXs will be able to spot it.

I mean, it was clear. In retrospect, it was clear in Prince Fielder's performance. Now, it's also clear in lots of other players' performance who don't need cervical surgery or whatever. I mean, lots of players go downhill, decline, just like Prince Fielder did. So it's hard to separate the one who has cervical cancer or whatever from the other. What does he have? You are just mangling your anatomy today. He needs cervical surgery, though.

Yes. So cervical is the adjective for of or relating to the cervix. So cervical cancer is cancer of the cervix. Cervical surgery is... No cancer involved here. No, I know, but cervical surgery then would be surgery of the cervix cervix is the one of the parts of the female reproductive system that lies between the body uterus and vagina i believe that there are cervical vertebrae in the back that aren't

distinct i think we need to we need to have cory dockins on too we need to send you to like send you to like sex ed class or something you need to send me you're the one who's talking about prince fielder cervix then you're right maybe we should both go uh so anyway the point is that um i don't know know, maybe all I'm saying is that maybe in 15 years in the dystopian futuristic landscape, this will all be irrelevant because you'll be able to tell in like three plate appearances via the various FXs who's performing suboptimally. We were talking about, right, when we were talking about Robert Arthur's stuff on how pitchers have pitched to hitters and whether we can tell from how players are pitching to other players whether those players are hurt or are declining or something. have an advanced scout who's following a player on a team and you're looking at all the numbers that you should be able to pick up on this sort of thing right but but fielder was hiding a pretty serious injury that was clearly affecting his performance and but robert wasn't fielder one of arthur's breakdown candidates uh was he i don't know i think he was i'm gonna look and we'll edit this out if he wasn't that'd be embarrassing for everybody but

i think i think he was uh let's see by the way that piece was great yeah did you read that piece having edited yes that piece is so good these pieces are so like his last three pieces i think are like the highlight of the seat of the site over the last two years i just think they're so they're so exciting and awesome i I can't recommend them enough. Yeah, Prince Fielder was one of his breakdown candidates. Okay, so that's interesting. So does that make you question Rangers' scouting ability, that they were not able to pick up on this living, serious injury?

No, I mean, the thing is that, I mean, you know, even if you think, okay, well, there's X percent chance that Prince Fielder is injured and is going to need surgery and it might ruin his career, but there's X percent chance that he's not and this is a fluke, and so you just play your odds. The fact is that the Rangers needed Fielder more than they needed Kinsler. The trade made sense. Maybe it made enough sense overwhelmingly to even ignore this problem. Maybe they could have looked at this and said, triple the medicals, triple the physicals. So I guess in that sense, yes. But, you know, you've just got to weigh the risks here.

I mean, look, you know who else was on Robert Arthur's breakdown list? Troy Tulewitzki. He has a very good, he explains why very well. yes so you should read that this article is very good so but anyway the point is just that it's you know baseball is very complicated it's very hard to say anything inclusively can you say that the Rangers did something wrong probably yeah you can probably say the Rangers did something wrong I would say in this case does it mean that they have something systemically wrong? Probably not. Hot take. Relatively hot take. Someone did something wrong. Well, I asked Russell Carlton about this also, just because he's written a lot about clubhouse chemistry and players' psyches.

And he made the point that, first of all, these are overwhelmingly young guys, not so young in Fielder's case, but certainly in Fernandez's case. He is he's 21 years old and Russell has written before about how you don't even finish maturing mentally until you're older than that. And so at that age, maybe you're not necessarily thinking long term. And he also he made the the macho pride point you don't want to be the the guy who's seen heading into the trainer's room every time he feels a twinge uh because you get a reputation is not tough enough so russell said that you would have to you'd have to sell it as you are doing this for the team right you'd have to turn it on its head, sort of.

Fernandez said that he didn't say anything about the injury because he wanted to help his team. He wanted to keep pitching. So you'd have to somehow convey the message that that is the opposite of helping a team, that the best way that you could help the team is by disclosing whatever pain you are feeling so that you can continue to pitch.

I don't know everything. I don't know what's going on in these guys brains but i have to just say to me this sounds like an answer that you give because it sounds good but i don't really buy it i think the guys go into the trainer's room all the time for for whatever reason i mean everybody knows that uh you know being gone for three months is bad for the team uh my guess is that this is not actually part of their calculus if they feel like there's a problem and they feel like something needs to be taken care of they i mean look half the league's on the dl right now how did those guys all end up on the dl they went to the trainer right right yeah i mean eventually you you get to that point you You just want to, if you can, stop it before it does get to that point wherever possible. I don't know. It's something that I would, and I talked to Jamie Reed, who's the Rangers trainer, when I was writing something about concussions earlier, and I was asking him how he tries to get people to reveal these things because concussion is not necessarily something you can tell by looking at someone.

You have to have the player come forward often. So he said that more and more he has emphasized that. He's delivered that message. He sits down with all the players in spring training and he tries to tell them that it is in their best interest to come forward with these things that you, you know, if you're a player, if you're a young guy who's trying to hold on to his roster spot, you don't want to play hurt because chances are you'll play worse and you'll lose your roster spot for an even worse reason. The team won't think you're good enough. So there's that.

And so he said that he tries to drive home that message. He said that he tries to drive home that message, and I feel like I would probably make that a constant refrain. If I were a manager or if I were a trainer, I would just tell everyone no shame in false positives, no shame in complaining about something that isn't serious. If we can save one thing that is serious, then it's worth it. Cliff Lee, by the way, is another guy who was pitching for three weeks through pain in his elbow before he just recently hit the DL.

I don't know whether he disclosed it or not. That wasn't clear to me. But obviously something that happens all the time doesn't necessarily turn into anything more serious, but occasionally it does. So it seems like something worth devoting some thought and resources to. All right. So that is that.

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