A reminder, no UTK on Friday as I’ll be at the SABR Analytics conference in Phoenix. If you’re there, say hi. My hope is that the fates will listen and keep me from having to dash off a UTK Flash like last weekend!
Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of my heart attack. Still here, still healthy, and still doing pretty much the same thing I was doing then. I just don’t have a national outlet. Instead, I have loyal readers and I know which one I prefer. I’ll have raised a glass of Northern Latitude* to you, to time, and to the future. Raise one yourself, and let’s get to it:
GERRIT COLE, SP NYY (sprained elbow)
By now, Gerrit Cole will have had his elbow reconstructed. Everyone will refer to it as Tommy John surgery, but we actually don’t know what technique. It used to be that every surgery was “Tommy John’s surgery” as Dr. Frank Jobe referred to it. Even before Internal Bracing came along, there were variants. Dr. James Andrews didn’t move the nerve. Drs. Neal ElAttrache and David Altchek used a docking technique. Now there are even more, but the name has stuck despite being less descriptive than ever.
Largely this holds because the promise of internal bracing was quicker return times and teams have abandoned this. The rehab is the old one, from the old surgeries, and while it works, there are modern constructs from people very inside the game. Using those would be an advantage, especially considering how bad the game is at preventing the injuries and avoiding the time loss/rehab at all. It should be both, rather than one or the other, but instead, baseball is seemingly content with the multi-million dollar losses year over year.
What I’m saying is that Cole could be back, in theory, well before the 12 or 14 or 18 months. Someone was on Reddit arguing it would be two full seasons because of the timing. Cole is at age-34 with 153 and running the Favorite Toy calculation with the assumption that he’ll have zero wins this season, his chance of making it to 200 wins drops from 80 percent to 78, a smaller drop than I expected. Is 200 enough to make the Hall of Fame with all of his other accomplishments? We don’t know how the voters will reset their parameters in this modern era and I’ll leave it to Jay Jaffe for the full calculations - he’s low per JAWS currently. My guess is that Cole will be one of my top comebacks in ‘26.
RONALD ACUNA JR, DH/OF ATL (sprained knee)
Ronald Acuna Jr is hitting bombs. Apparently, Acuna worked on some other things while he was doing his knee rehab. This isn’t unusual. I was speaking with a PT at Sloan last week and one of the things we discussed was “second time rehabbers.” They know the process, especially if it was recent and Acuna’s was. They not only have more success, because they know the steps and know the results will likely be positive, they also can power through some. They tend to be a bit quicker with the process and often work on other things, like packing on some muscle.
There’s also what Tom House calls “dumb muscle.” Going into the gym and pushing up stacks is nice, but is it functional? When Acuna goes out and hits 450 foot bombs, I have to think it’s functional. Will Acuna run less and jog around the bases more with this? At age-27, I doubt he’ll transition to “old man skills” entirely, but he could certainly have a season the echoes what Shohei Ohtani did last year with the bat.
As for the knee, all is positive though the Braves continue to look like they’ll be ultraconservative with his timeline. I get keeping him at DH and telling him to run less, but I don’t get what waiting a few more weeks is going to gain them. They have their hands on him, so I’ll assume there’s something.