Oh look, I can embed from Substack in the way we used to be able to from Twitter! Who knew?
I mentioned this article last Thursday but the more I thought about it, the more I thought about it. Lewie Pollis is just flat out a great read and this feels like more and more of the perfect piece at the perfect time. I’d like to hand deliver this to Rob Manfred, or at least to teams that are contemplating things like six-man rotations.
Lewie also suggests directions to take this further, which I think are dead on. Rotations should have been fixed years ago and I’ve suggested this on multiple occasions. 1-2-3-4-5, each going as many innings as they can is not the best way to organize this, especially if you acknowledge that how far a pitcher can and should go is relatively known. Every starting pitcher should be able to go five or six, depending on efficiency, but they’re going to get shelled sometimes and that throws off the plan. It shouldn’t throw off the plan for a whole week. It’s one day, an adjustment, and then the plan is more or less back to where it should be. The inability to adjust is the biggest indictment of modern pitching management, and I’m being generous with the term “modern.”
Combine this kind of thinking with the newly-accepted wearables I spoke of last week and we could get to a place where not only are throwing programs and workload management easily detectable and programmable, but customizable readiness plans could overtake rotations. Add in the rapid use of AI in everything, down to pitch/swing decision making, and it’s the kind of big-swing thinking that teams should be doing, but aren’t. For teams that say they can’t spend millions, this should be where they’re spending thousands. Start with trying to hire Pollis back into then fold and go from there.
I will say there’s another paper making the rounds that discusses using machine learning to make pitching pull decisions that appears to be getting a lot of traction, to the point I’m convinced one team hired the researcher and basically copy/pasted it into their system. We won’t have visibility on to how teams are making those decisions until we get into May, perhaps longer to get a sample, but Pollis’ thinking should be leading the discussions and pushing real change. What baseball at all levels is doing clearly isn’t working and it’s beyond time to try something better.
A reminder: I’ll be at Sloan Sports Analytics Conference from Thursday, so no UTK those days. SABR Analytics is next week, so another abbreviated schedule, unless I get really bored on the planes.
I’ll also put this link in over the fold, since it bears watching and matches with what I discussed over the off-season (and on Downstream) regarding TV rights. There’s some tough issues to solve and not much time to do so, MLB is in an exceedingly difficult position. We’ll discuss this more soon.
Plenty of injuries and situations across Arizona and Florida, so let’s get to it.
GIANCARLO STANTON, DH NYY (inflamed elbows)
Was it a slip when Aaron Boone said that he hoped Giancarlo Stanton could return “in the middle of the season”? Boone’s no media slacker. He’s grown up in the game, he’s been in the media, and he’s been in the center of the Yankees media maelstrom for years. He’s no naif. If he said it, it’s more likely that he meant it and knew he was going to say it, and surely that he knew what the consequences would be from the time he said it. There’s been a lot of confusion since, but I think we have to take most of Boone’s statement at face value for now.
With the timeline and the subsequent move to the IL, there’s some interesting guidance within it. We could be talking about eight to twelve weeks, which rules out a lot of things on the long end, but we also have to assume that most of the conservative treatments have been tried and are currently failing to manage the symptomology. What we don’t know is if Stanton is at the end or the middle of the process. That it’s been going on for years, per earlier statements, doesn’t tell us much. Things can be managed for years, and often are.
We can safely assume that Stanton has been through the anti-inflammatories, the braces (though no one I spoke with remembers him wearing any and I can’t find a single picture of him in 2024 that suggests he wore one), and the therapies available in modern training rooms. Has he been through shockwave therapy or one called Tenex, which can do a partial tenotomy with a minimally invasive procedure? Those could be options now, or ruled out.
After that, we get into surgeries like a clean out of the tendon called a debridement, which is cutting out the damaged tissue. Depending on how much has to be taken out, the healing time can vary greatly and it can compromise the strength of the tendon, even after it heals. In some cases, it’s simpler to surgically rupture the tendon and repair it, though again, the chronically damaged tissue might not heal well or the structure itself might be compromised.
With the latter, Boone’s stated timeline doesn’t match the more severe possibilities. Is that hope or a solid handle on what’s about to be done? I’m not sure and there’s a very small circle involved here. Stanton tends to be insular in the best of cases, but I don’t have much beyond what’s already public to work with. Unless Stanton or the Yankees decide to tell us more, we may have quite the wait before there’s new information on this.
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