Under The Knife 6/16/25
The Order of Operations
The overlap between Joe Sheehan’s readership and mine is a Venn diagram where I’m a small circle inside a much larger circle. I operate under the assumption that everyone here has already read what he wrote and like me, feels smarter for it. When I disagree with him, my stomach churns a bit and I start making arguments as to why I’m wrong with myself. Even when I don’t think he’s wrong, just a bit off, makes me queasy.
Joe Sheehan’s recent argument - that the answer to the pitching crisis is to make endurance a necessary commodity again - has undeniable logic. Limit teams to 10 or 11 pitchers and suddenly you have to value the guy who can give you six or seven innings, not just the flamethrower who maxes out at 14 batters. It’s a romantic idea, calling back to the era of workhorses and complete games. It’s not that simple and it may come with more harm than healing.
Start with the manager. When you limit the number of arms available, the manager has fewer ways out of a tough spot. Suddenly, there’s no long man in the pen. The starter’s at 94 pitches after five, laboring, but it’s a tie game and the bullpen threw 11 innings yesterday. You leave him in. Just one more inning. Then a shoulder tweak becomes a strain, becomes a tear. The decision isn’t reckless - it’s forced. Fatigue makes cowards of us all, but it also shreds ligaments.
What happens next? That pitcher goes on the IL. He’s gone for at least 15 days. You bring up a fresh arm from Triple-A. Then another guy tweaks something. Another call-up. Pretty soon, you’ve reinvented the 16-man pitching staff via the back door. It’s a carousel of IL stints and option moves that turns the active roster into a shell game. The very thing you tried to control - overuse - has been shifted to a rotating cast of sacrificial arms and minor injuries. Welcome to the IL rotation.
Let’s not forget how this breaks the workload model entirely. A pitcher down for 15 days can’t keep up his chronic workload. Pitchers thrive on consistency, but if they’re shuttling back and forth - three outings here, a rest day, then back down - you lose the ability to track fatigue, stress, and recovery across the season. Tim Gabbett shudders. Every biomechanical model we’ve built, every GPS workload number, every stress equation get rendered meaningless by chaos. You’re hitting the Whoop with a hammer, which itself isn’t a bad idea.
Yes, it would be nice if teams had to develop pitchers to go longer, but we also have to acknowledge the reality of how the game is played. Pitchers aren’t soft: they’re specialized. They’re maxed out from pitch one. Asking them to suddenly be Greg Maddux because you’ve taken away the safety net is how you get a 28-year-old Uber driver from Reno throwing 74 pitches in a playoff elimination game. (By the way, Grant Holmes struck out 15 on Sunday and was pulled at 93 pitches. This problem might not be all on the pitchers. Looking at you, Snitker.)
If we want to fix pitching, we need to fix the incentives. Reward innings. Reward durability. Build developmental systems that emphasize repeatable mechanics, recovery, and long-term planning. Legislating it by roster constriction is like fixing traffic by limiting people to one tire. You don’t get fewer accidents. You get a scrapyard.
In fact, let’s go one further. Rob Manfred has talked about tying the DH to the starting pitcher somehow, but what if we tied the roster to it? For a team that averages six innings or more for starters, they get an extra roster slot the next season, or maybe just a bonus pick in the draft.
Make it so that every pitcher that throws more than 125 innings in the minor leagues is automatically protected from the Rule 5, expanding on the 40-man for that all important off-season decision. That alone might make the biggest difference, with the usage patterns in the minors directly leading to the issues in the majors.
The spirit of Sheehan’s point is dead-on: the game can’t survive on 14-man pitching staffs and 4 inning starts, but the answer isn’t just to cut the staff. The answer is to re-engineer the expectations. Otherwise, all we’ll have is more names on the IL, fewer stars in the game, and a never-ending parade of guys throwing 99 with no idea where it’s going or when it might cost them everything.
On to the injuries:
SHOHEI OHTANI, SP/DH LAD (sprained elbow/torn labrum)
EMMETT SHEEHAN, SP LAD (sprained elbow)
I told you this was coming sooner rather than later, but the shock announcement that Shohei Ohtani would return as a starter in a day rather than in weeks or maybe never is even sooner than I expected. I’d started to suss out this was coming this weekend in some emails with trusted sources but the big guys got the scoop, which is fine.
How big is this? In LA, Variety - the Hollywood entertainment bible - is telling people how to watch. (Which reminds me, we need to talk about the recent Spectrum cable deal and what it means for MLB’s next big deal. The MLB on NBC deal is going to be minor.)
The question now is what the usage is going to be. Ohtani was never going to make rehab starts, for reasons I’ve detailed pretty extensively here. (You know, the search function isn’t bad on Substack, though few use it.) Ohtani’s last outing was a 44-pitch, three inning up and down. Sim game? Sure. There’s a lot of indications that the Dodgers will have a shadow pitcher behind him and there was early indication that would be Emmett Sheehan.
Sheehan made four starts after coming back from elbow reconstruction, but he’ll go Wednesday, per reports. That would make him the sixth man, functionally, and buy a bit of rest for the others and keep everything in the Dodgers’ pseudo-six man rotation on track with two additions, or one and a half for now. Sheehan went four innings last time out, 57 pitches, so he could go 70-75 and not need a hard shadow. With the day between, there’s a number of scenarios Dave Roberts could use and they’ve likely gamed all of them out.
There’s a lot of moving parts with the Dodgers pitching staff right now. They’ve been testing the waters on some relievers, which is standard, but with what you’ll read in Quick Cuts, there’s a lot of ways this could go leading to interesting depth issues and deployment scenarios. The Dodgers have always been on the edge of “too many pitchers”, but new injuries have kept that from being a thing. It wouldn’t be a real problem, if it were to occur, just an adjustment.
Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of indication that Ohtani is wearing a Kinetic Arm unit. I detailed this back in 2022 and while there’s been some upgrades, it’s largely the same as what I showed you then. It’s unclear if he’ll wear it in game, but he has been wearing it during side work. It’s pretty distinctive, even under a shirt as he normally wears it so keep an eye out for the “muscle web” look of the unit and whether the media will discuss it. The Dodgers have been very reluctant to talk about it and even some of my best sources flat out refuse. My hope is that Ohtani’s use of this will widen the adoption, especially considering how many rehabbing arms the Dodgers have. That team alone could boost sales!
KODAI SENGA, SP NYM (strained hamstring)
The Mets got some good news on Kodai Senga. His hamstring injury is a low grade strain and he might miss the minimum or close, after early expectations of a much more significant time off, which would necessitate a ramp. That might not be the case and even if this isn’t a pure minimum stint - my guess is it won’t be - then it’s certainly a lot better than last year’s long wait for his calf strain to heal.
It’s that latter that complicates things somewhat. Out here, we don’t know exactly why it took so long and why the Mets were reluctant to put him out there. Biomechanic risk, some feeling about the location of the strain, or something else entirely? I simply don’t know. That means that assuming anything from that injury and applying it to this injury is probably not the best idea. It seems to make sense - enough to mention, but not enough to really base anything on.
Paul Blackburn will take the slot for now, but the first key we’ll see is when Senga begins throwing again. There’s some sense that will be soon and that he’ll be able to keep up the workload in his arm. That would shorten any rehab or even eliminate it, allowing him to slot right back in. That first throwing session is going to tell us more than we can possibly know right now.
Would you believe me if I told you there were a lot more pitching injuries to talk about, but that you subscribing would make this even better? Consider it.