Under The Knife 7/25/22

Bowing in the Direction of Cooperstown

Congrats to Tim Kurkjian, David Ortiz, Buck O’Neil, and everyone being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame last weekend. With some new honorees freshly in bronze, let’s get right to the injuries, some of them on a path to Cooperstown as well, if they can just stay healthy:

JACOB DEGROM, SP NYM (fractured shoulder)

The sim game wasn’t enough. Jacob deGrom threw 60 pitches in his delayed Thursday outing, but the Mets decided he’d need one more rehab start, likely to come on Tuesday. deGrom is due to get in work on Sunday and again, how he responds to it ahead of that rehab start will determine the next steps.

Of course, my big question is why the Mets decided they wouldn’t be better with deGrom throwing his next outing for them rather than a minor league club and I frankly don’t have an answer to that. 60 pitches is more than enough. It’s not like they’d overexpose the bullpen, or that they are in such a tight race that they couldn’t risk a bad start. There’s no reports that deGrom had a setback or even more than normal soreness, so what is it? I don’t think the Mets can really believe that the deGrom they have right now is worse on a single-start basis than David Peterson.

That must mean they don’t have a routine dialed in, because there’s just no other plausible explanation. There’s been suggestion that Buck Showalter is comfortable with the starters he has and how the rotation/bullpen has been working, enough to wanting to wait on deGrom’s return, but I think Showalter is smart enough to see the delta between Jacob deGrom and pretty much every other pitcher on the roster, short of Max Scherzer.