Under The Knife 8/21/24

Possible Skenes Skam

Let’s get right to it today:

PAUL SKENES, SP PIT (no injury)

Ken Rosenthal suggested on Monday that the Pirates, now down to a sub one percent chance of making the playoffs, could shut down Paul Skenes at some point. It’s not just physical, but could keep Skenes from getting service time, keeping him in Pittsburgh an extra year. Know what else would keep him in Pittsburgh? A long term contract. If the Pirates were to do this with even the suggestion that it was not purely a baseball decision, Bob Nutting should be removed as owner immediately. It would simply not be good for Baseball.

Even the suggestion that Skenes should be shut down on a physical basis has no real evidence. He’s not pitching into October now, so there’s already a cap. He’s not being extended deep into games, so there’s already a cap there as well. Acknowledging that college innings aren’t the same as the pros, Skenes is a few short of where he was at LSU, though that was in a very compressed time frame comparatively. Add in that Skenes was pitching high-leverage games all the way to Omaha, taking on a new level of competition after transferring, and still finding time to date.

I don’t have as much of an issue with shortening his outings, though it would certainly fly in the face of the suggested six inning rule. “We have to shorten Skenes’ outings to protect him, but next year we couldn’t do that” is poor mouthing at its finest. Without his throw count, not just pitch count, and that same data for his side work, it’s impossible to tell what Skenes’ current chronic workload level is. I’d hope that the Pirates know it, but I don’t know that. (It’s an easy calculation if they have the basic data.)

HUNTER GREENE, SP CIN (inflamed elbow)

The news on Hunter Greene is being presented as “best case scenario” by Nick Krall ahead of a second opinion - likely Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who did his Tommy John surgery - and described the injury as “minimal.” Most UCL injuries could be described as mild, but it doesn’t take a complete or even high-grade sprain to make the ligament non-functional. There’s a growing consensus that small sprains can heal, especially with biologic support, but even with advanced MRIs, there’s not enough resolution to get a clear, definitive view of that.

Which is not to say this isn’t good news. In relative terms, it’s great, but we don’t know yet if this is one of those extremely low grade sprains or if it’s a sprain at all. Given that, there’s no timeline for his return, though I’d have to think that the Reds will be exceptionally conservative here, to the point of shutting him down, though I could see one or two “confidence starts” at the end of the season as well. We should know more by the end of the week after the consultation.