Under The Knife 9/11/24
Wyomissing
After staying up way too late watching the spin room, let’s get right to the injuries.
JUSTIN VERLANDER, SP HOU (no injury)
Father Time is unbeaten and with Justin Verlander, we might be seeing Time’s latest victory. Astros sources continue to insist that physically nothing is wrong with Verlander. He’s healthy. Sore? Sure. Fatigued? Some, though he’s pitched much less this season (and carried less chronic workload than he normally does, which could be a factor.) If there’s not an injury, then what is leading to the poor performance?
The shoulder issues from this season certainly give us an easy start, but there’s no evidence that we’re seeing something lesser physically. For years, we’ve had simple rules of thumb - shoulder is velocity, elbow is control. With biomechanics widely available, now we can see physical changes inning to inning, start to start. We can see pitch shape and movement in addition to velocity and spin. For Verlander, what we see is generally similar when he’s successful and when he’s decidedly not this season in almost all respects. (Baseball Savant is amazing.)
Verlander is simply getting hit. If he’s not able to hit his spots, even the same stuff doesn’t work. If his biomechanics haven’t changed and his stuff hasn’t changed, why have the results? The suggestion is location, again via Savant. An MLB coach, who didn’t want to be seen as criticizing Verlander, said that what he saw last time out is a guy who isn’t hitting the spot every time. “He’s not making a mistake as much as not making that perfect pitch,” he said. “He has to make three great pitches and just one mistake.”
Which is to imply that Father Time might not want to chalk up that W just yet. Late career adjustments happen, but so does falling off cliffs. Verlander is going to have to change, or at least change back, and resetting the clock isn’t simple. Then again, if the Astros get back to the World Series or add another hunk of metal to the collection, Verlander’s struggles don’t matter. He’s headed to Cooperstown and the question is whether we remember him as someone that didn’t seem to age or whether he stayed just a bit too long.
TYLER GLASNOW, SP LAD (inflamed elbow/tendinitis)
CLAYTON KERSHAW, SP LAD (inflamed toe)
YOSHINOBU YAMAMOTO, SP LAD (strained shoulder)
Good news for the Dodgers? That would be a bit novel, at least in this column, but the team and rotation might get Tyler Glasnow and Clayton Kershaw back in coming weeks. Anything ahead of the playoffs would be good, while the makeshift rotation attempts to hold off any collapse ahead of that.
Tyler Glasnow is getting more serious with the throwing, with a bullpen on Saturday and Tuesday, with a sim game scheduled for Friday. Assuming he makes it through those with no issues in the forearm/elbow, the Dodgers will face a decision on what to do. Does he come back without a rehab and be limited to functionally an opener, maybe allowing Justin Wrobleski to be the shadow and limit his innings some? Does he make a rehab with the minor league season running down, and does one rehab start at 40-50 pitches get him all the way there, or much closer? That’s the decision to be made, and not an easy one.
Clayton Kershaw was throwing without a shoe on Monday. No one I spoke with had any idea why the shoe would make a difference and Kershaw’s certainly not going to pitch barefoot. It’s progress, but the interesting thing to me is that no one is discussing what they’ve done. Injections are just one possibility, but no one I’ve seen has mentioned that. There’s some suggestion that Kershaw is again handling his rehab on his own, as he did for his shoulder, but that was more for travel than anything. There are good doctors in Dallas, where he was, so why come to LA? He’s in LA, they have great doctors, but we don’t know what any of them are doing, so we have very little guidance on when Kershaw will be back. One source does tell me that when Kershaw is “reasonably comfortable”, he’ll come back without any rehab or really any sign beyond throwing once or twice, which we may not see.
Even better? Yoshinobu Yamamoto came in Wednesday and shoved. I’m not sure where that term even came from, but I know what it means and yeah, he did. Missing since mid-June, Yamamoto came back from the shoulder issue - forget everything anyone said about triceps and focus on the cuff issue - to succeed in his first start out. A lot depends on how he recovers, to next time and the next time. If YY can do it and if Glasnow and Kershaw can fill in behind it, who cares if the Dodgers sacrificed a year of River Ryan and Emmett Sheehan? I don’t say this to be flip but very seriously, the Dodgers and any team should be willing to sacrifice things in order to get to a World Series win. It’s too early to say that will happen, but we can see things lining up to make it possible. That’s all any team can ask. Just ask Jerry Reinsdorf, who was sold a bill of goods.
Lots more to come so if you liked what you read so far, why not give me five bucks and see what else happens? Wow, that sounds like a bit too Times Square 1977 for my liking.