Under The Knife 9/26/22

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Albert Pujols got his round number, while Aaron Judge has been stuck on his. Both have been pretty emotional and interesting, enough of a cultural phenomenon that ESPN was cutting into college football for Judge at-bats. That’s good for baseball.

Let’s hope there’s more than Judge over the last week, though early returns on this new playoff format are terrible. It’s added nothing and taken some drama out rather than putting it back in. There’s no final read there until we see what happens in the expanded format games. For now, let’s get to some key injuries over these last two weeks of the season:

ART WARREN, RP CIN (sprained elbow)

“Art Warren had a UCL repair.” That’s not exactly a sentence that will register as important for a lot of baseball fans, or even for the Reds. Warren is a decent enough receiver, but his case might be important down the lines, especially for the Reds who have a lot of young hard-throwing pitchers on the way. More than a few of them, like Hunter Greene, will find themselves on a surgeon’s table. It’s no longer a career-threatener, just a speed bump.

Warren’s surgery might make that less of a bump. Warren had a repair and while the Reds didn’t release details, the likelihood is that it was an InternalBrace with repair done by team ortho Dr. Tim Kremchek. I don’t know of any other repairs that Dr. Kremchek has done, but it would be yet another physician inside the small circle of baseball orthos doing this kind of surgery.

The hope is that IB/R (InternalBrace/repair) will reduce the return time for pitchers from the 12-18 months we see with standard Tommy John. There have been a very small number of these with elite pitchers, so we haven’t seen the times really drop much, as teams have been more conservative. There have been significantly faster times at lower levels, as shown by this Dr. Jeff Dugas study. It’s going to take numbers, sadly, to push forward, as well as a willingness to trust the procedure in a conservative area.

It remains an interesting quirk that we have very few Tommy John guys in the Hall of Fame. The first wasn’t even a pitcher! Looking at the likelies through the next couple years, it might stay that way. I don’t see one on the standard lists through 2025 and I have no explanation for it at all.