UTK Special 6/23/20

Who's Crying Now?

If baseball is back, get ready for a flood of articles like this one. The difference with this one is that the article itself is … really smart. Kudos to Tom Keegan for finding Josh Dines and for asking the right questions. That’s sadly rare and even in a world where the headline is divorced from the article, there’s a lot of good things here.

Seeing Dines - a Mets team physician - talking intelligently about workload, acute to chronic ratios, and the like makes my little heart skip a beat. (Which is probably bad given my issues.) The question is whether or not teams are actually doing this.

You’d think, given Dines’ comments, that the Mets would be at the top. Mickey Callaway, the former manager, discussed bringing in tools and with a very smart front office, they should be enabled.

[Ron Howard’s voice: They’re not.]

There are teams out there doing a very good job of monitoring their pitchers, keeping them at a workload where they can ramp back up safely, and those teams will have an advantage early on. Their guys can go four or five where other might go three. I say three but most pitchers will be pushed too hard, too fast. Anyone going six in the first week of the season is likely overtaxed.

We should see very early in the process where these pitchers are. Will Spring Training 2.0 start with simple PFP or will we get right into throwing and intersquad games? If we see teams doing what they always do, without the necessary adjustments, that’s going to be a problem. The smart teams will know right where to pick up because they’ll know right where their pitchers are now.

I’ve written previously that I don’t think we’re going to see a significant increase in injuries. That still holds, even with the extended break. Talking to some of my best sources this morning, they’ve kept up the management of the athletes. Again, this is not going to hold across the entire league, but I’d say 20 of the 30 teams are very level in terms of what they do to manage pitchers and how they do it. There’s a handful ahead, with scientific and direct measures, then there’s the handful that’s behind.

As for position players, I’m not sure how much we can learn from European soccer but combined with what we’ve seen from Asian baseball, there’s going to be a slight increase in muscular injuries. It tends to be in bigger players; the speed guys are running because they’re runners. Power hitters are running because it’s in the rules. Get them hustling down the line or chasing a ball in the corner, that’s the kind of thing they just don’t - and can’t - practice.

The bigger issue is going to be the players we don’t see. I’ll go over what I see with the “taxi squad” players and what would have been minor leaguers in more detail then.