Given the rash of Braves pitchers who’ve had “Tommy John” surgery — seven in a five-year span at the major league level — there have to be questions of whether something’s wrong in the way the Braves used or trained pitchers in that period.
Maybe it’s bad luck, and they had a lot of guys predisposed to torn ulnar collateral ligaments because of factors such as pitching mechanics, as Jonny Venters said was the case with him last week when he had his second Tommy John surgery.
But not all of the Braves’ Tommy John-surgery pitchers had violent deliveries. And only Tim Hudson had a decade in the majors and a couple of thousand innings logged before needing the surgery. None of the others were even remotely like Hudson in that regard, but all ended up on Dr. James Andrews’ operating table.
The list: Hudson (August 2008 surgery), Peter Moylan (May 2008), Kris Medlen (August 2010), Arodys Vizcaino (March 2012), Brandon Beachy (June 2012), Venters (last week), and Eric O’Flaherty (Tuesday).
All besides Hudson were in their 20s and hadn’t made it to free agency before surgery. Medlen and Beachy were well short of arbitration eligibility before surgery, and Vizcaino had made only 17 relief appearances in the majors, after pitching for about one year with a partially torn ligament in hopes of avoiding surgery.
Again, we don’t — and probably can’t — know enough about every pitcher’s health to suggest the Braves could have done something different to prevent injury in the cases above. Vizcaino, for instance, came from the Yankees organization, where he already had elbow issues.
But it’s reasonable to question whether, in the cases of Moylan and Venters, and possibly O’Flaherty, they were overused by the Braves for one or more seasons in the years leading to Tommy John surgery. Moylan pitched 90 innings in 80 appearances as a 28-year-old rookie in 2007, and led the majors with 172 appearances during 2009-10.
Venters had 79 appearances as a rookie in 2010 and led the majors with 85 appearances in 2011, when he had a 1.84 ERA and 96 strikeouts in 88 innings.
O’Flaherty had 78 appearances in his first season with the Braves in 2009, and 78 again in 2011 during a sensational season when he posted a 0.98 ERA in a career-high 73 2/3 innings.
After two-thirds — Venters, Kimbrel — of the vaunted “O’Ventbrel” trio showed fatigue during the Braves’ September 2011 collapse, manager Fredi Gonzalez and pitching coach Roger McDowell altered their usage pattern for the trio last season. They rarely used any of the Big Three in games with leads of more than three runs.
But was the damage already done with Venters and O’Flaherty? Again, no one can say with any real certainty. To his credit, Gonzalez doesn’t dance around the question or get angry when it’s asked.
Like this past week, when the O’Flaherty news came down. Could the workloads of the past have played a part?
“I don’t know,” Gonzalez said. “That’s a good question I keep asking myself. I mean, his (number of appearances) aren’t crazy. I mean, you could have an argument with Jonny. But (O’Flaherty’s) numbers were OK, appearance-wise.
Gonzalez added, “It’s the hardest job in baseball, being a good reliever.”
He was talking about the physical demands of the position. Relief pitchers have become the most vulnerable players in baseball, in terms of injury susceptibility. The best ones are sometimes damned if they do and damned if they don’t. That is, damned if they complain of soreness and ask for a day off, and damned if they don’t say anything because they don’t want to let down the team or be labeled as soft or unreliable.
Gonzalez, in another moment of candor, said: “You don’t want them to always tell you. If they told you every time they had something, you couldn’t play or pitch anybody.”
Like his mentor Bobby Cox, Gonzalez has said many times that he believes a pitcher has a certain number of pitches in his arm, and when that number is exhausted, he’s probably going to have a major injury if he’s still pitching.
Or, as Gonzalez put it, “I am a believer, the more I’m in this, you’ve got a certain amount of bullets. And when it’s time to blow, it blows. You can coddle or mother-hen them, but it’s going to blow anyway.”
Braves general manager Frank Wren also was asked, after the O’Flaherty news, about the relievers’ workloads.
“You look at every bullpen of winning teams, there’s heavy workloads,” he said. “That goes with the territory. When you have a team that’s winning a lot of games, pitchers pitch a lot.”
Other than some closers, relief pitchers never make the money starters make after a few good years in the majors. It’s why you don’t see many get long-term deals. Teams churn through them, get what they can out of them, and plug in new, affordable ones when others get hurt or become too pricey.
