Chad Jennings gives the best report I’ve seen on the Michael Pineda injury. Here’s Cashman on when the injury occured:
Brian Cashman: “We believe this took place on that last singular pitch in the 15-pitch rehab outing.”
He also debunks the theory that Pineda had a bad second half in 2011:
The myth Cashman’s refering to is the idea that Pineda’s second half was significantly worse than his first half last season. His ERA suggests that’s the case, but his strikeouts-per-nine and walks-per-nine stayed almost exactly the same (strikeouts-per-nine actually went up a little bit). As for velocity, that stayed relatively consistent as well except for his last start when he was pitching on 10-days rest and had gone through a kind of odd September as the Mariners tried to limit his workload.
“The bottom line, they were very similar, first half, second half,” Cashman said. “The important statistical categories that kind of measure how someone is pitching were fairly close, and his velocity in the first half and second half were fairly close. It wasn’t a radical change that’s been written about.”
Pitching is a crap shoot. Always has been, always will be, unless they start using robots. The Yankees made a reasonable trade and got burned by an injury.
I’ll let Yoda offer some comfort:
The dark side has not caught up with Jose Campos yet.
Coming in quite out of shape couldn’t have helped Pineda. And perhaps it even led to his trying to throw harder [and perhaps even effected his “mechanics”]? And also there probably was some previously impossible to detect wear-and-“tear” in the shoulder. But yes, bottom-line a crap-shoot. And Pettitte’s not going to be the savior, though his appearance at the Clemens’ trial could be interesting entertainment.
Jan B >> I read a story where the judge is not letting in Andy’s testimony. Can’t find it now, and haven’t seen it elsewhere, so take it for what it’s worth.
Nice to see a calm, rational discussion of Pineda’s injury. Every players is basically one play away from injury. Montero could tear his ACL running out of the batter’s box and never be the same player again.
Were the Mariners playing the same fielders the second half as the first? Putting one or two younger, less experienced players on the field could turn outs into hits and those into runs.
Oh, by “pitching is a crap shoot”, did you (David) mean that you can pitch the same in two halves of the season but get very different results, or that any time a team shells out big money for a pitcher they are gambling that he won’t get injured?
Both are true, of course!
James » I meant the latter, although I’ve also used the theme in discussing a good pitcher simply going bad.
Pineda’s first half and second half.
3.03 ERA vs 5.12
584 OPS vs 688
Velocity
His velocity was reduced in the 2nd half, primarily in the early innings. Even Dave Camerons chart showed a downward slope, which he ignored (he is a Mariners fan).
Pineda admitted to throwing at reduced velocity in the early innings of the 2nd half, saying he wanted to save his arm.
Just go to the B-ref game logs and click on the pitch counts and you can see his velocity chart for each game from 1st pitch to last. In the first half he started games off around 95, while in the 2nd half he was well below this in some games, sometimes as low as 90 before getting it up to 95+. The averages might have been close, but it was quite a different approach.
Taking a couple of innings to get your velocity up is typical for pitchers with arm problems.
Chad just following Cashmans line on this. Cashman got cleaned out ignoring the signs.
Then the Yankees denial that anything was wrong in ST most likely led to the tear worsening as he pitched through it.
Straight MRI’s miss labrum tears over 40% of the time. The only contrast dye MRI they did, which miss these tears only 10% of the time, found the tear. That does not mean the tear was new. I bet if they did a contrast dye MRI early in ST they would have found, and then they could have shut him down and maybe tried the conservative approach w/o surgery.