The Orioles may not sign Grant Balfour after all:
Today was supposed to be a day of celebration at The Warehouse, with the Orioles ushering in their new closer, Grant Balfour, who agreed to a two-year, $15 million deal earlier this week.
But the news conference won’t happen. The deal is teetering and likely to collapse — or, at the very least, change dramatically — because of an issue with Balfour’s right shoulder found during his physical, according to industry sources.
Because the Orioles in the past have had issues with agreed-to deals once they get to the physical stage — Aaron Sele, Xavier Hernandez, and, just last year, Jair Jurrjens, to name a few — there’s going to be an underlying sense that this is the Orioles’ fault.
Better safe than sorry, as the Yankees found out with Michael Pineda.
If the Orioles standard is a clean MRI pitchers won’t even bother with them. Read in one of the journals that over 50% of pitchers who were asymptomatic and had never had shoulder or elbow surgery would have abnormal MRI results. Dr Andrews is on record as saying MRI’s are not very useful in diagnosing shoulder elbow injuries because there are too many false positives and false negatives.
The problem with Pineda is there were clear signs that something was wrong based on his 2nd half performance.
Balfour had a poor 2nd half as well last year, so maybe they got it right here. I assume they did some of the physical tests and did not rely on the MRI. Balfours doctors insistence on using the MRI as evidence that he is ok runs counter to Dr Andrews thinking.
Last I heard, though, Balfour is looking into filing a grievance with the union, claiming the Orioles had second thoughts and just used the physical’s MRI as an excuse to back out of the deal. We may not have heard the last of this.