The notion that today’s pitchers are
coddled is a pet subject of sports talk radio.
Callers point to the seeming epidemic of Tommy John surgeries, and blame
pitch counts, inning restrictions, 5-man rotations, and a general lack of
toughness. Not like the old days, they say, when men were men and pitchers went
200 innings a year for 20 years, rubbing dirt on sore arms and soldiering on.
And there does seem to be a sudden rise
this spring in Tommy John surgeries, being performed on the really promising
young arms of pitchers like Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy of the Braves,
Jarrod Parker of the As, Patrick Corbin on the Diamondbacks and, most recently,
Bobby Parnell joining Matt Harvey on the Mets’ pitching casualties list.
But were the good old days really so good?
Did a tougher breed of man stride the mound back in the day, as the callers all
like to say?
I say no. I maintain that pitchers are
having this surgery because now they can, and that pitchers are generally
having longer, more productive careers than was the norm before the revolution
in sports medicine.
And how revolutionary have the advances in
sports medicine been?
Well, we all can cite chapter
and verse about Tommy John surgery, especially having sadly read the recent
obituary of Frank Jobe, the father of the procedure. But have we forgotten that
simply being able to see torn ligaments and other soft tissue injuries without
surgery, via CT scans and MRIs, dates back only to the 1980s?
I think it true that a lot of pitchers
over the years simply left baseball young because of the commonly called “sore
arm,” mysterious, undiagnosable and untreatable, never to be heard from
again. And we’ve forgotten about them. We remember just the durable stars and tell
ourselves that their few careers were the norm.
Just to check myself, I went back to my
two favorite teams growing up – the 1962 Yankees and the 1969 Mets. These are good test cases because, beyond
being World Series winners, they were anchored by the kind of durable stars we
look back on as the rocks that tower over today’s pitchers. Whitey Ford
anchored the ’62 Yankees, and Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman the ’69 Mets, and yes,
they had long, durable, impressive careers.
But what about the other pitchers on those starting rotations?
First, the ’62 Yankees. Their number two
pitcher was Ralph Terry, the Bulldog. And yes, he was a tough guy, and had the
second longest career after Ford. And how long was it? 12 years, with just
three years of 200 or more innings.
The number three starter that year was a
young guy named Bill Stafford, who had two good years – 1961 and 1962 – and who
was out of baseball in 1967.
The fourth starter? The rookie Jim Bouton,
and we know all about him, thanks to his amazing book, Ball Four. He went on to have two great years in 1963
and 1964, blew his arm out (maybe a candidate for Tommy John, had it existed
then?), taught himself a knuckleball and hung on to his career, just barely,
until the 60s ended.
And now the 1969 Mets. Seaver and Koosman and…
Well, there was the older veteran Don
Cardwell, who did in fact have the kind of long career we imagine everyone did
back then.
But the true number three starter that
year was rookie Gary Gentry, about whom Orioles manager Earl Weaver said after
his team lost the Series in five games, “We knew about Seaver and Koosman, but
we didn’t know the third guy was that good.”
Gentry was good through 1972, then was out of baseball in 1975, at the
age of 28.
The fifth starter that year was a
promising young pitcher named Jim McAndrew. He lasted 7 years in the majors,
never pitching 200 innings in a season, and clearing 100 innings just three
times.
A funny thing, memory. But the facts seem
to state that the golden age of pitching may be… right now.
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