Like a good neighbor, Phils subscribing to Sixers’ flawed (ahem) sports science
Somewhere out of the think-tank that is modern-era sports science has emerged the idea that the best way to keep athletes available to play is to not play them at all. The 76ers are the world leaders in such a timid approach to personnel management, swearing by the idea even though they are comically proven wrong again, and again, and again.
Sit out Joel Embiid for a year? Before the next one starts, he’s injured again.
End Jahlil Okafor’s year early with some knee problem believed to be minor? He’s not right the next year, either.
Put Embiid on some discretionary restriction of game-night activity? He damages his knee in those minutes when he is allowed to play.
They’re goofy, the Sixers are. But their good neighbors, the Phillies, at least show support.
Last week, Vince Velasquez, a talented, young right-hander who once struck out 16 San Diego Padres in a game and for whom the Phils had to spend Ken Giles, needed to leave a game in the second inning after suffering a strain of a five-syllable arm ligament. It happens. But it shouldn’t have happened to Velasquez, should it? It shouldn’t have happened because the Phillies, with no other reason than sports-science wishes, ended his season last September 3 after he’d thrown seven quality, pain-free innings against Atlanta. That had given him 131 innings for the season, and darn it, that was enough.
“We didn’t know exactly when that would be but as we’ve been monitoring his workload, his innings, his pitches, the intensity of those innings and those outings,” Matt Klentak announced at the time, with authority that had to have been handed down from the surgeon general. “We felt like this was going to be them moral the right time to do it.”
It was the wrong time to do it. And that was proven when Velasquez couldn’t make it through the next May without trips to the MRI and the DL, in that order.
Yet that’s the way it is in sports and particularly with pitchers, who are regularly dragged off a field whenever they might teeter toward an arbitrary pitch limit. While there can be science proving that pitchers lose effectiveness as their pitch count rises, the policy is laced, too, with long-term superstition. What if a pitcher — shudder — is injured because he throws one slider too many past his bed time?
Had Velasquez strained that elbow on his 110th pitch, Pete Mackanin would have had to answer about his inconsiderate, selfish approach to trying to win a baseball game. And he might have been fired, too, given other surrounding Phillies circumstances. But Velasquez was hurt on Pitch No. 19, so, well, that’s just bad luck.
It will all turn around. Trends always do. Though there are real values to sports science, sitting players down now so they won’t have to be sat down later is fundamentally nonsensical. Because treating players as if they were injured before they are even injured only doubles the negative effect of the injury itself. How’s that for science? ligament
For billionaires, NFL owners can be bad poker players. How else to explain how they backed themselves into an offseason training system where their employees have the legal right to make them look like incompetent fools?
A league-wide epidemic, the trend battered the Eagles recently when, among other nonwinners, Fletcher Cox hid behind the fine-print of the union contract and elected to spend an extra week on vacation rather than join his teammates for reasonable offseason workouts scheduled months in advance.
It was just last offseason that Jeff Lurie gave Cox $102,600,000 to work for the Eagles. And for the owner’s generosity, he and his coach, Doug Pederson, were made to feel small because the defensive tackle didn’t quite feel like joining in with voluntary team activities, at least not right away.
Many NFL players — Cox is one — are compensated like the great kings of Europe. For that, they are really only asked to do one thing: Behave like good, responsible teammates. If that requires a few extra days of training, well, that’s why it is called professional football. And professionals will do what it takes to get a job done right. Daily Times
Fifty seasons is enough time to announce: It was the Pittsburgh Penguins, not the Flyers, who would win the most sustained greatness out of the 1966 expansion of the NHL.
The Flyers gave it a run, winning two early Stanley Cups. Nor do they have any reason to apologize. They have been a wonderful franchise, charitable, aggressive, proud, successful. They reached the NHL’s Super Bowl eight times from 1974 through 2010. They’ve had superstars and Hall of Famers. Their fans have a special loyalty. It’s all good.
The Penguins, though, are the franchise the Flyers and their customers believed they were destined to become, a championship-level operation through the decades with a good chance to win their fifth Stanley Cup in coming days.
For numerous reasons — injuries, mostly — the Flyers were never able to add to their early collection of championships. The Penguins did. Destiny is funny that way.
■ If the Nashville Predators come close but just fail to win the Stanley Cup, maybe their head coach, Peter Laviolette, can be talked into a trade with the Flyers to acquire Claude Giroux, whom he once called the best player in the world. The Flyers could even toss in the rights to 16 goaltenders, just so Laviolette can rotate them into big games.
Delaware County sports fans — and area sports fans in general — will enjoy “The Black Rose,” a novel by veteran sports writer and legendary storyteller Kevin Callahan. Much of the plot takes place in the outdoor basketball culture at the Jersey shore and involves characters from Monsignor Bonner High, among other familiar spots. Detailed Philadelphia-area basketball history, including mention of the longago and legendary summer games at the Aronimink Swim Club, is woven into the tale. It’s available on Amazon and at outlets at the shore.