A’s enjoying fine season despite starters’ injuries
Oakland’s successful season is, most oddly, intertwined with a mountain of rotation injuries, making the team’s run into contention all the more improbable.
Beginning in spring training with Tommy John surgeries for Jharel Cotton and A.J. Puk, the A’s have lost 10 starters to 13 injuries and the parade never seems to end, with Sean Manaea (rotator-cuff tendinitis) and Brett Anderson (leftarm nerve irritation) landing on the disabled list at the end of August.
Oakland just keeps improvising. The team signed Trevor Cahill and Anderson in March, Edwin Jackson in June and traded for Mike Fiers in August, and even picked up Aaron Brooks this month to add some length in the bullpen.
“That’s all we can do is
spend the offseason and into spring training building our depth,” general manager David Forst said. “This season has really showed that we’ve needed every single guy and more. We’re here in September still claiming players on waivers because we need innings, we need outs. The name of the game is depth and trying to survive these injuries.”
The A’s creativity extends to using reliever Liam Hendriks as an “opener,” followed by a more traditional starter type, as the team awaits the return of Anderson this week. With Manaea looking ever more like he’s out for the season, the “bullpenning” option might continue to appear throughout the stretch run.
Most teams don’t weather two rotations’ worth of injuries particularly well. The Mets, Angels and Rangers are teams whose seasons went south in recent seasons after numerous starters went down. According to injury consultant and researcher Stan Conte, the former Giants and Dodgers trainer, 50 percent of all majorleague rotations miss time at some point each year.
“While it seems like this is a ‘when it rains it pours’ situation for the A’s, other organizations are going through the same thing,” said Yahoo baseball writer Jeff Passan, whose book “The Arm” examines the Tommy John epidemic in depth. “Of course, when it happens almost all at the same time, there are going to be questions if this is an organizational thing, but I see no evidence to point to anything other than just really bad luck.”
Coming into this season, the A’s had a reasonably good track record when it came to pitcher injuries, with five Tommy John surgeries in the organization over the past three years, among the fewest in the major leagues. This year, throughout the system, Oakland has seven starters recovering from ulnar-collateral ligament repairs, including Cotton, Puk, Daniel Gossett and Opening Day starter Kendall Graveman. But even with 12 in the course of four years, Oakland is well behind many teams — the Mets and Reds, for instance, have lost 26 pitchers apiece with torn UCLs. The Yankees have lost 20, the Brewers and Giants 19 in that span.
The bottom line: Pitching is an inherently unhealthy activity. The human body was not built to throw overhand repeatedly, especially not as hard as most professional pitchers throw now.
“Now if a guy isn’t throwing 97-98 out of the bullpen, you’ve got to find someone else to do it, but the increase in velocity is potentially detrimental to these guys’ elbows and shoulders,” A’s trainer Nick Paparesta said.
The era of specialization in youth sports is widely considered a factor. Simply put, pitchers are getting to the major leagues with more mileage on their arms than ever, many more of them already having undergone at least one Tommy John surgery in the minors or even as amateurs.
“I think maybe it starts early in your career with concentrating on one sport, throwing a lot,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “I know growing up, during basketball season, basketball was my favorite sport. During football season, that was my favorite sport. You weren’t playing one thing all year.
“Now guys are getting specialists to help them at young ages, certainly guys are throwing harder. Maybe the combination of doing it year-round and throwing through the strengths of your ligaments potentially has something to do with it.”
Gossett is among the many A’s pitchers who concentrated solely on baseball, and he said when he had his Tommy John surgery, his UCL had degenerated to the point that only the muscles around his elbow were holding it together.
“You can’t really blame it on anything but throwing overhand,” he said. “It’s not really good for you. That’s what happens.”
Somehow, the A’s have persevered through this mass of DL stints with their best season in four years and they hold the AL’s second wild-card spot. They could be in much better shape next year, with Manaea, Andrew Triggs (nerve irritation), Paul Blackburn (epicondylitis) expected to be ready for spring training, along with intriguing prospect James Kaprielian. Kaprielian, obtained in last year’s Sonny Gray deal with the Yankees, will be throwing in instructional-league games beginning Sunday.
Puk and Cotton should be back by midseason, Graveman and Gossett possibly late in the year.
“It’s been bad luck for those guys who been affected this year,” Forst said. “With so many guys coming back next year, hopefully at some point, we’ll have a bunch of options to choose from some really good pitchers.”