Campillo to DL, Nageotte up
DMZ · August 3, 2005 at 7:52 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Campillo’s currently on the 15-day DL with an “elbow strain”, word is that he’ll need ligament replacement surgery. As if the rotation wasn’t in enough trouble already. Well, I hope everyone enjoyed seeing that inning of work from the junkballer, because that’s all we get until 2007, probably.
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86 Responses to “Campillo to DL, Nageotte up”
or perhaps the Spanish equivalent
El Cartelua, folks.
47. Have any of these newspapers had a history of editor replacement surgery? Could their problems be caused by editor overuse or by poor editing?
Being Gannett papers, the answer is almost certainly yes. Jeff’s wife worked for The Bellingham Herald for several years and I’m sure he or she could enlighten us.
#45 Re: Bad mechanics are to blame for the large number of pitching injuries
I don’t think you can just say that modern pitchers don’t have mechanics like the old-timers did, and that’s why the old-timers could pitch a lot of innings and not get hurt. I think there’s probably a lot more to it than that. Pitchers today throw with more speed and throw at max effort more often than pitchers in bygone eras. There are a lot more leagues for players to play in now, so they may wind up pitching all year long, whereas that wasn’t necessarily the case when players didn’t make enough money for baseball to be a full-time job. I’m sure bad mechanics are a main cause of many arm injuries, but I’m not convinced at all that today’s pitchers have much worse mechanics than pitchers in earlier times.
Before Tommy John surgery, did pitchers try to pitch through the pain or did they just retire immediately?
I think the Campillo injury and Franklin suspension might delay Pineiro going to Tacoma and/or Shiggy’s release. Why would the M’s think of DFAing Shiggy but bring Kida up?
Not much left in the pitching stable in Tacoma now. I don’t see Livingston/Bazardo/Foppert getting Sept. looks and I really hope Baek does not get promoted.
LONG-TERM PITCHING INJURIES (#S 13, 17, 24, 45, and others) – I think we’re being premature about this. IIRC, Derek has completed only 2/3 of his “Labor of Love.”
We should wait until he assembles all his data, and analyzes it. One of the things we’ll note–some already have–is that the Mariners are not the worst organization when it comes to long-term arm injuries to its pitching prospects.
As tempting as it is to blame yet another arm injury on the organization, there’s an interesting non-public backstory to this one that would change almost everyone’s opinion if it got out.
Basically, there’s a lot more here than meets the eye.
Maybe we should start requiring an elbow and shoulder MRI for all of our pitchers 24 hours prior to each start. 🙂 Actually, since I know very little about the way these injuries develop and occur, I don’t really know if it’s something that shows any predictive evidence. That said, I’ve got a strange feeling that in 15-20 years we’re going to look back on this era as the “dark ages” of preventitive sports medicine…but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
As tempting as it is to blame yet another arm injury on the organization, there’s an interesting non-public backstory to this one that would change almost everyone’s opinion if it got out.
This is the sort of stuff that (no offense, Dave, because it’s my pet peeve, probably irrational, and certainly not your duty to breach a confidence) makes me gnash my teeth. It’s like hearing “Hey, I know what the review you are about to get from your boss is going to say, but I’m not telling you”. It inflames my sense of nagging curiosity.
Don’t get me wrong, I can relate. I work in the software industry, where having to say “Sorry, can’t talk about stuff that’s under NDA” is all too routine. But I hate having to say things like that.
Anyway, uh, yeah, I wasn’t going to go into the “OMG TEH M’S SCREWED UP ANOTHER PITCHER!!111” mode. The funny part is that I remember being in an argument here that Price messes up pitching mechanics a few days ago, as part of him being a butcher of a pitching coach- and now the M’s are accused by other posters of being indifferent to Campillo’s mechanics. I think they call that “Heads you lose, tails I win”.
Ah! Ugh, it might just be my libertarian leanings, but I HATE “non-public” stuff, because it totally screws up the way in which I would form a conclusion — since I’m lacking all of the premises — regarding a given subject. Yeah, okay, I realize that the argument about whether or not the mass public is deserving to be privy of certain information is sound and valid; yet, it still greatly annoys me. Sure, alright, I understand the Seattle Mariners are a private entity — though, one might dispute that the fact that taxpayers financially funded the building of the organization’s staduim thereby earns them the right to be made aware of each and every thing concerning the franchise — so yeah, this is another debate that has many angles to it. Anyhow, with all things considered, I’m just flat-out agitated ’bout the Mariners’ organization in general . . . from Hiroshi Yamauchi, to John Ellis, to Howard Lincoln, to Chuck Armstrong, to Bill Bavasi, to Lee Pelekoudas, to Benny Looper, to Mike Hargrove, to Don Baylor, to Rick Griffin, to Allan Wirtala, to the damn groundkeepers.
I really don’t understand why this stuff bothers you guys so much. Dave knows something, he can’t tell us, but he offers us the conclusion he’s drawn with that information. Certainly we’re not completely informed, but if you trust Dave (as I do), you at least have a good reason to believe this one isn’t on the M’s this time.
IOW, I’m glad Dave mentioned this, even if he can’t tell us the full story. And honestly, people being driven crazy about not knowing everything about something that really isn’t any of their business. . .well, THAT drives me crazy. I’m pretty comfortable knowing that their are secrets and skeletons in every field and industry. I really don’t care that I don’t know every detail about what goes on in the world.
I would just like to point out that nobody forced Dave to type his little @#$*teasing statement either.
You bastard. I hate you.
Of course nobody forced him to do it. But I’m glad he did. If the choices are A) You know neither the evidence nor the conclusion or B) You don’t know the evidence but do know the conclusion or C) You know both the evidence and the conclusion, but Dave burns his source and never gets inside info again, I for one would much rather have B than either of the other alternatives.
So I guess what I’m saying is, thank you Dave.
Solution:
Mariners take their 17-20 year old pitchers after they sign them and immediately give them TJ surgery. These pitchers are young and their arms don’t hurt yet, so they’ll recover faster.
Upside: the kids won’t blow out their arms in the segment of their careers that ought to include several of their best years. Downside: a fair amount of them won’t recover. However, they’ll have a better chance than they later on when the scar tissue has built up.
There are many bleeding-heart, hand-wringingly moral counter-arguments, of course, but most of them boil down to the contention that the surgery is unnecessary. Patently false: if the kid is both a prime pitching talent and owned by the Mariners, he’s eventually flaming out. Let’s just get the preemptive operation over with and move on.
58: Well, if there’s a backstory, Dave, holding back isn’t exactly helping the M’s credibility either.
I wonder what it is. Until then, I’ll keep blaming Pedegana for fun.
Re. #68: What credibility?
Anyhow, the Seattle Mariners’ management is, at this point in time, an utter farce. As it is, if they aren’t willing to be forthright about any and all information regarding Jorge Campillo’s elbow injury, then the blame for what went down is solely placed on the organization.
Uh, it’s late/early, so I meant to put in regards to post #66 in the post I just posted right before I posted this post. Wait . . . does that make sense? Yeah, okay, it does — sweet!
I don’t think Campillo’s injury has anything to do with the Mariners. The guy pitched for the Mexican League, Winter ball, and straight on to us, non stop.
How would Campillo fit into the Mariner’s troubles with pitcher attrition? Jorge was a Mariner for a whole 5 months.
Also, assuming that he does have TJ surgery… might it actually be BENEFICIAL to someone who throws soft garbage and a max 84-86mph fastball?
I mean, if he LOSES velocity, well no biggie there. And if he gains velocity, well that can’t hurt either, can it?
Way I see it, of all the pitchers who had to go down with TJ surgery, I think Campillo stands the best chance of making a reasonable recovery.
Send Pineiro and meche to Tacoma. They sux deep. THey forgot how to pitch. Call everybody that might be ML ready to make a test.
On a general note — we’ve talked about the rumor/no-rumor issue before, as it relates to topics like this (for instance, here — should Dave say “there’s something else afoot” if he can’t or won’t reveal what?) and the overwhelming response has been that we should say what we can, when we can.
There’s an argument that this leads to frustration and a whole other set of problems, and I sympathize with that but at the same time, given the choice between set of problems foo and set of problems bar, the readership overwhelmingly opted for bar.
What Derek said.
So basically, there is more to the Campillo injury, but the M’s organization wants it swept under the rug.
That’s not frustrating or anything…
It’s gotta be one of these:
(a) severely pumped-up ‘roid-raging Ryan Franklin greeted Campillo upon his arrival at the clubhouse that he tore his arm out of the socket
(b) Campillo went out drinking with Carlos Guillen in Detroit and fell off a barstool onto his elbow
(c) Campillo hurt his elbow carrying a “suitcase” up a flight of “stairs”, like Sasaki did — where, like Sasaki, the two nouns in quotes are widely believed to secretly be “half-gallon of Scotch” and “fancy”.
(d) Campillo’s elbow deliberately injured in showers by Pineiro in last-ditch effort to save career
(e) Campillo actually has 115-MPH fastball, but has been pitching hurt this whole time.
and just a reminder– with the implementation of HIPAA the M’s and their medical staff (like every other business) are not allowed to release medical information about an employee without that employee’s permission.
Bit of a change from the comments preceding, but how did Nageotte look last night? I only saw a boxscore and its a bit hard to tell. Was he throwing well, what kind of a role will he have for the rest of the season?
That there is “more than meets the eye” when Dave cites a “non-public backstory” makes perfect sense to me. I, for one, simply do not believe that the M’s would deliberately waste the $$millions invested in scouting and development (and incur $$millions more in medical and rehab bills) by neglecting the proper care of their pitchers’ arms.
In reality, I surmise, certain parallels can be drawn between “bad mechanics” and steroid use. The incentive to add some heat to a fastball or bite to a slider at the risk of one’s health is huge. Whether it’s done by abusing an arm or ingesting a PED, the risks and benefits are similar. Not everyone will make it by doing it the hard way (clean/good mechanics), so some will take the chance and hope they get away with it. The difference, of course, is that the chance you’ll get away with arm abuse is higher, at least for a while.
I’m not asserting that this specifically is what Dave’s “backstory” is all about. I’m just saying that anyone should be able to see this side of the story WITHOUT knowing what Dave knows. To simply blame the M’s organization for every problem, or to flame on Dave for alluding to another perspective, lowers the level of discussion to that of call-in talk radio, and this blog deserves better than that.
I suspect that non-revealing of sources (along with indications that there is more information where that came from which cannot be revealed) has been around since before the Romans.
Any information is better than no information. Not an issue.
Sherril pitched year around for 2 years he didnt need tj surgery.
So basically, there is more to the Campillo injury, but the M’s organization wants it swept under the rug.
No, I think it’s just the opposite — there’s more to the Campillo injury that the M’s want to tell everybody because it will make them look better but they can’t because of legal/privacy reasons. So somebody in the organization leaks it to Dave knowing they can trust him to keep the actual information secret but hint at it here to reassure the hardcore fans who populate USSMariner.
I’m not surprised that there is a back story, Imagine, you’re Jorge Campillo and the Mariners offer you a contract. Your elbow hurts, but do you turn the contract down? Of course not. You decide to live a “big lie”. I don’t mean to imply that Jorge Campillo is a horrible person; just that he believes he is getting his one chance to really improve his “lot in life”.
You scuffle your way through the season, trying to work through the pain. You are not sitting on a long-term, large financial commitment from the Mariners; so you don’t have the financial security others (Joel Piniero for example) have.
You start in the bigs, and can’t really hide the problem any more. The whole world is watching: the training staff is better, the pitching coach is better, and the opposing batters are better. It quickly becomes obvious that there is a problem.
End of the line.
Who’s at fault here? Most likely everyone involved at some point or another. Player and organization.
Of course I’m speculating here, without the benefit of any additional information. But it makes sense to me.
I agree with Gary: any information is better than no information.
And re #61 — AK, you just need to accept the fact that you can’t form anything more than a provisional conclusion about any current public events, because you never have all the information. All Dave has done in this case is bring attention to something you should have already realized: namely, that you don’t really know what’s going on, and you aren’t going to find out by reading the papers.
That’s just life.
My own personal “Guess the Conspiracy”:
The M’s knew there was a better than average chance he was going down with an injury when they scouted him, but figured he was worth a shot to see if they could get something for nothing.
Since Campillo got hurt while pitching in a big league game, does he get the big league minimum salary while he is rehabbing? In other words, did this guy just pick up ~ $300k a year for the next year for 1 inning’s work? I don’t begrudge him this, just wondering.
TIME TO GET A.J. BURNETT!!!
In free agency that is.