Tommy John is a Punk

How convenient.  Our host 'round these parts, the Tao, has jetted off to parts unknown for God knows how long, leaving yours truly in charge of providing Jays-related content, at a time when it's fully understandable that the fanbase is growing increasingly perturbed and inconsolable.  I'm going from comfortably posting on the weekends (or not, as the case may be), to getting tapped for more regular duty at the exact time that the team slipped into a losing record for the first time all season, coupled with a meteor shower of injuries to the starting rotation.

I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR THIS, TAO.

The Twitterverse damn near blew a gasket tonight when Drew Hutchison became the third Jays starter this week to tiptoe off the mound in the first inning and disappear into the dugout, presumably to navigate a maze of MRIs and/or flight schedules to Birmingham, the home of Dr. James Andrews. (Aside: I picture Dr. James Andrews owning a foreboding-looking castle on the top of a mountain somewhere, and you have to pound a giant medieval door knocker to get in the place.  And it's always raining.  I'm sure his office is much better lit than I'm imagining, though.)

Lost in the rush to start hacking off our own arms and sending them to SkyDome as replacements was the fact that the Jays won tonight, with some yeoman's work put in by the bullpen being the most significant factor (because they sure as hell didn't hit much, although it was good to see Brett Lawrie drive a couple of balls hard to the wall.  We'll forget about his little baserunning escapade in the eighth).  That losing record?  Back to even-Steven.  No matter how much rending of garments takes place, the fact remains that the team is still competitive.  Nobody's printing post-season tickets, but they're hanging tough. 

Don't tell that to Fox Sports' Jon Paul Morosi, though.  After Hutchison's injury, Dr. Morosi (I can only assume he's a medical doctor, and moreover one who is capable of diagnosing arm injuries from a TV screen) tweeted that it was time for the Jays to start selling. I'm not here to tell you that the Jays will hang around a wild card race with a mess of starters on the DL, but if my knowledge of 1970s crossover country hits has taught me anything, it's that you have to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em.  I just don't think it's time to start selling every last piece just yet.  Maybe let's wait until we're a little closer to the deadline?  Please?

I feel awful for Morrow, Drabek and Hutchison, but you may have noticed that apart from that, I'm basically an optimist when it comes to the Toronto Blue Jays.  My reasons for that are pretty simple, when it comes right down to it:  I have a family, a job, a mortgage and a real life that all provide me with my quota of stress.  I don't need to let baseball, of all things, add to it.  When things turn negative for the team I support, I try not to get too grouchy or complain too much.  I try to take it with a bit of good humour.  A couple more wins this weekend will help with that.

Baseball's other unnatural advantages

We've gone through years of peaks and valleys in this whole festival of affected and overly sanctimonious outrage around performance enhancers, with the awkwardly scripted admissions from A-Rod providing the latest jumping off point for the sports talkerazzi.

The outrage seems to stem from a belief that these enhancers give the current generation of players a leg up on their current competition, and moreover, skew the sacrosanct history of the game as it is written in the numbers they produce. If we were ever to turn a blind eye to this sort of behaviour, the argument goes, we'd be left with record books that diminish most of what has come before, and a game that is radically different from what we have come to love. With apologies to Fukuyama, it would be the End of History. And we'd all be poorer for it, or so they say.

But with all this talk of the unnatural advantages that modern anabolics and growth hormones provide to the nefarious and disreputable, we've been left to wonder about the place in baseball's dialectic that is occupied by one of the most ubiquitous and increasingly perfunctory procedures: ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, or Tommy John Surgery.

While we drive ourselves nuts in trying to push back against medical science in some areas of baseball, Tommy John surgery is tacitly accepted as part of the game. Once a career-saving procedure and a last resort for pitchers, going for a "TJ" is so commonplace at this point that players seem to be going for this surgery as a preventative measure. Give up next year, the thinking seems to be, and get back five years on the other side with a brand new arm.

Nobody really thinks much about the competitive advantages that TJ surgery provides, and most view it in the same context as having a knee scoped or a labrum tear repaired. These surgeries and procedures are generally acceptable, it seems, because they are the pound of cure applied after someone has suffered an injury. That's the way we like our medicine.

The question is: Does this surgery, or even the knowledge that it is readily available, affect the competitive balance of the game? Do pitchers throw harder or throw pitches that they may have avoided in the past (e.g. sliders and splitters) because of the safety net that TJ procedures provide?

How conservative will a young pitcher be with his arm when he knows that, at worst, he can have his ligaments yanked out and replaced with stronger ligaments from his leg? And moreover, if there is any truth to the notion that pitchers eventually throw harder after having their UCL replaced, does this not constitute an unfair advantage?

Will Carrol and Thomas Gordon noted in a Baseball Prospectus piece in 2004 that some speculate that the "dead arm" that ended Sandy Koufax's career was in fact a wonky UCL that could have been fixed with this surgery. This raises for us a question: If we are going to insist on giving the utmost respect to the historical performances of hitters throughout the past century, shouldn't we be considering the number of injured arms throughout those eras?

To underscore the ubiquity of the procedure, that same BP article notes that Dr. Tim Kremchek performs 120 TJ's per year, roughly the equivalent of 10 big league pitching staffs. And he's just one surgeon.

If we find it morally problematic to reward Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds because they enjoyed an unfair advantage over the harball heroes that we see in gauzy sepia tones, then shouldn't we take into account the injured arms that threw only a couple of pitches to avoid pain, and that threw them slow and straight over the plate to Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle or Henry Aaron?

If we're going to heckle an easy target like Alex Rodriguez with catcalls of "A-Roid" and "A-Fraud", what sort of treatment should be given to Shaun Marcum when he returns? Because from our point of view, Marcum's Tommy John surgery seems to fall more in the category of being an ounce of prevention.

What the hell are the Jays doing to their pitchers' arms?

In spite of the title of this post, we don't want to unnecessarily feed into any b.s. about how J.P. is singlehandedly wrecking the arms of the entire pitching staff. Because seriously, you know that whole argument is coming, don't you? How else are the dyspeptic Jim Kelley's of the world going to deal with Shaun Marcum's name being added to the list of fallen pitchers, alongside Dustin McGowan, Casey Janssen, and Jeremy Accardo.

When as many pitchers start to hit the 60 day DL with elbow and shoulder issues, you have to take a look at how they are utilized and whether if there is some level of unnecessary abuse that is coming into play. There's nothing that immediately comes to mind for us, and a mere recounting to the pitchcounts and innings totals for the fallen will probably not tell the whole story. Those numbers don't tell how many pitches the pitchers were throwing in the bullpen before the game, nor do they tell how many pitches they threw in their side sessions in between starts/appearances.

We'd guess that what is happening with the Jays is just part of the peril of relying on young homegrown pitching talent. Yankees fans can probably spill volumes on this after the year that their future pitching stars have had. (Or not had, as it were.)

Incidentally, there's a great interview with Jays pitching coach Brad Arnsberg that was posted at Baseball Prospectus last week. In it, he mentions that Roy Halladay has significantly cut down his side sessions to ensure that he has more left in the tank (or the arm) for his starts.

Viva Las Vegas!
The word isn't yet official, but it appears as though the Jays' Triple A activities will be run out of Las Vegas next year. Given how few options the team had, the City of Broken Dreams is probably as good a spot as any for them to stash their top minor league prospects.

Although if Travis Snider gets sent down to start 2009, we sincerely hope that he's kept away from the cheap and plentiful buffets.

The Dodgers got the hell out of Las Vegas after this past season, noting that the facilities at the cavernous and rapidly aging Cashman field were inadequate for their prospects.

As a side note, Las Vegas is changing their franchise's nickname. The new ownership group which purchased the franchise last year didn't care for the name "51s" and the associated alien/UFO/conspiracies that are tied to it.

And now, he's no longer with us.

Please remove your caps, bow your heads, and observe a moment of silence for B.J. Ryan's season.

Three words: Tommy John surgery.

It's over.

Now everyone please move in an orderly fashion to the emergency counselors who are standing by.

BJ Ryan - Way too much belly itching

So Bo Junior Ryan is on his way to the DL.

Not only that, but he is ominously his way to see Dr. James Andrews to determine whether or not if he'll need surgery to recover from whatever is ailing and causing him to devolve from an All-Star closer to a Jim Acker-level chuck-and-ducker.

Ryan spent the better part of spring training suffering from "the flu", "backaches", and whatever else he could think of to explain his poor performance. What are the chances that all of these were a smokescreen for what was really bothering him?

In the meantime, the Jays will trot out Jason Frasor (18 career saves) to hold down the fort.

And we will spend the next few days with a rosary and a giant pack of Alka-Seltzer.