Thursday 10 July 2008

I hate to say I told you so...

So the official word on McGowan is that he has a torn rotator cuff. In the article JP says:

"I think right now, we're probably looking at, I don't know exactly how long, but probably longer than four weeks... regarding how much time the pitcher could miss.".

I didn't think much of it at the time until I came across this little gem by Rotoworld:

"Blue Jays placed RHP Dustin McGowan on the 15-day disabled list with soreness in his right shoulder.

The team made the decision before finding out the results of his MRI, which isn't a great sign. The team has publicly admitted they're out of it in the last couple days, and will play it very safe with their young pitcher. Dont' be surprised if he's out months instead of weeks. It's worth noting that McGowan threw 125 pitches in a complete game on June 10, and has allowed four runs in each of his five starts since."

Huh. How about that. Apparently, McGowan hasn't been the same since he threw 125 pitches in some June 10th game against the Mariners. I just can't seem to remember if anybody had mentioned that it might have been a problem to have McGowan throw a meaningless, complete game against the Mariners since he had to throw 125 pitches in the process.

This is why we have pitch counts to protect young pitchers like McGowan. All this nonsense about a torn rotator cuff most likely could have been avoided by him not throwing 125 pitches in that game. It's why I won't buy into the argument that a starter 'earns' or 'deserves' a chance to finish a game, when they have a high pitch count. As you saw, yes, the starter can finish the game strong. But down the line, shit like this is bound to happen.

Twitchy.

4 comments:

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

i don't think we can blame his torn rotator cuff on one game in which he threw 125 pitches.

but in retrospect, i guess you're right, it wasn't a smart move...

The Southpaw said...

I also recalled when I read that blurb that you commented on that pitch count. Kudos on calling it - though I'm still not sure there's a "bound to happen" effect I do thing the risk far outweighs the reward.

~Will

The Southpaw said...

Believe me Will, it's not something I'm happy to be right about :(. One of those things I wish I was wrong.

I'd rather edge on the side of caution with young, promising players than take risks like that. That game may not be the only reason he's hurt, but it definetly didn't help. And it's too much of a coincidence that his next 4-5 starts were absolute garbage.

Twitch.

Brian McFadden said...

How about the multitude of injured pitchers in 2008? I don't remember ever seeing this many arms go down in a given year.

McGowan (and teammate Marcum) are on a pretty long list of injured pitchers who have made things interesting this year for MLB and Fantasy teams to say the least.