a brief history of mark mulder's shoulder

pretty stark illustration of how their policy vis-vis young pitchers hurts the organization.

if it was a reasonable risk to keep mulder on the mound in may ---- and i'll accept that argument, because mulder seemed to be pitching without impairment --- do you think it was reasonable to keep him out there after three consecutive blowout starts?

as for jocketty's statement about the MRI thing --- just sounds like spin to me.

And further, could it be that their willingness to take a serious risk with Mulder is reflective of their intention to let him walk after the season's end?

but if he comes back healthy, those are not catastrophic losses.

what bothers me is the possibility that the shoulder injury was a direct result of their gamble. it's one thing to gamble on a guy who already has a sore arm, throw him out there and see if he can still get hitters out. it's another thing to take a guy whose arm is healthy and, by having him pitch when he isn't healthy, create a sore arm through imprudent usage.

if tony/dunc are guilty of that, then it's not a good bet.

but i still think it was. case in point: last august they skipped him for one turn in the rotation with a minor neck ailment --- the august 27 game, which jason marquis famously started instead, on short rest, and won with a 3-hit shutout. it was just a precautionary measure --- they didn't want something minor to become major.

they might easily have made the same calculation back in may. as will carroll put it at the time, they have two alternatives: pitch him and get him some rest, just to make sure; or gamble and have him pitch through it.

you state the other half of this very well: however you feel about their decision to keep mulder pitching in may, it was pretty clear by early june that he was not healthy --- and they very stubbornly insisted he was.

Does this mean it's ownership's job to put the brakes on sometimes?  Unfortunately, it may be.

Maybe the Birds can hire a VP of Common Sense to whisper things in WJ's ear at certain times.

that's an awful lot of movement for a first-place team. i'm not sure Tankersley can be trusted, so we're gonna have to keep Marquis or Ponson.

at this point, i say get Mulder right (as right as he can get), pitch Reyes, hope that Ponson keeps it together for a few weeks until Mulder gets back and then DFA him. I'd feel okay in the playoffs with a Carp/Mulder (if healthy)/Reyes/Suppan rotation, and Marquis in emergency/long relief.

in the long run, i'd feel alright with a Carp/Reyes/Wainwright/Suppan/Marquis rotation, if nothing else can be done. i gotta feeling that Marquis' ego will have him leaving StL next year, tho.

first, my complaint isn't against paletta; it's against la russa / dunc. the last line of the post says it's those two who will have to answer for mulder's health; not paletta. it is tony/dunc's responsibility to manage the team's resources (players), and wise stewardship sometimes means that you impose caution and shut a player down, even if the player and the doctor say he can play.

obviously, something wasn't right; otherwise, why was mulder flying back to st louis to see doc paletta in the first place? so even when doc paletta said, "i can't find anything specifically wrong with this body," it was still the manager's option to say, "well that's great news; fantastic news. something still isn't right, so let's play it safe anyway and give the guy some extra rest. it's too early in the season to be monkeying around."

i, and more knowledgeable people than i, offered that opinion at the time of the injury; it's not a 2d guess.

your 2d point --- there may be no relationship between the back pain and the shoulder --- is more than fair. but at the very least it's a possibility that the two are related; back injuries commonly do lead to arm injuries, which is why back pain trips the alarms to begin with.

mulder has never had an arm injury in his life; it would be quite a coincidence if he suddenly got one on the heels of a back problem, but there was no relationship btween the two.

but it's still possible that they're unrelated, so for the sake of discussion let's assume that they are.  we can then set aside the month of may and focus on june. i still don't understand their decision-making from june 4 forward. it was obvious by then that he was hurt --- guys were spotting the injury from their tv screens, and the beat writers were all asking questions about it; his velocity was way down, his motion looked different, and so did his pitches. and the results spoke for themselves. sending the guy out there three more times ---- well, at the very least it didn't give the team much chance to win on the nights mulder pitched, and at worst it caused his condition to worsen.

the possibility that mulder said "i'm fine," and the training/medical staff said "it's nothing structural," still doesn't get TLR off the hook. it's his job to make independent judgments and do what's best for the sake of the team.

if they'd shut mulder down three starts ago, it would mean a) they might have won some of the games mulder started, instead of losing 20-6; and b) he'd be coming back healthy a few days from now, instead of 3 weeks from now.

i just don't see any upside to the way this way handled. there were a series of decision points, and at each juncture they decided to let him keep pitching. since i and others questioned those decisions at the time, it's not unfair to point out that their decisions haven't worked out very well.