a brief history of mark mulder's shoulder

let's begin in the present day --- st louis post-dispatch, june 24, 2006:

ahh, conservative treatment; where have we heard that one before? the cardinals lead the league in "conservative" treatment; they're the most careful, cautious guardians of ballplayer health in the whole major leagues.

let mark mulder serve as an example -- a case study in how conservative treatment can prevent a minor problem from flaring up into something major. . . . .

mulder's saga dates back to may 3, the day he left the team in houston and returned to st louis to see team doctor george paletta. matt leach picks up the story:

whew, sigh of relief. but the following day, will carroll suggested at baseball prospectus that mulder's sore back was nothing at all to dismiss lightly -- and that his problems might be only beginning: mulder's manager, coaches, and training staff -- conservative lot that they are -- chose option B: pitch through it. mind you, mulder's next turn was in florida, vs the woeful florida marlins -- an 8-21 club at the time. the cardinals were carrying 13 pitchers; maybe they could've squeaked by with a bullpen game? for that matter, they might have sat mulder down and turned to a pitcher named reyes, down at memphis. with two open dates in the subsequent 10 days, the cards could have held mulder out for three weeks at the cost of only one missed start -- in may. against a last-place team.

but mulder kept pitching.

he tossed quality starts in his next four games and won three of them, but he was laboring; only once did he go more than 6 1/3 innings (he exceeded that total 4 times in his first 6 starts). on may 28, at san diego, the first sign of real trouble surfaced: mulder gave up three homers and 8 runs in the span of 10 batters, blowing a 6-2 lead and sending st louis on its way to a 10-8 defeat. after mulder's next start, a 2d successive pummeling (at home vs chicago), some guy calling himself "no dribble" (a tobacco juice ref'nce, perhaps) posted the following keen observations at bernie miklasz' chat room:

with hindsight, it's pretty clear that "no dribble" knew whereof he spoke. and i more than half-suspect "no dribble" wasn't just your average game-of-the-week-watching schmuck; sounds like a pretty knowledgeable guy with a well-honed sense of what to look for.

whoever this guy is, he knew then what we all know now: mulder's shoulder was unsound. duncan, la russa, weisberg, jocketty -- somebody had to have seen what "no dribble" saw and reached the same conclusions. we can guess that they did, because two days later, on june 6, mulder's health status came into question --- as noted right here, in this post:

somewhere in the organization, there were doubts about mulder's ability to take his normal turn. in the end, he did take it -- and got killed, yielding 6 runs in 3 innings at milwaukee.

reyes continued to mow 'em down at memphis.

after mulder's next start, a 5-inning slog (9 hits, 4 runs, 2 homers) vs the pirates, duncan offered this upbeat assessment: "It's a step forward. As long as he keeps making steps forward, he'll get back to where we need him to be."

and then came the comiskey collapse, after which la russa explained:

either these guys were lying -- the same thing duncan indignantly accused ozzie guillen of the day after the mulder debacle -- or they missed something that a fan (if that's who he was) diagnosed from a TV screen and described to a tee in a chat room.

i don't think tony and dave missed anything. i think they knew mulder was hurt but thought that he could grit it out, just as they thought rolen could grit out his sore shoulder last season. i think they kept sending mulder out there, impaired, because -- to quote la russa from directly above -- "we need him so much." they needed him so much that they decided to pretend he wasn't hurt; they decided to pretend that mulder had been improving and that his side sessions had been electric.

they kept sending him out there, and all along they had reyes available down in memphis.

it doesn't really matter whether you agree that their handling of mulder has been fundamentally dishonest. if the mistake was an honest one, so much the worse: it means tony and dave were the last ones to see what had become plain to fans, reporters, and ev'yone else. if it was an honest mistake, then it was also a grossly incompetent one; and these two men have had too much success for me to believe they were guilty of such.

i can believe, though, that they would take a reckless chance with a player's health and then plead ignorance when it backfires.

all of this might have been avoided if the cardinals had applied (ahem) conservative treatment in may, when mulder's back problem becamde serious enough to require an emergency trip to the team doctor. the shoulder almost surely got hurt as a result of mulder's pitching through the back pain; as "no dribble" described, mulder likely favored the back, changed his delivery, and put more stress on the joint. those compensatory measures worked for a few starts, but they ultimately turned a manageable problem -- back pain -- into a far more serious injury to mulder's pitching arm.

could any of this have been foreseen? am i just 2d-guessing here? no, i'm not just 2d-guessing. on may 8 i outlined a plan to leverage two off-days in mid-may into a 14-day respite for mulder, while keeping ev'ybody else on normal rest:

i'm not dredging this up to show what a smart guy i am; i'm merely saying the team had options. the cardinals chose a different option -- and then stubbornly stuck with it for six weeks, until they'd run their #2 starter into the ground.

whatever the outcome for mark mulder going forward, la russa and duncan will have to answer for it.