Tommy John Tommy John

My vice president in charge of baseball news called yesterday to report that Mets’ fireballer Noah “Thor” Syndergaard needs Tommy John surgery.  “Why do pitchers keep getting Tommy John [surgery] without getting Tommy John [the pitcher]?” I asked at one point.

 

Allow me to explain.  Front offices today don’t want pitchers who do anything but strike batters out.  In other words, they’d have no use for the second coming of Tommy John, never mind a career that spanned 26 years and 287 wins.  No, they’d take one look at that 4.3 strikeout rate per nine innings (or SO9 for you laypeople out there) and walk away.

 

Somehow, baseball has reached a point where every infielder and outfielder operates under the suspicion of incompetence; hit it anywhere, fear the worrywarts in power, and somebody will drop it.  The only position beyond reproach is catcher.  Old position #2 is trusted to catch the ball most of the time, provided he can frame it all of the time.  Here are your building blocks to MLB executive thought, 2020: Throw it, catch it, strike ’em out. 

 

It’s a near-perfect strategy, provided you have a endless supply of “power arms.”  Syndergaard has a career SO9 of 9.7.  That’s nice, but not as good as Chris Sale, with a SO9 of 11.1.  Oh, wait, Sale needs Tommy John surgery, too.

 

I love Sale, that string bean with the heart of a lion, always have and always will.  I hope he comes back from surgery as good as new.  But, even if he does, the odds are he won’t have a career nearly as long and good as John’s.

 

And yet the 30-year old Sale with his 109 career wins possesses a career WAR of 45.3, as opposed to 61.6 for John.  Consider what that means.  If Sale does come back 100 percent and replicates the same stats over his next 100 wins, his WAR will be nearly 30 games higher than John’s, even with 87 fewer career wins.  This is analytic insanity, at least to me.

 

But not to a general manager like Brian Cashman of the Yankees.  He sees free-agent Gerrit Cole with a 2019 SO9 of 13.8 and signs him to a nine-year deal for $324 million.  Cole turns 30 in September.  What will his SO9 be in four or five years?  Tommy John went 37-17 between the ages of 34 and 35, in case you’re wondering, not to be confused with 43-18 the two years after that.

 

I explained all this to Clare, who summed it up with, “In other words, you’re saying only physical freaks who end up in the Hall of Fame can keep throwing that hard.”  Yes, grasshopper, I am, along with wondering why general managers keep taking the gamble and hoping that someone tells Michael Kopech all about the guy the surgery he had is named for.