Mets right-hander Jacob deGrom went through a serious injury scare to his pitching elbow on Wednesday, but it turns out he won’t even miss a start. DeGrom will take the ball Monday as scheduled, manager Mickey Callaway told Brian Heyman of MLB.com and other reporters Saturday. The 29-year-old DeGrom’s near-injury didn’t occur on the mound, of course; instead, it came when he was swinging the bat during a third-inning plate appearance. As a result, Callaway would rather the prized hurler take a more passive offensive approach. “No, he will not,” Callaway said when asked if deGrom would be swinging in his next start. “I haven’t told him that, but no. There’s really no reason to. If it were up to me, the [pitchers] would never take BP. They would never swing in the game. We don’t need their spot in the lineup to score runs. And if we do, we’re not going to win anyway.” To his credit, deGrom is actually a decent offensive contributor relative to most other pitchers, evidenced by the .211/.233/.268 line he posted in 77 plate appearances last year.
Here’s more from the National League:
- Giants outfielder Mac Williamson won’t come off the seven-day concussion disabled list Sunday, manager Bruce Bochy announced (Twitter link via Kerry Crowley of the Bay Area News Group). Williamson is still “woozy,” according to Bochy. As Crowley notes, that suggests Williamson is continuing to deal with symptoms from the head injury he suffered April 24. The Giants have gone an impressive 7-3 since then, even though Williamson may have been in the very early stages of a breakout season prior to going on the DL.
- Dodgers left-hander Rich Hill will also have to wait a bit longer to return from the DL. Hill was scheduled to start Sunday against the Padres, but the Dodgers will instead give the ball to righty Ross Stripling, Pedro Moura of The Athletic was among those to report. The Dodgers don’t want to expose Hill’s injured finger to the high humidity in Monterrey, Mexico, site of their current series, according to Moura. However, Hill pointed out that he’s ready to come back. “I’m good to go. There’s nothing wrong,” said Hill, who has been out since April 14 (via Andy McCullough of the Los Angeles Times).
- Righty Enyel De Los Santos is making a case to join the Phillies’ rotation sometime this year, Todd Zolecki of MLB.com writes. The Phillies acquired the hard-throwing 22-year-old from the Padres in exchange for shortstop Freddy Galvis over the winter, and De Los Santos has since opened the season in dominant fashion with his new organization. Across 19 1/3 innings (four starts) at the Triple-A level, De Los Santos has pitched to a 1.40 ERA with 11.64 K/9 against 2.79 BB/9. Although De Los Santos isn’t on the Phillies’ 40-man roster, which could work against a promotion, they’ve taken notice of his performance, as director of player development Joe Jordan explains at length in Zolecki’s piece.
Come back soon Mac
Yeah! Like Gobbysteiner said: come back soon Mac!
Great to see Mac get a second shot at the bigs with his new swing and confidence, only to smash his head on a wall after tripping on a mound in the field of play! For crying out loud….figure out a way to move the bullpen mounds! The fact that everyone forgot to find a place for them when the park was designed and had to stick them on the field is embarrassing. What would they be saying if a big time player tripped over those mounds and blew out an achilles? Ridiculous.
I understand the Dodgers are playing it safe with regards to Hill. But I find it really difficult to accept pulling a guy from a start due to fears the humidity will cause issues with his finger. Isolating that and saying it out loud is enough to make plenty of old timers roll in their grave.
He’s been babied so much since he put on Dodger blue. Maybe it’s time to accept that the cautious approach might be part of why he isn’t warding off these injuries. Maybe he needs to get that finger in game shape and stay there.
Eh, probably not. Best to trust the medical experts with an order of magnitude more information than you and I have with that decision.
I assume you mean dead old timers. The live ones are having a face palm moment, above ground.
Well now his back is going to hurt because he just pulled himself landscaping duty.
You’ve never been to Monterrey. The humidity there is unbearable. Imagine Miami in August x 50.
You may want to look at the history of Rich Hill’s health and the fact that he’s now 38. That’s not babying; that’s smart use of a fragile asset. Most teams would have destroyed his arm years ago (and some tried)
The Dodgers can’t even get the chance to destroy his arm if they wanted to – Hill’s fingernail gets in the way.
While he’s old by baseball standards, he’s also a professional ball player. And a well paid one. Being beaten by the potential for your fingernail to react poorly in humidity is just ridiculous.
How much the player is paid doesn’t really matter here. A year before Hill, the Dodgers signed Scott Kazmir to an identical deal, but I would much rather have Hill, even if he only gives you 140 innings. If anything, this ‘baby-treatment’ is a form of respect for his immense talent. Dodgers need to win now, but they need him more in October. Knowing his health history, why wouldn’t you take precautionary measures and risk a long term injury?
Also, you don’t mess around with blisters. Aaron Sanchez should be a prime example why.
Can we get over this “soft” or “babying” narrative already? Its pathetic, dangerous and based on lies of how “tough” (a thing that doesn’t have a set definition) people were in the past (newsflash: they werent like that, but tell everyone they were and people have been swallowing lies for decades).
It’s like telling a kid to “toughen up” by just abusing them. Then they kill themselves and no one wins. We need to end this cycle today if we can. No one needs to be tested on their toughness, life is already tough just existing.
Bad teams ask players to do things they aren’t capable of. I mean, yeah, Rich Hill is a “well-paid professional ballplayer.” Maybe the Dodgers should use him at first base in the wake of Bellinger’s injury? Some pinch-hitting appearances?
Smart teams utilize assets well; if the Dodgers weren’t smart with Hill they’d just Dusty Baker him and get like 40 good innings and 30 bad ones before he went to the DL. The Dodgers will take the 140 excellent innings and the limitations that come with them.
This absurd narrative that people have about pitchers – “Nolan Ryan threw 300 innins every year and walked 200 batters and struck out 300, so what’s wrong with these babies today…” is ignoring that guys like Nolan Ryan are the extreme exception, not the rule. We remember Ryan’s durability because there is literally no other pitcher in history like him. The vast majority of baseball history is littered with guys like Brandon webb and Mark Prior and Rich Hill.
For the record, Ryan wasn’t that extreme. Before the ’70s, the workload for starting pitchers was routinely over 250 innings. Also for the record, Hill is adamant that he is perfectly able to pitch right now, and has openly disagreed with Roberts’ decision to hold back his next start until next week.
Ryan was extreme in that he pitched till he was 45 or whatever. Most of those guys you talk about – those 250-300 inning/year pitchers had fairly short careers, probably because they were soo overworked. I mean, you’re a Dodgers fan so you might remember this guy named Koufax whose career was over at 30 after throwing like 320 innings in two straight seasons. There’s tons of guys like that in baseball history – Bob Feller was overworked and done at 30, Dizzy Dean pitched 4 full seasons, tons of pitchers made it through two or three 250-inning seasons before that arm injuries took over. We remember Ryan because he somehow sustained that for longer than almost anyone. But he’s an outlier for sure. Most pitchers in baseball history didn’t hold up.
Hahahaha, ok bub. We hear ya. Abusing, thats funny. Where you from? Toughen up!
Reality of baseball is most pitchers are done by 30 now. Teams already pretty much have said it’s not smart to ever sign a pitcher after 30 for multiple years.
Guys are taught how to pitch everyone is taught and trained to throw harder. I would like to see mlb and this will never happen because of people in baseball that are backed on here whine and cry every time someone tries to change a rule even though it’s better in the long run. I would like to see mlb limit the amount of RP you can carry to 6. This will force teams to develop more RP who throw more than one inning. These guys can pitch more than one inning it’s just not as effective their numbers say. This is much needed change before we get to starters going 3 innings and seeing 6 RP pitch 1 inning each 3 of which are just called up.
The fact that people on here suggest well just add a 26 man. Look at all the old bat only guys who would get signed then like Holliday and Bautista (yes i know he was signed already). You really think teams will add a expensive bench bat instead of adding yet another RP who makes the league min? I don’t think so.
We don’t get anywhere in this sort of discussion by anecdote. If that’s the way to go, it’s easy to refute your argument by example. Just to pull one out of the hat: Juan Marichal. He had a long career with hardly a season of under 200 innings and several over 300. Yet he pitched for a long time. It would be easy to come up with more just like him. The fact is starters routinely pitched far more innings before the specialization era, and by no means did they all kill their arms in a few years of what we call today overwork but then was completely normal and expected.
Again, Juan Marichal is a hall-of-famer. I would bet that every pitcher you’re going to bring up – Marichal, Sutton, Seaver, ec. are Hall of Famers. Hall of Famers are, by their very nature outliers. Most pitchers are not Hall of Famers. Lots of pitchers have Hall of Fame talent but don’t make it because they get hurt. There are far more pitchers like that than actual Hall of Famers. Less than 1/10th of 1% of pitchers who start games in the majors make the Hall of Fame.
Or, to put it another way, there are 70 Starting pitchers in the Hall. One is Eckersley, who was mostly known for his reliever work.. One is Candy Cummings, who invented the curveball but wasn’t a great pitcher. Two are 19th century guys who were selected for non-performance reasons (O’Day and Joss) and one is John Ward, who is mostly in the hall for non-pitching reasons.
So that leaves us with 64 Hall of Fame Starters. (If we’re counting Smoltz, which I think is fair) Most of them combined long healthy careers that were very good quality. A few of them didn’t (Koufax, Dean, Feller, Newhouser) but generally only the most elite pitchers in history combine the two – long careers of very good quality – to make the hall. But there are probably hundreds of pitchers who had the talent to make the Hall who got hurt. Way more than 64. Most pitchers get hurt or become ineffective fairrly quickly, usually in tandem. Having a long healthy quality career is relatively rare in baseball history, and is recognized as such
I’m pretty sure I am not following your point. Why is someone who had a long, illustrious career disqualified as an example of someone who had a long, illustrious career? A mediocre pitcher normally won’t have a long career (and by definition, not illustrious) if only because he is mediocre and the demand for mediocrity is pretty low in baseball. A workhouse journeyman could still pitch a heck of a lot of innings, retire due to age not infirmity, and still never make it to the Hall of Fame. Some random examples: Jerry Koosman, Jim Kaat.
What I am hearing between these lines I think is the theory that every pitcher has an odometer on their arm and at some point it ticks over to a magic number and bang he’s dead. Even if that was true (and I doubt it), nobody knows the magic number. For every rookie who rips his UCL and is never seen again (especially in the days before TJ), ten throw thousands of innings and retire not because of any specific injury but from the normal wear and tear of competition and age.
In the history of baseball, there have been a relative handful of “Workhorse jorneymen” who have racked up thousands of innings without at least some consideration for the Hall – mediocre pitchers don’t generally rack up huge innings totals because someone better comes along, great pitchers often – more often than not – flame out early, and then there’s an eliter tier of hall-of-fame pitchers. The 64 starters in the Hall, basically, minus the few exceptions (Koufax, et. al.) I find this argument a lot: “Nolan Ryan (Or Marichal, or Sutton) managed to pitch 250 innings a year for two decades, why are pitchers such babies now?” And the answer is that it’s not really fair to compare most pitchers to Hall of Famers.
I would argue the kinds of pitchers you mentioned – Kaat (who should probably be in the Hall anyway; he was a victim of the old HoF voters’ obsession with 300 wins) and Koosman – are nearly as rare as actual Hall of Fame pitchers. Even the innings eaters – guys like Claude Osteen or Frank Tanana or Koosman – are really rare; of the top 50 career pitchers in IP, virtually all of them are Hall of Famers, 1800s guys and Roger Clemens.. Kaat, Koos and Tanana are the only exceptions.
I guess what I am saying is we think there’s a certain kind of pitcher – a guy who racked up tons of innings but wasn’t good enough to make the Hall of Fame – the workhorse journeyman – and those pitchers are actually rarer than Hall of Famers.
I think you are being a somewhat arbitrary. The players who make the Hall do so on largely a subjective basis. If you now add to that universe those who received or deserved “at least some consideration,” now we are talking about a huge set of players with no logical boundary definition. If a line was drawn at say 3,000 innings I believe the set of pitchers who crossed it would be quite large, especially if we go back to the pre-specialization era when 300 inning seasons were far from unusual. A lot of non-household names would be in that list. I suspect they are not rare at all.
Just for record, I am not making the “players these days are big babies” argument. I fully understand what goes into the decision to treat starting pitchers like crown jewels. I also understand that the decision to play on any given day generally does not come down to the player but the management and I don’t think those decisions reduce so much to concerns about wearing out the pitcher’s arm so much as not permitting them to pitch when they are achy or weary because that leads to performance issues.
Okay; if you set the cutoff at 3000 innings that includes 136 pitchers in ML history. A little more than half of them (75) are Hall of Famers. The vast majority of the rest are 1800s pitchers – those guys who threw 500 innings/year because they were throwing underhand. There are 4 non-HOF knuckleballers on the list (Wake, Hough, J. Niekro and Wood), and more than a handful of guys who should be in the Hall (Tiant, Katt, Mussina, Clemens, SChilling).
That leaves 35 pitchers who played post 1900 with 3000+ IP and not in the Hall of Fame, and some people think Vida Blue has a good HoF case. .It’s just not very common for a non-elite pitcher to get to 3000 innings in a career, at least in the last 118 years.
Christ. Let’s get back on track and away from talking about suicide. It’s a baseball post about rich hill not making a start.
Yeah obviously not. A pitcher who crossed 3000 regular season innings would realistically have to pitch at least 15 seasons assuming 200 innings a year. Which is fair, I’d say. There’s not going to be many guys pitching that many innings and there will be a whole lot less moving forward. I’d wager a whole lot on The % of guys who throw that many innings and miss the Hall will be significantly smaller moving forward.
My point here still is that the Hall criterion is fairly arbitrary. It doesn’t go anywhere in terms of accounting for the number of pitchers in the pre-specialization era who far exceeded the workload that is expected of starters today. That set includes many of the greats (for obvious reasons), but also a fair number the not great (or near-great, if you insist), and fewer of them, for obvious reasons. It certainly doesn’t refute my argument that the number of innings pitched by starters each year (and accordingly, in their careers), has declined substantially in the modern era.
Can an argument be made that this lengthens the careers of starters overall? I have no answer for that, but if that question were to be approached it would have to factor in the many advances in sports medicine in the modern era. That would be quite an exercise. I’m not sure how/if that can be done. What I wouldn’t assume is that today’s kid gloves treatment does extend careers, or that it even is intended to do so.
If Callaway’s comments are how most, if not all, managers feel, why the hell wont they use a DH in the NL? It’s just a matter of time, IMO
I think the best way to appease the “No, I love watching a .200 OPS hitter not even try to get a hit because the one time they do, I love it” crowd would be to let that spot in the batting order be more fluid and up to the manager, if the pitcher really can hit, they can, but if its someone like deGrom (.447 career OPS), then use a damn DH already. Fair?
I think the best way to appease them is actually let the pitchers run and bat and actually practice other parts of the game so they’re actually in shape to play the game instead of protecting them from injuries and given the amount of arm injuries on the DL I’d say it’s a utter failure by the entire league
batting and running and all that stuff would cut into their practice time for, you know, pitching. Pitchers have never been able to hit. It’snot the skill they are selected for. And nobody at the major league level is going to gain much by practicing it more..
The argument always against pitchers hitting is that they get hurt. Very few do and the reasons for that is they’re unathletic or trained to be. You really think pitchers are just practicing pitching all practice long? lol most of their time at practice is shagging flyballs.
How is that fair? Even the pitcher like DeGrom can hit it’s extremely likely you have a hitter on your bench who is better. There’s no middle ground on the DH v Pitcher.
The Mets don’t need the pitchers spot in the lineup to score runs…so far the other 8 aren’t scoring any either. And if that’s how he feels what is the point of him hitting the hitter 8th anyway?
There’s more than. a bit of evidence that hitting the pitcher 8th and a speedy leadoff-type 9th helps a team score an extra 8-12 runs per year. (The theory is that the #1-4 hitters are your team’s best, and also to do with something about pitcher’s batting with one out or two outs is slightly different between the 8th and 9th spots in the order.. 8-12 runs a year doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s basically one extra win per year. It’s marginal, but it exists. If you’re forced to bat a non-hitter in a lineup spot, you take a marginal advantage wherever you can.
Ryan Vogelsong got hit in the face, deGrom hurt his elbow, Scherzer hurt his thumb and three Brewer starters got hurt hitting or running the bases. Ask Jimmy Nelson how he feels about this. Even old school Terry Collins was for DH. He said no comes to a game to see the pitcher hit. Need to prevent injuries, Mets may have dodged a bullet this time.
I would bet having the entire league having pitchers hit would save 1000s of pitches a year saving pitchers from arm injuries which is far more injuries than pitchers getting hurt on the base paths or at the plate.