With the news of Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale needing Tommy John surgery, MLBTR’s Jeff Todd seeks out comparable aces who were able to return to prominence after the procedure. Click here for today’s video.
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he could be a fine RP again
He’s a gamer he’ll comeback strong after TJS
agreed
only if he changes pitching motion.
He’s not the only one to have an unorthodox motion and it’s not as if he has a huge injury history pitching this way. Tjs happens to lots of guys with all different motions. IMO he bounces back and if it were me I’d leave that motion alone
That unorthodox motion is a large part of what makes him so successful. He will never change it. You don’t dominate mlb for 10 years and then change what you are doing.
Sale goes deep into games and has some CG’s on his resume (16 in his career), so he actually knows how to pitch as opposed to most SP’s, who simply try to strike out as many guys as they can in 5 or 6 innings.
Obviously it’s too early to tell, but I think he’ll be fine.
Longterm studies on TJS recovery can only be done every 4-6 years as you need time for data to compile. About 5 years ago Fangraphs did and article and one of the areas they looked at was how age can be a factor. The older the patient the less bright the future. Sale will be 32 if/when he returns.
Age at TJS 16-23…App(Gms) 93… IP 221
Age at TJS 24-27…App(Gms) 70… IP 137
Age at TJS 28-31…App(Gms) 74… IP 130
Age at TJS 32-50…App(Gms) 29… IP 46
tht.fangraphs.com/tommy-john-surgery-success-rates…
who’s had TJS at age 50?
Give him credit for trying no? haha
Maybe Tom Brady will in a year or so at 44 and then come back to play until he’s 52 while winning 3 additional Super Bowls.
Lololol – TJS 32-50. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s great.
Big Sexy??
Jamie Moyer was 49 years 151 days old at the time of his TJS
Opps…I looked at the wrong date….sorry…he was 48 years 14 days at the time of his surgery. 49/151 was his record setting age as the oldest pitcher to win a game
I knew about his longevity, but wasn’t aware that he set a record. I would’ve guessed that Satchel Paige had that record.
Only Paige himself may have known for sure how old he was. He claimed his mother kept birth records in a family bible and a goat ate it.
He could well have been several years older than he was stated in baseball records. Luis Tiant is another who was often thought to be several years older than his baseball records said.
Tiant’s listed age is correct, it’s in dog years.
Lol
Bartolo Colon is currently older than all those dudes
And isnt in the MLB and probably never will be again, so what’s your point?
Also, medical treatment including rehab continues to improve. Stats look pretty but aren’t worth much.
Well, stats always have a flaw to them. The part I wondered was: aren’t pitchers in there mid-to-late 30s pitching fewer innings or retiring simply because of their age, regardless of having or not having TJS? Would be nice see FIP and WHIP in that table Cat provided. But not complaining.
From The American Journal of Sports Medicine did a study a few years ago..they studied 147 TJS pitchers…..
20% never returned
13% returned to picth fewer than 10 games
67% managed to pitch 10 games in a season after TJS
50% ended up on the DL with arm/shoulder troubles
Average ERA before 4.23….after…4.67 – BAA before .249…..and after .257 – WHIP before… 1.368 and after…. 1.432 – % of pitches in the strike zone….51.9 – and after…. 49.6…. Innings pitched before 94.3…. and after…. 77.3 – % of fastball thrown before 63.9 and after 59 – Avg. fastball velocity before 91.2…and after 90.8
Im thinking that just maybe the age 32-50 group might be skewed by people not pitching because they are just old…
An excerpt from the article I referenced ………….
“When we think about pitchers who have recovered from Tommy John surgery, our minds tend to lock onto the successful ones. Tommy John himself. A.J. Burnett. Adam Wainwright. Jordan Zimmermann.
What is critical to understand is that one out of every five major pitchers who undergoes the operation never throws another pitch at that level. These are less familiar names, given their career-ending injuries. Ambiorix Burgos. Anthony Reyes. Macay McBride. Bill Simas.
The most recent data suggest that one out of two major league pitchers who has Tommy John surgery will throw fewer than 100 innings the rest of his big league career. Bill Bray. B.J. Ryan. Taylor Buchholz. Victor Zambrano.
Is it my imagination or does it always seem like when Red Sox or Yankee pitcher goes down it’s a crises. There’s been a lot of other pitchers who are getting TJS. I don’t see articles written about them.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. 🙂
Goodness gracious how petty are you?
Exactly….the guy with a NY sports icon has a problem with this.
I’m guessing to you it’s the Yankees, the Sawx…and the other teams are just schedule filler.
How many of those pitcher are starting a 145M contract right after getting TJS?
Chris Sale has been one of the top five pitchers in the game for the past decade, so it would have been a big deal even if he was still with the White Sox.
It’s just your imagination. The last article posted on MLBTradeRumors is literally about two no-name Padres relievers who need to have TJS
Andrés Muñoz is definitely not a no-name pitcher.
‘No-name’ is a figure of speech. I think everyone in here knows that everyone has a name. “No-name’ means a name no one recognizes.
Andres Munoz is an immense talent. He and Jordan Hicks were the only 2 pitchers to average 100mph on their fastballs last year. If you haven’t heard of him you haven’t been paying attention.
The only thing to write about the Yankees right now is how classless they have been trying to negate the contract they foolishly gave Jacoby Ellsbury.
Early in the off-season the Rangers and Red Sox were rumored to be pairing up in a salary dump deal of either Price, Eovaldi, or Sale. Thank God for Corey Kluber.
Depends on which Kluber you get.
Thanks Jeff this made me feel a little better. Sale is my favorite player and yeah I’ve always known this was probably going to happen but it’s nice to know there’s still hope for him.
You have to wonder how much keeping Sale was Dombrowski’s decision and how much ownership. They knew he had issues.
The Sox basically have to rebuild the entire rotation from the ground up. They will be in the wilderness for a bit. Maybe they trade Benitendi and Devers and load up the farm while they are at max value. They have some big payroll coming off the books shortly.
Devers isn’t going anywhere
They will never trade Raffy. As far as thh hg e Sale contract goes, it was ownership I heard that didn’t wanna lose him “like Lester”. Sale was underpaid for many yr, n never once did he complain. He deserve the contract, who would’ve known his elbow would flare up?5
A player can deserve a contract, but the team doesn’t have to be the one to provide it. Always better to be out a year too early than a year too late.
The Red Sox need to trade E-Rod after he had his career season last year. He has two years of control left and a long injury history. If he gets hurt again then they won’t be able to get much for him.
They also need to see if they can dump salary like JD Martinez and Christian Vazquez. They are not going anywhere in the next couple of years so it is best to get a head start on the rebuild.
You have lost it Rmul.
In a shortened season no one will be actively trading for the foreseeable future. But how MLB handles the trade deadline will be interesting.
At 6’6″ and 183 lbs, and 32 years of age, it is highly unlikely that Chris Sale ever pitches again in Boston, least as a starter. Perhaps he can follow the footsteps of Denis Eckersley and become a topflight reliever but that is highly improbable. We can only hope the Red Sox organization has an insurance policy to cover their losses from Sales’ contract
There was more to Eck’s story then what you think. When they traded for Eck he had turned his life around in alcohol rehab. Bout many come around like Eck. He was special.
Yeah he didn’t let Gibson’s HR ruin him like Donnie Moore did with Henderson’s. Although Angel fans were no help booing him constantly the following year. Poor guy took his own life SMH. Plenty of blame to go around.
Oh but it does. Setbacks Ned to be overcome.
Halo, I’m a RS fan n I felt just sick hearing what Moore went through n his final death. That was a horrible ending, he deserved so much more.
Living in Chicago, Eck was crazy when he Got traded to the Cubs…. Who did Boston get back in that trade? Yup you got it…. ANY Red sox fan who blamed Buckner was not worth talking to just as any Cub fan who blamed Bartman!!!!
Welcome to the Texas Rangers!!!
So you’re saying it has to with the fact he wears Red and White Sox?
Padres need some more stupid trades
Good luck with that.
Cole is next
Well they both were on the same UCLA pitching staff.
Sale is a fierce competitor. If anyone can return to form, he will. It’s too bad they wasted almost a yr fooling around with injections.
Being a fierce competitor has nothing to do with it. It’s how well will his arm respond to the surgery.
Pasha2k is absolutely correct. Being a fierce competitor has plenty to do with it. Sale will put a lot into his rehab because he is driven by being such a competitor. The physical aspect is certainly important but so is the psychological part.
Oh I forgot he’s a Red Sox player, it’s a game changer. Lol
Tim, are working on a Red Sox cheating story? Apparently the investigation has ended.
MLB won’t do anything to the players, and the manager’s gone. What is the point?
curiosity. is there anything else to do with sports on the fritz?
Go for a walk or run. Practice a musical instrument. Read some books. Listen to the radio. Clean house. Get plenty of sleep. Get take-out food from your local eateries. Face time with friends and family. I’ve been busy and I haven’t even started reading books yet. Hardly watching TV and certainly not paying any attention to the phony baloney precedent. Talk to people who actually know something about this pandemic instead of the mindless yacking idiots.
I just saw the prior story. my bad.
I wish Sale had it done in the middle of last year you could see this surgery coming with velocity dropping like it did. Now most likely another year maybe year and a half before contributing.
Yea he’s gonna be 32 before he pitches again
Ridiculous headline.
Chris Sale is not a Red Sox legend. He’s a White Sox legend who got traded to the Red Sox.
Sale is his own legend.
He’s not a legend period.
Sale was a White Sox legend, until he started acting like a jerk (cutting up uniforms, belligerent behavior over teammates kid being banned from the locker room).
He won’t pitch again until he’s 32
There won’t be a season this year IMO so I think he will comeback and be strong next season
The next season is 2020
Probably has a sub 3 ERA over next year’s second half.
Tampa has it figured out.
The average RP gets paid a fraction of a SP.
The solution is to have fewer SP’s and more RP’s on your team.
We could also expand the roster size and pay pitchers even less.
Or we could waste our time lamenting the idiocy of paying someone over $30M per year to throw approximately 3,000 to 3,500 pitches per season.
That’s $10,000 every pitch.
Do the math.
32 starts x 100 pitches = 3,200 pitches.
You’d think MLB pitchers are part of the military LOL.
“Air Force No Longer Spending $10,000 on Toilet Seats, Officials Say”
military.com/defensetech/2018/07/11/air-force-no-l…
What’s with all the hard core doomer articles? Isn’t there enough sorrow as it is?
I’d be willing to bet that there are underlying factors in a pitcher’s ability to come back. Some of it could be simply genetics and some of it could be approach. Those are wide categories. Rather than look at averages why not wait and see what happens. That approach is terrible with something highly predictable like a pandemic but probably fine for being a baseball fan.
He’s done for sure. Mediocrity is his new ceiling. Red Sox made a huge mistake, LOL. He gets paid but g time, he’s fine with it all, guaranteed.
The Athletic allows for editing, MLBTR up your game!!
What I’ve always thought was interesting about TJ surgery, is that Tommy John himself was literally an experiment. Despite that, he returned to throw 207 innings in his first year back at the age of 33. He also pitched until he was 46 years old, throwing more than 2500 innings following his surgery. John was a guinea pig on the operating table and his rehab process likely mirrored that.
Today, there’s immensely more data, knowledge, technology and practice that almost surely makes the entire TJ process more precise and efficient. Given that, guys come back on strict innings limits, having been coddled and evaluated much more, yet still fall apart. I am by no means one of those people who say “they just don’t make em like they used to,” rather, it’s just an observation that intrigues me.
The maturation of the procedure, that we now call pancreaticoduodenectomy, has been punctuated by the involvement of several giants of surgical heritage. This highly demanding procedure requires the highest level of surgical training and excellent technical skills. The excellent outcomes in the recent past have been very successful in dispelling the nihilism that was attached to this procedure in the 1960s and 1970s..
My father had this procedure in 1968 and survived for 20 years which was unheard of, as he wasn’t expected to live even 2 more years. My point is that sometimes a person does very well after a procedure and yet there is still an expectation of not doing well around the procedure.
Obviously, opting for TJ is a much less invasive and life threatening situation than pancreatic cancer. That said, maybe Tommy John is not only the pioneer but one of the truly fortunate ones who thrived afterwards. I think there are underlying factors in a patient’s success including genetics and personal approach. My dad was meticulous with his life style but he also knew how lucky he was to survive.