Sean Lowe was hurting last September, physically and emotionally. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating at times but was outweighed by the longing to pitch for the White Sox in the playoffs, maybe even the World Series.
So Lowe found a way to delay his shoulder surgery until after the season. Would he have done it if the Sox weren’t steaming to a title in the American League Central?
“Probably not,” Lowe said Tuesday. “That was a big thing. . . . Same thing with Cal [Eldred]. Same thing with Bob Howry. Same thing with a lot of guys. You have a chance, you’re going to do everything you can to be a part of it.”
Left-handed reliever Kelly Wunsch, who led the AL with 83 appearances last year, will undergo surgery soon to repair a torn rotator cuff. He will become the seventh White Sox player lost for the season through injury, with two-time MVP Frank Thomas the only position player in the group.
Questions are being asked of the White Sox about this unusual run of pitching injuries, which has cost them Eldred, Jim Parque, Bill Simas, Lorenzo Barcelo, Antonio Osuna and Wunsch. The Sox are asking their own questions.
The biggest of those is rhetorical: Why us?
“For whatever reason, this is just our time,” general manager Ken Williams said.
Today’s climate demands accountability. If something is wrong, it figures that it must be somebody’s fault. There’s a rush to judgment that points fingers at managers for overusing pitchers, conditioning coaches for building up too much (or too little) bulk, pitching coaches for not instilling injury-proof mechanics or doctors for not making a firm diagnosis at the first hint of trouble.
The reality is that pitching injuries are as inevitable in baseball as knee injuries in football.
“The old adage that you can never have enough pitchers is bad on the fact injuries to throwing arms are fairly common,” former Texas Rangers President Mike Stone said. “You’re not going to avoid injuries with pitchers. It’s the way it goes.”
The White Sox are under the microscope now because they have the most casualties. But when Stone was president of the Rangers, his team went through a run of injuries in which it lost young pitchers Edwin Correa, Jose Guzman, Brad Arnsberg, Ray Hayward and Jose Cecena in a span of six months.
The San Francisco Giants once thought they were set for years with Atlee Hammaker, Mike Krukow and Dave Dravecky, but injuries shortened all of their careers. More recently, the Cleveland Indians lost Charles Nagy, Jaret Wright and Chad Ogea to injuries.
Cleveland has used the disabled list 49 times with pitchers since the start of the 1997 season. That’s almost three times as many as the White Sox, who before this season had made DL moves with pitchers 12 times in four years. They are up to 19 in five years, which is less than every other major league organization except Minnesota (14) and San Francisco (17).
“The bottom line is I haven’t lost faith in our medical staff,” Williams said. “We’ve been too good for too long.”
There is a common theme to the Sox’s run of injuries. It is the same one that underscored an unfortunate run of injuries the Cubs experienced in 1999, the year after they won the National League’s wild-card spot in the 163rd game of the season.
When their teams have a chance to win, especially teams that weren’t expected to at the beginning of the season, pitchers are pushed harder than normal to produce results. Sometimes managers push them, but usually the pitchers, like Lowe, push themselves. There’s often a price to be paid later.
“Last year really took a toll on us,” White Sox trainer Herm Schneider said. “Guys really had to dig deep into themselves. Guys had to bear down and throw a lot of intense pitches.”
Wunsch will become the ninth member of the Sox’s division-winning staff in 2000 to undergo surgery. James Baldwin, Howry and Lowe underwent off-season repairs to their shoulders and are back in action. Six others, including the since-traded Mike Sirotka, are on the DL.
“I saw guys pitching through a lot of pain last year,” said Sirotka, whose shoulder injury was diagnosed six weeks after he was traded to Toronto in the David Wells deal. “They did the best they could.”
But Sirotka doesn’t blame manager Jerry Manuel or the Sox staff for the run of injuries.
“I think the fact a lot of guys are having arm trouble is purely coincidental,” he said.
The 2000 Sox paralleled the 1998 Cubs in how they positioned themselves with a run of strong starting pitching in the first half of the season and then turned to their bullpens to finish the job after sustaining injuries in the rotation.
The year-after carnage with the Cubs included Rookie of the Year Kerry Wood, fellow starters Mark Clark (who had signed with Texas) and Kevin Tapani, and relievers Rod Beck, Terry Adams and Matt Karchner. The ’99 Cubs used the DL 14 times with pitchers.
“We act at times like we have a faucet turned on and have an unending supply of human bodies to pitch a baseball,” said pitching consultant Tom House, a former big-league coach. “I am an alarmist, but in the professional game, where winning is what it’s all about, we have a tendency to let good intentions get in the way of good sense.”
Managers generally view anything beyond 120 pitches as a danger zone for a pitcher. Jim Riggleman allowed Wood to throw 122 to 133 pitches eight times in ’98, but most in the Cubs’ organization believe his torn ligament was more bad luck than poor handling.
Beck appeared in a career-high 82 games in ’98, including two stretches in which he worked in five consecutive games. His ’99 season ended early because of elbow surgery. Wunsch appears to be a similar case. He worked 86 games in his rookie season, including all three games of the first-round playoff series against Seattle.
Lowe, like Wunsch, is a converted starter who carried a heavy load in relief. Simas and Barcelo previously had undergone surgeries.
Unlike the injured White Sox starters, Eldred piled up a lot of innings coming up with Milwaukee, including 258 in 1993. That workload could have contributed to his history of elbow injuries, which dates to 1995. Sirotka is alone among the other injured Sox pitchers in having worked more than 200 innings in a year. He topped out at 211 2/3 innings in 1998.
With a chance to end Cleveland’s five-year run atop the Central, Manuel allowed starting pitchers to go 120-plus pitches eight times last year, including three extended outings by Parque. None threw more than 127 in an outing, but every pitch came with more meaning than in most years.
“There’s a price that goes with winning,” Schneider said. “I really believe that what we’re seeing is part of the price. You hate to see it, you wish you could avoid it but this is the way it is.”
Pitchers on the DL
Times teams have used the disabled list with pitchers.
%% 1997-2001
THE MOST
Cleveland 49
Pittsburgh 43
Philadelphia 43
Boston 42
Milwaukee 38
1997-2001
THE LEAST
Minnesota 14
San Francisco 17
White Sox 19
Oakland 21
Los Angeles 21
St. Louis 21
2001
Atlanta 8
Arizona 8
Colorado 8
White Sox 7
Yankees 7
Pittsburgh 7
San Diego 7
%%
